No doubt fiscal policies put this (and other) councils on the back foot, but it’s reductive to ignore that the thing that tipped them over the edge was bureaucratic incompetence combined with being fucked by the Oracle Corporation.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/05/birmingham_city_council_oracle/
To be honest it wouldn’t even let me download it off a vpn, on a different OS that hadn’t connected to a vpn, or in a different browser.
Had to find somewhere other than the Microsoft site to get one.
I have an intel device, not an ARM one.
Though I would love an M2!
What device are you intending to use, you mention you’re using macos so I’m guessing Apple hardware?
Just thought I’d share my experience with pop on my MacBook in case we can help each other 😂. Basically I was dead set on pop but couldn’t get it to install for the life of me - the installer showed my disk as being a fraction of the size it was, even exfat volumes created by the installer. So I had to shrink other os petitions like crazy so I could trick it into thinking there was enough space.
There was no option to encrypt the disk in the installer and it didn’t play nice when I created my own LUKS container.
After several hours of trying to beat it into submission I ended up using Ubuntu’s legacy installer and was up and running in 15 mins.
So yeah if you are using Apple hardware and get pop playing nice please share any tips :)
You could get “smart flood detectors” cheap on amazon that use smart life. They make a sound (not the loudest tbf) and trigger notifications on your phone via the app.
Maybe not the greatest for privacy but might start the trail…