Old tablet in a drawer can make a great dashboard for Home Assistant or another smart home setup. The problem is that after years of use it gets slow, comes loaded with manufacturer bloatware, and animations slow it down even further. In this article, I'll show you how to use ADB to remove unnecessary preinstalled apps, turn off graphical effects in Developer options, and what else can help breathe new life into an old piece of hardware.

GrapheneOS is an open-source project delivering a security-focused operating system built on Android for Pixel 6 - 10 phones. The project originates from Canada.

GNU/Linux is a versatile open source operating system suitable for a wide range of uses, from kiosks and routers to personal computers, laptops, servers, and supercomputers. In this article, we explain why it is beneficial to move to a Linux distribution and we will share our experiences of using this system on a personal computer.

The ideal starting point is the safest way to familiarize yourself with a desktop Linux system directly on your PC from a USB flash drive. We have prepared a live persistent distribution of Kubuntu for you to download. You will immediately see how compatible the distribution is with your computer. You can confidently try out a web browser, multimedia player, or install an application from the Discover or Snap. You can work with the LibreOffice office suite or simply explore the environment. Save anything you need, and then you can come back to it later—a portable, versatile system that you can plug into any computer.

The classic disk cloning tool in Linux is the dd command. This command can create a disk image or write the contents of an image back to a disk. However, dd must be used carefully, and it’s important to understand how it works. In this guide, we’ll demonstrate a more advanced technique for creating a disk image that includes unallocated space. A typical use case is when you have Raspbian installed on a 250 GB disk, but the system only uses a small boot partition (e.g., sda1) and a main operating system partition (e.g., sda2), which together occupy only 15 GB. Instead of saving a full 250 GB image, you can save just the two partitions totaling 15 GB. This results in a smaller image that can later be expanded to whole disk.