 A few months ago, I made a video talking about how I was going to start doing all of my work, all of my web browsing, basically everything inside of a virtual machine environment. And I had this whole grand plan where I was going to have a separate virtual machine for work, I was going to have a virtual machine for my web browsing, I was going to have a virtual machine for this and that and, you know, basically everything I was going to have virtual machines all over the place and I was going to switch around between them like I was playing musical chairs. I had this whole plan and the idea was fairly sound. Now, I made several different videos talking about that process and the experience over the course of the first month or so. And I did stick with that plan for several months. So I was creating virtual machines. I lived in them. I did most of my work in them. And I did a good job of transitioning a lot of the stuff that I usually do on bare metal over to those virtual machines. And I was very proud of myself because I stuck with it longer than many people thought that I would. And that was the primary comment on that initial video was that, yes, this is something that you can do, but it's often too much hassle and you're probably not going to stick with it for very long. Now, first of all, thanks for the faith, guys. I can stick with things when I want to. I can. No, I can. I definitely can. OK. So I did stick with it for a few months. So I proved those doubters wrong. But I will say this is that they were 100 percent right, that it is a lot of work and a lot of effort. Now, some of that is that I made it actually harder than it needed to be. And also I made several mistakes along the way. And I'll talk about those today because my VM experiment is over. I'm no longer. It's not like I'm never going to make a VM again. That's not the case. But my experiment of doing all my work, all my browsing inside of the VM, it's just I'm done with it. So I want to talk about that today. But before I jump in, if you'd leave a thumbs up on this video, I'd really appreciate it. So why am I stopping this? Why is the experiment done? Well, there are many different reasons. First off, the process of actually doing this, of setting up VMs and making those VMs actually private is more than a one step thing. You can't just install Ubuntu inside of a VM and then be private. That's just not the way that it works. And I knew that going in, right? I knew that there were extra steps. But my philosophy was that I needed to take one step in order to actually get all the way through the journey, right? You know, one step starts the journey. And my initial step was to do the VM thing. And then I knew eventually I'd, you know, I'd install a VPN. I'd install a hardened browser. I'd do all the things that you need to do in order to maintain your privacy. And I did all those things and I didn't feel more private. So here's the thing. And it's probably a situation where a lot of us actually are, it's probably a situation where a lot of us are in the same boat, right? We do have to use Google from time to time. Now, I know this doesn't apply to everybody. A lot of people have successfully de-googled their lives. And I'm so envious of you people. I would, I just wish that I could, but I can't. Okay. And well, when I say that I can't, I mean, I literally can't for my work, I use Google Docs. I have to use Google Docs because that's what the company uses. Okay. I can't avoid it as much as I want to. Now, I do manage to only go there to upload things, but that doesn't really matter because it means I have to have a Google account in order to do it. Now, I was always going to have a Google account because I have a YouTube channel and YouTube is owned by Google, which is owned by Alphabet, which is probably owned by the CIA or something. I don't even know. The point is, is that Google owns my data already, and despite my efforts to prevent myself from being tracked online, I still felt not private, simply because I still had to exit out of my VMs and go to a place where I could actually sign in, which, you know, I had a VM just for places where I needed to sign in. I'd go over there, didn't do my uploading, and it was, it was a mess of actually having to SSH into the other machine, which was still running to get the data off of it because that's where, you know, I was private and doing work in that data or in that VM. And then, you know, it was, it was a mess. And at the end of the day, I didn't feel like it was worthwhile because I didn't feel more private. Now, if I could do Google my life, if I could completely shut my YouTube channel down, quit my job probably, you know, and just completely delete my YouTube or my Google accounts, all of them, I could probably then feel much more private and this whole VM thing would actually make sense because it would be, it would allow me to segment things and be connected to different VPN servers. So if I'm doing any searching or whatever, I can appear from sweet. And if I'm doing something on, you know, YouTube, I can appear from Chicago or whatever, you know, I can kind of play the whole whack-a-mole game and try to be as private as possible. But because I can't do that completely, there's that one gigantic leak. When it comes to my privacy, it just feels like it was not worthwhile. And when I added on top of the problems and the mistakes that I made, it really wasn't worth it. It was just really, really wasn't worth it. So let's talk about those problems and the mistakes that I made. So let's start with the problems that I had. So I've already talked about the first one is that because I decided to do this at least at first in multiple virtual machines, I had to finagle away to get data from one place to another easily. And eventually I got pretty good at it. I use SCP a lot. I use SSH a lot. I use SSHFS a lot. I even made a video about it when I discovered that. And then I found out that that was, of course, abandoned. So, of course, it was. I make a video about something and find that it's abandoned. It always, always happens that way. But the point is that I got really good at transferring data from one VM to another to my main machine. All these things, right? And it worked fine, but it was tedious, right? And I did research other options, so things like Samba and stuff like that. But that all that stuff is also a mess. And I also thought about just creating like a drive of some kind, like a P cloud drive or a next cloud drive or something like that that I could use that I could then access between the different virtual machines. But that was also kind of a mess. So at the end of the day, transferring data between them was very, very tedious. And what I ended up doing to solve that problem was I just stopped using multiple virtual machines. I just ended up with one. And this worked out well for a couple months. And I enjoyed doing it because it allowed me to choose a different distro than what I was on. So it allowed me to experiment with some distros and some desktop environments and stuff like that outside of my regular experience. So that was fun. But it also just kept the data pushing and shoving to a minimum. And I was just able to focus on transferring data from my main machine to the VM and back and forth. It was much easier and it was much less tedious. It was actually more enjoyable. The biggest issue with going down to one VM, of course, was just that I was basically just connecting to the Internet from one place instead of multiple places. And it just was not as secure as multiple VMs ended up, you know, early seem to be, I should say. So that's the biggest problem that I had. But the biggest problem slash mistakes that I made were all self-inflicted. So we'll just start off with this. And I think I mentioned this in another video where I will mention it in another video. I'm way ahead on video recording right now. So I don't know when I've talked about things and haven't talked about things. So if you hear me talk about something that I've mentioned in this video and it seems like I haven't made this video yet, it probably is because I haven't. It's going to be very confusing for all of us. But the point is that I've made some mistakes. So over the course of the last two months, I have distro hopped on my main machine quite a few times. Now, all of these were stupid reasons to distro hop, mainly because I was lazy and didn't want to fix things. And that's usually the way things go. And it's one of the reasons why I've started the two year Linux challenge. I want to stay on a single distro for two years. And that's one of the reasons why it's because I got sick of distro hopping. And I actually want to put some effort into fixing things when they go wrong. But that's beside the point. The point is that I distro hopped several times. I went from Redcore, then to Arch, and then to Fedora, and then back to Arch, and then to open Suza, and then to Fedora. You get the idea. I went through a lot of distributions. And the biggest issue here was that y'all, I'm a dumbass. Now, I preach on this channel constantly about backing up your data. I mean, I have gone blue in the face. And along with many other Linux YouTubers, regular tech YouTubers talking about the fact that if you are going to have data on a machine, you have to back it up. And in fact, you should back it up in multiple places and all this stuff, right? We've talked about this so many times. And I do a good job on my main machine. I have gotten to the habit of running a manual backup every time I do an update. I don't really trust a cron job to do it for me. So I do it personally. And I have an alias in my Bash RC. I just run it. And I've gotten to habit of doing it. But I didn't do it with my VMs. And I didn't do it with my VMs, not only once, not only twice, not only three times, but at least four times. And the problem with that is that my VMs all had data on them, right? I had data from work. I had data from the channel. I had my browsing data. I had all my apps set up and stuff like that. I had my SSH keys and all the stuff that you'd expect to have in a VM where you've actually set it up to actually do some work. And I didn't back them up. It would have been bad if I'd just done it once, but I did it at least four times. And I did at least one point when I was hopping try to back things up. So at least one of the times that I hopped, I tried, I didn't succeed, because it turns out that I don't know how to back up a VM itself. Now, I know how to back up the data on a VM, but I didn't really know how to transfer a virtual machine from one machine to another. I did eventually learn, but it was past the point of actually being worthwhile. And I kept losing my data because I'm a dumb ass. Now, like I said, if you're going to take one thing from this video, take the thing that you should always take back up your data, kids. Don't don't be like me. Back up your data because of those mistakes, because of constantly losing my data. I had a hard, I had a hard time justifying continuing to do it. And this time now, I've installed open SUSE, the time of week, I'm on the two year Linux challenge and add on with all the tediousness of transferring data back and forth and setting up a virtual machine every time I decided to do something. And all the stuff that went into this whole process, I've just decided that I'm done. Okay, it just doesn't feel worthwhile. Now, like I said, I did stick with it longer than people thought that I would. But at the end of the day, it just doesn't feel worthwhile. Maybe, like I said, if I were to able to completely do Google my life, I would feel like it was more worthwhile and I could just kind of stick in a single virtual machine and it wouldn't be that big of a deal. But as it is, I can't, right? I mean, I don't want to shut my YouTube channel down. I'm doing pretty good here. I'm having a good time. I hope I'm entertaining some people at least. And I also have to have a Google account, which is something that I use for work. So I can't not do my work. I mean, somebody has to pay the bills and it has to be me. So the idea here is that there's that gigantic leak of data that just made the rest of it feel like if they already have all my data, why am I bothering with this tediousness? Now, that doesn't mean that I'm abandoning the idea of privacy altogether. So I'm going to start using VM more constantly on my main machine so that I can kind of protect the location data and stuff like that. I'm going to be signed out of Google as much as possible so that I'm not broadcasting literally everything that I do on the internet to Google. I'm going to install multiple browsers on my main machine. One of the reasons one of the ways I'm going to do this is through distro box so that I can kind of containerize things. So if I want to say use Firefox in a container, I can do that and that's much more containerized and I can kind of just blow away the container if I need to. So the idea is to take advantage of containers but also just kind of change my workflow in such a way where I'm not logged in. I've deleted cookies and done as much as I can to make my browsing experience private when I'm not signed in. Now, it's not going to be a perfect solution. I will 100% absolutely say that, you know, right out loud is that it's not going to be a perfect solution. There's going to be times where I go and do a Google search and I am signed in, you know, it's just going to be the nature of the thing. I'm not going to want to sign out. The biggest problem with having to sign out all the time of all my Google stuff is that the two factor authentication takes a little bit extra of effort to actually sign back in and that's paying the ass but I can deal with that. So the experiment with the VMs is over but that doesn't mean my privacy thing is my privacy goals have been completely abandoned. I'm still going to attempt something new in terms of my workflow in order to try to maintain some sense of privacy but I have to be realistic about this and I think that we all have to be realistic about it. When we're using online services that we have accounts for and even when we don't have accounts for them, it's just kind of the nature of the modern web that we have to be aware of all the data that we are basically giving away to everybody and their capitalist ideas of data collection. It's just the nature of reality, unfortunately and we can do as much as we can to mitigate that data collection and I will do but again, I have to be realistic and say that it's never going to be a perfect thing until I can sign our sign art at Google and never sign into anything ever again. You know, maybe I can go live in the woods. Luke Smith could possibly be my neighbor. Although many, many, many miles between us, you get the idea, right? It's just not going to be a perfect solution. Unfortunately, the VM thing just did not work for me. It just didn't. So that's it for this video. If you have thoughts on any of this stuff, you can leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. If you haven't already, give this video a thumbs up. I'd really appreciate it. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com's last Linux cast links for YouTube and Paypal will be in the video description as well. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube because we're all absolutely amazing without you. The channel just would not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you very, very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it guys. Thank you so very much. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time. Stay safe.