I'm a student, about to graduate from a BSN nursing program that's online except clinicals. I went from using a Dell laptop to using a Pinebook Pro to mostly using an iPad Air (4th gen) for everything, without making an Apple account (so no installing apps).
The iPad is managed by my uni, who installed the Canvas LMS app. I can read pdfs in the Files app, submit papers written in the Word app, attend class with the Zoom ap. Most of work happens in Safari: watching videos, taking exams, etc. I'm a heavy terminal user, so use a GateOne gateway for ssh access in the browser, allowing me to do most serious work on my user's account on a NetBSD server, working in vim, mutt, sc (spreadsheet), manipulating text with awk, browsing with lynx, managing my website, etc.
A good dock is important. I use the Pinebook Pro usb-c dock with a scroll-wheel 3-button Dell mouse and Model M buckling-spring keyboard. A recent update let bluetooth keep sending music to my stereo when docked. Keyboard shortcuts (like ctrl-a and ctrl-e for moving around the lines of a textfile) are a big part of my workflow. The docked peripherals allow more functionality than the Smart Keyboard folio. I don't like touch screens.
When I graduate, I'll probably fall back to something I like better (my little GPD or old ThinkPad X61), but for school the iPad + folio keyboard + dock + shell account is better than any other single device I have tried.
Eastern and Central European history has less stable borders/states than Western/Northern Europeans and Americans often assume. Nationalities existed under various empires without much state-aspirational nationalism until the 19th century. People practicing various religions, speaking various languages lived under changing lords or free in the wild fields, then fled en masse in times of conflict and lived somewhere else. Forced mass-conversions and massacres changed demographics a number of times over the last thousand years. Bureaucracies remained largely intact through their posession by empires, soviets, then nation(ish)-states.
Modern states in the region are real, but contingent, and shouldn't falsely be projected backwards through history.
Yes, although sometimes people feel their country is not normal. "In a normal country, this would not happen," many Russian people said, especially in the '90s between Yeltsin's US-backed coup and the 1998 collapse.
My favorite Soviet/Eastern Bloc scifi novel is The Day Lasts More Than A Hundred Years (1981) by Chingiz Aitmatov.
"Ethnic" writers were accorded more freedom of topic than white Russians, confined to village prose in the Breznev era. Aitmatov's book sweeps the vast steppes of Central Asia and interstellar space, begins from the perspective of a fox, considers traumas of the Great Patriotic War and Stalin's resettlement, thousand-year-old traditions, the quest to give a dead railroad switchman a proper Muslim burial, and an international incident caused in space.
Aitmatov was ethnically Kyrgyz. The book's mostly set on Kazakh steppes.
OP was looking for context on the meat-grinder in Ukraine. He won't find it in the meat-grinder near the end of Roadsite Picnic.
Sienkiewicz (1884), With Fire and Sword, set in 1640s-1650s Khmelnytsky Uprising (Cossacks of Zaporozhian Sich vs Polish-Lithuanian empire) is remarkably good, and geographically contiguous with the current meat grinder in Ukraine. A pre-Soviet book from outside what became USSR (Polish), not scifi, but which clearly inspired Frank Herbert and possibly Tolkein. Scifi and fantasy continued the adventure genre, after all. If you read it, be prepared for Iliad or The Bridge on the Drina-level violence at times.
For more non-scifi lit grounded in war in previous iterations of Ukrainian statehood, see especially Bulgakov's (1925) The White Guard. A love song to Kiev, loving and complex critique of its bourgeoisie that could only have been written by a physician.
Roadside Picnic's a fast-paced philosophical read. Solaris (yes it's Polish, but Tarkovsky painted it in film) has the dreamy, encyclopedic quality of something like Moby-Dick. (Post-Soviet) Metro 2033 is lower quality, more pulpy, feels like it was written to be turned into a series, video game, etc. (it was), but it's an interesting page-turner.
Last I was paying attention, all the legacy aircraft carriers hadn't been upgraded from windows xp, and had no upgrade path. That's only one of the platform's many vulnerabilities. Their purpose seems to have more to do with capital extraction than warfighting.
another container based approach is what barry kauler of puppy fame is doing with https://easyos.org/.
I haven't used BSD, but I think jails are another solution in this space.
I used Qubes pretty heavily in school. The Windows 10 template was great for running STATA etc, and the way Qubes handles copy paste and file transfer were pretty great.
What I didnt like was having to restart qubes when updating software, and general complexity. I will go back to Qubes or something like it when I go back to school, though, as it is simpler to manage than multiboot or multiple computers.
Joey's known for the Debian installer and git-annex, among other things.