Yes, as long as you practice good OPSec.
The first mistake you made was to ask about it. While logical to ask since you probably didn’t know, you now have an increased risk of linkability. Is the risk enough of a threat? Your threat model and OPSec will determine that.
If your goal is wanting to avoid being identified, planning starts before doing any prior actions.
I made a rough guide of my setup for someone wanting to download videos from their browser. Since Seal uses yt-dlp, it will work with Youtube as well.
Hope this can help you out
You did mention a “main drive”. I don’t know what’s taking all that space on your SSD but if you have a media library that takes some space you could move that to a connected HDD. While HDDs aren’t good as a boot drive it does the job well enough with most “standard” quality media. So can be said for documents and more obviously. You can then auto-mount your other drive to be inside your home directory for seemless access.
One thing that isn’t mentionned but I’ll just say this just in case. Always have external backups. I’ve scared myself way too many times thinking I had lost my main drive’s data just to find it the next day on one of my backup. Really a life saver if your setup has a problem where you find that one forum post from 12y ago with a “Nvm I fixed it” marked as [FIXED].
Other than that, thanks for sharing and with the solution at that.
Please do share. What better thing to do than to take a break from a broken install to read about someone’s own hardship with the endless quest that is maintaining a rolling-release distro.
Like someone else said, it’s unlikely. However it is possible but it would need to exploit your media player (VLC) and/or your OS. As long as your source is trustworthy you shouldn’t have to worry, that’s why the megathread is there.
The link to Z-Library itself is one of the legitimate ones from what I know so I wouldn’t worry on that side too much.
PDFs have a few exploits that could infect a system. However they are rare and not efficient especially if the intent is to infect as much machines as possible.
If you don’t have much technical knowledge to analyze the files yourself, I would recommend you open the PDFs in Virtual Machines without any acess to the internet or opening the files only when you have disconected your device from any acess to the internet.
Tools like the one mentionned by someone else in the comments would be good to prevent from having to worry about a potentially malicious PDF. Various tools are around to convert a malicious file lile PDFs into regular “trusted” PDFs (said tools flattens everything making it impossible to select text or click any URIs included). I would look up the trustworthiness of some of those tools first (to not try and avoid malwares by installing one).
That was way too long of a comment but I hope it could ease some of your worries.