Gives me a jumpscare when I apply updates, not gonna lie

A lot of it is hitting critical mass too. Reddit used to be tech enthusiasts and stem students the same way Fediverse is currently. Now any town idiot yahoo from the sticks will angrily yell at you on Reddit for no reason.

But yeah the algorithm is a lot stronger than it would seem.

Ah yes, organic rage bait instead of Ai swirls fancy wine

Mint is pretty legit. Their Cinnamon desktop is looking a lot prettier these days too.

I landed on Fedora KDE because I need gaming features like VRR, still wanted features like Secure Boot, and a distro with a lot of users and documentation.

I’m working on it and avoid it when I can as I mentioned. The only reason I mentioned it is that it’s one of the last vestiges of apps I don’t fully trust. I treat it like SMS or email, I don’t send anything I don’t expect could be audited by the government with the right subpoenas.

But sometimes I’m in a weird position. If I need to order food in my wife’s country, I am not going to be able to contact the restaurant without WhatsApp. Then I, as a white American who doesn’t know them, am going to explain to the delivery guy the reasons why they shouldn’t support American fascism, in their native language that I am not 100% fluent in?

I don’t, I use Signal whenever I can. WhatsApp is for businesses that use it, and the people who refuse to go to Signal, or can’t figure it out. Like my mother in law tried but got confused and so far have been unsuccessful troubleshooting why long distance. But I still need to talk to her.

They have had some third party audits. It is not totally convincing to me as being trustworthy, but I see it as more of an acceptable necessary evil. Better than Discord, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, probably even SMS. My wife’s whole family uses just WhatsApp, and so do some businesses even in her country. Believe me though, anyone I can get on Signal, Matrix, Session, etc, I do.

I also just switched to Linux! Well dual booting Windows for now but only for gaming really, and until I figure out if Ardour is good enough for me for music production. But still: Microsoft has nothing except my game saves now, no tax documents or web history, etc.

What distro did you go with?

I’m also looking into making a home server to ditch streaming services and so I dont need 250 GB of music on my. phone. Got to be able to afford the RAM though…

I never know what to expect from Google. They respect open source efforts to an extent, but play Calvinball with where they draw the line. In any case, Motorola will be an option soon, maybe more. And there are other custom ROMs, albeit not as thorough as Graphene. And for me? They can’t take it away now that I already did it, so I’m good for up to 7 years unless my phone breaks.

Flagship hardware has been sufficient long term for a while now. I’d still be using my 6 year old phone if it had security updates and I wasn’t getting into privacy and security

The Fediverse is not perfect, but it actually blew my mind a bit how much it lowered my blood pressure to not see the constant ragebait, and the calm of not being exposed and monitored at all times. I still have Snapchat just for one person, and WhatsApp which is Meta but still E2EE. Other than that, I’m all in on FOSS privacy approved apps and man does it feel great.

Soon, but not yet! I needed to upgrade, can’t wait until 2027 or whenever. But hoping it’ll be one of their flagships, the new Razr is pretty dope specs wise.

Not really, but I got one anyway because I need the storage. I wish I would have gone all the way and got a TB but I couldn’t buy that one in cash in store so I didn’t.

Like anything, it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish, but in general yes.

You will still have a carrier phone number, but you don’t need to give identifying info when signing up, and you don’t need to use it. This prevents people from tracking you or Sim swapping. If you grt multiple numbers it also allows you to call anonymously or not worry so much about how much you give a number out because you can just turn it off. You’re more protected from data breaches. Jmp specifically isn’t KYC last I checked, but the phone number you actually use is going to be pretty public. You may also save money despite paying for Jmp, because of new customer deals from the carrier: you do not care if you have the same Sim number.

However, no VoIP number uses RCS. SMS is very insecure and lacks features. Jmp uses XMPP, but that only works when both parties are using it, meaning probably never. You could convince some people maybe but texting, even XMPP, is for people that won’t move to Signal or another actually secure messaging app.

If you have most people on more secure/private/featured platforms, VoIP and SMS is a good choice. If you are going to use text extensively and can’t get people on other platforms, you may consider sticking with Google Messages & RCS.

Right now I use VoIP but I’m having a medium amount of issues moving people over to Signal and missing some of the features, so I’m mixed on it. If RCS ever becomes more universal (and if Graphene gets better support for it) that would decide it for me.

Terrible time for any case to being going to the SC

I can’t agree with this. Mint, for example, is a great general use distro. It doesn’t support HDR, VRR, or even 4k 60 FPS because it’s not in Wayland. These are very basic gaming features that Windows has had for 7+ years.

Also, gaming focused doesn’t mean it has to boot into Steam Big Picture Mode and be used only for gaming. Bazzite is Fedora based, so it has RPM and flatpaks, and uses KDE, the most customizable DE. It even has a helpful onboarding Ui, and is packaged with the drivers you need for gaming. What could it possibly be missing that average users would want?

You very much need to pick a distro that has the features you want need, and the rest will follow unless it’s just a bad distro.

Deathloop doesn’t run well on Windows either.

They block VPN connections, that’s why it appears down. Ironic for a privacy site.

They’re not that impressive specs wise, somewhere between mid range and a “real” flagship that has a Snapdragon Elite chip. The only reason to get it is the top of the line security features that allow GrapheneOS to function. Or the software if you’re into Ai and such and don’t want Graphene, but that’s like the opposite of privacy.

You’ve gotten some good answers kn fingerprinting so I won’t repeat that. I will add though: it depends on what you are trying to do. Blending in with Tor or Mullvad Browsers makes you less trackable, but logging into an account immediately breaks that. Brave et al will only fool naive scripts, sure, but telemetry and built in tracking is another battle to fight: you’re going to want a privacy browser even if you stand out amongst the sea of Chrome and Edge. The more of us who do make it more normal looking. At the end of the day you are probably going to want two browsers per machine:a logging in browser and an anonymous web search browser. So no it does not negate itself and is worth doing, but has use case limitations. I find it best to block everything possible in Brave but use it as the sign in browser. Not using Brave shields doesn’t make you much less recognizable anyway, you’d have to use Chrome for that.

i would go through your privacy settings and delete and turn off everything you can, then if you can, change pii to nonsense burner info and deletethe account. Services like that can sometimes be useful, but not for accounts specifically. Personally I dont use them and send delete requests to people search sites myself.

Tor + VPN is a VERY contentious topic. The one thing not to do is turn on a VPN in the middle of a Tor session. That’s agreed upon. VPN before Tor… it can make it harder to find who you are in some ways, but makes you seem more suspicious that you feel the need to do all that. It makes your activity stand out, and it may even be easier to bully your VPN provider into giving up your identity (if they have it from payment info, etc). But that’s just if they are monitoring the exit node, so mot particularly likely. Still, I avoid mixing them entirely. Of the two, Tor is more anonymous, but VPN is faster, hides all network activity even outside the browser and is just about required in many places due to stupid age verification laws and similar nonsense. So I like Mullvad Browser + always on VPN, but Tor is a good tool.