I’ve been a long time FF user, and if I encounter a buggy site I just wouldn’t use it. Only problematic site is fucking Teams, and since I can’t just stop using it, I’ll switch to brave for the meeting and right back to FF after.

In my city there is a T intersection where the top part of the T is a busy road with a traffic light and I once saw some kids pressing the button as a “joke” when they are not even crossing. Usually its always green but if it turns red it causes a huge lineup of cars, especially during rush hour.

I found FreeTube just recently and I really like it so far. It’s a desktop app that uses electron and the Invidious API. It supports 1080p and is really snappy, at least for me. https://freetubeapp.io

Tracking can be disabled

Tracking is one of the main reasons I switched to Linux. You simply can’t know if Microsoft is tracking you, even if you turn off all of the settings. That is because it’s closed source.

Bloatware can be uninstalled manually/Winget/Chris Titus Tech Tools etc

Apart from this beeing exclusive to advanced users, in my experience, after updates or at least a reinstall you would have to do it again. And that was just getting on my nerves.

I never get Ads on Windows

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen for anyone else.

Look, maybe Linux is just not for you I get that. You’ve come accustomed to Windows and are happy with how it works for you. But for some people it might be a good choice. To give an example from my own life:

I recently installed Debian 12 KDE (looks like windows) on my step dads laptop. He is not technically inclined at all mind you. And apart from setting up auto mounting his ssd, I never had to give him tech support again after that and he is very happy with it.

Currently in the process of installing Lineageos on my brothers redmi note 10 pro.

Its a huge pain compared to my phone, mainly because unlocking the bootloader requires an account with his number connected. Then I had to install Windows to use their shitty unlock app, which the requires you to wait up to 30 days for seemingly no reason. Luckily “just” a week for us.

But yeah the hardware is amazing.

Tuta

If you just want to change your IP, there is no reason to use Mullvad. If you care about your privacy Mullvad is great. You can pay in xmr or even in cash by mail.

This definitely applies to me. I had a Reddit account for 5-6 years, but never made a single post and only wrote a handful of comments. I just feel more comfortable interacting here.

There is a distinction. Dark web is usually associated with the Tor network. Deep web is stuff you can’t access normally, like your email or someones Onlyfans.

I think she actually meant dark web tho.

Also a bit confused by this. I thought the point of searxng is to combine your preferred search engines. So couldn’t I just configure ddg for the image results?

Get a sharpening stone, brand doesn’t matter imo. I have one with 1000 grid for rough sharpening and 6000 grid for making it really sharp. It does require some learning tho.

Nice way of leaking your illegal activities lmao

Yes, Aurora is not the ideal solution and Google might be cracking down on it soon. But as long as it works I don’t really mind it going through Google, at least I don’t need an account for it.

And sadly many Apps are just made with Google in mind because it’s so popular, but my hope is that in the future more and more Apps will have at least a Google free option.

Mobian sounds cool, but doesn’t seem so promising to me as well. I agree that custom ROM’s are not in a good spot right now, but I think it’s gonna get better in the future.

I know that many people still rely on Google’s services, but speaking from my own experience, it’s not hard to ditch them entirely.

I installed LineageOS 2 months ago, and was only missing my banking app, which I installed using the Aurora store and it works without any issues. For everything else I found alternatives which are, admittedly not as good/users friendly as Google’s. But I wouldn’t say there’s no true FOSS phone OS.

Aren’t custom ROM’s open source? It would be nice if you could buy a phone from big brands with it preinstalled already. That would make it so much more accesible.

I don’t think he meant that literally.

If you want to harden Firefox, use ffprofile.com. It makes creating a custom profile very easy, and it should have good defaults. This should provide you with decent privacy and also allows you to remove annoyances like sponsored sites.

Or if you are lazy, use LibreWolf which, as far as I know, basically does just that, but preconfigured for you.

For addons, I would go with: uBlock Origin, CanvasBlocker, Privacy Badger and Decentraleyes.

Finally you can test your setup with Panopticlick.

I feel the same way. I switched to NewPipe recently, while degoogling my phone for privacy reasons, but I’m still using YouTube when I’m at my desktop. The recommendations are just better at finding new content for me.

Isn’t chrome also based on chromium? I would argue they are equally bad, because both are proprietary.

Have you tried installing it with no internet connection? That’s what I always used to do, to get a local account during installation.