What are some of the must-dos, must-installs, must-uninstalls, and must-alters of setting up a new PC? I'm getting my first new PC in 5 years on Sunday and the old one is really showing its age. I would like to avoid that as much as possible in order to keep the PC running smoothly as long as possible. I'd also like to optimize its performance and have useful software tools.

Thank you for any advice,
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I've started doing this amateurishly a few months ago, translating a novel slowly, and nowadays I'm thinking of going to a few publishers and asking for actual contracts. Currently, I'm using an Org mode file in Emacs to do the translation, but I'm not sure that this is the most optimal way to do it. I was doing it using paper for a while, but editing and commenting is more flexible in Org mode. Yet it is also rather cumbersome the way I do it:

<<pageNo.paragraphNo.sentenceNo>> Text, text text
#
some text with a comment
# comment about the part between this comment and the above empty one
more text, more text. <<...>> Another sentence

I'm thinking of adding some code to make this a bit prettier, though.

But are there anything that's better out there already. My preference hierarchy: Emacs mode, yayyy! > Open source app, that's fine > Proprietary app, shit! but better than nothing.

I'm not sure if this should go under ~comp, ~tech or here (~books).

Almost every content provider online tries to access some of your personal info, whether it's to keep itself afloat, improve functionality, or create profits. In 2014, Google made [89.4%] (https://revenuesandprofits.com/how-google-makes-money/) of its profits from advertising, all of which attempts to target users with their interests (though Google does allow this to be disabled).

What do you do to try and protect yourself from data collection? What software, programs, or browser extensions do you trust to protect you, and not just also monitor your activities?

If you don't do any of this, why not? To what extent do you think companies should be allowed to use your data?

Or phone, or after an OS reinstall, etc. Just got to thinking about it because I did a fresh install of Arch on my chromebook the other day, and I'd be curious what other people's priority software installs are. For me, after the basics like drivers, it's xfce, Firefox, Transmission, Libreoffice, and VLC on linux. Pretty much the same on Windows, plus a few utilities like 7zip, PuTTY, and notepad++. For Android installs I grab nova launcher, Hangouts Dialer, F-Droid, NewPipe and MoonReader before anything else.

EDIT: Forgot firefox on android, as well as ublock origin on all platforms.

Also not completely sure if this belongs more in ~tech or ~comp.

Maven tries to be the kitchen sink in a lot of ways - rigid requirements to use plugins instead of scripts, trying to wrap your scm, and even act as a docker wrapper... this is insanely frustrating and an anti-patter for the rest of the software space. I would rather find a new job than work at a company that keeps pumping out maven and jhipster apps. It doesn't play nice with CI, it uses an insanely ugly configuration (xml) and most java developers don't even really know what they are doing when they are using it.

Making a micro-service api? You don't need jhipster or maven or even java - there are so many other better alternatives. Need something simple? flask. Need something performant? go. And there are so many others in between that won't give you a NullPointerException, require you to download the entire internet just to serve some serialized json, or make your devops team hate you.

Interested in hearing rebuttals and other peoples alts and overall preferences.