I have had people tell me " I dont feel like building my own OS from scratch " I’m like what are you even talking about?

This comes up with every windows EOL announcement and it never really ends up with everyone switching to linux

Exactly and if you have to use stock android or iOS to get this feature you are agreeing to so much intrusions into privacy that it’s sort of moot.

Of course you can’t use it without being part of a huge tech duopoly so yay and it doesn’t work without googles proprietary messaging app.

Not really necessary people make DNS requests which are pretty easy to track if you know what URL was requested that will be the exact product. This can all be done by man in the middle and monitoring network traffic. But even that is sort of unnecessary. They could very possibly have contracts with ISPs or other network operators some of that is likely just secret and they dont disclose it.

Likely every product any amazon customer ever views. They could potentially even figure out which things you buy. But you can get a pretty clear picture of someone’s personality and interests if you know everything they search for.

They do it all to build up a huge web of interconnected data points. Duckduckgo itself they might take as evidence that someone is trying to hide something. Then the government goes to a FISA court and gets permission to have other tech companies hand over all your data. Its not any one site its the picture that can be gleamed from all the data available across all the sites.

Duckduckgo is not the problem. They are using publicly scrapable information. So for instance if they have fingerprinted your device they see you go to duckduckgo, then they see you access a site about buying guns, it becomes trivial to determine what you searched for. They would not have direct access to what you search on duckduckgo and duckduckgo is not giving them access. They are using various methods to collect data based on habits. You can use literally any service you want and they could do the same thing.

Probably just whatever the public metadata is. metadata is super powerful especially if you have a lot of it. if the email was protonmail to protonmail they will get nothing. If it’s gmail to protonmail they will know that user X is talking to User Y in gmail. They will also have the email header information which is basically just going to be clear text. so they can still ascertain who you know, who you are talking about, and maybe a bit about what the conversation has to do with.

EDIT: so I asked protonmail directly about it and they confirmed its only publicly available information that they can get. For instance they can try and verify if a certain email address exists. However proton told me that they actively watch for this kind of thing and block IPS trying to do this sort of monitoring.

I think this is absolutely doable to problem is you need to have enough users on all the time to make this sort of thing work soa doptionn is important. You could probably piggy back off existing open source projects to get it going.

Google’s idea of privacy seems to always be we will protect your privacy by having all your data and making sure we are the only ones who can profit off of it. Its not that they care about privacy they care about them having exclusive rights to your data.

Honestly i didn’t even know this was still a thing

Okay any time I mention this product I get roasted but I don’t care because I like it. There is a program called aptik and basically it backs up all your settings and home folder and then can be restored if you need to reinstall. https://store.teejeetech.com/product/aptik/

It’s a one time purchase. I bought my copy like maybe almost 10 years ago and still use it. I used to have a script that I would maintain manually for this sort of thing but this is much easier. I also like that it will update strings and stuff for you when going from one version of a distro to another or between distros. You can also easily go in and uncheck things if you don’t want them or only revert certain parts of the backup and not others. it has 100% saved my butt a few times especially where I had some weird config on a piece of software and after a restore it worked just like before. In my opinion this is also a better option than a diskimage because of the customization of the restore and the fact that you can do it I guess my biggest issue with it is it’s not free software which is kind of annoying however it’s just one dude and the license is very bare bones so it’s not like he is trying to get away with anything with this tool.

Freetube and newpipe for me. However I will say they just don’t work sometimes. So then I just am left with my browser.

As someone else said its free libre open source software. Not my term I just use it because it tends to piss off the least amount of people.

Its osmc updating on the veroV

It’s very hard to say. Based on your use case I would say either grapheneOS or calyxOS. I personally have a bit of a soft spot in my heart for CalyxOS but technically speaking graphene likely meets your usecase better.

Starlabs starlite tablet looks really nice. I actually just ordered one the other day. I don’t have it yet so I can’t give you a review but from what I have read it’s pretty nice. It’s an Intel machine, upgradable, running coreboot so the compatibility should be high.

I do want to make this point as well even though I know this thread is old. A lot of the issue comes down to very new hardware that isn’t in the mainline kernel yet but may be in the future. So the case of a 2017 laptop being fully supported is not that surprising. The question is if you could get a 2024 laptop from dell to run on mainline kernel with no extra drivers and the answer is likely mixed. The majority would likely work however things like webcam and the fingerprint reader would likely not work. You might still be able to get the drivers directly from dell and get it to work but it can be a hodgepodge and difficult to support. For instance the dell I had when I wrote this I could run on the latest Ubuntu however I had to download the debs for the webcam and fingerprint reader and screw around with the settings and config files to get them to work. Sometimes I would get an update that would break them and then I would need to mess around again to get them working. It’s linux so many things are “doable” however I wouldn’t say that it was user friendly or simple a lot of times. I am on system76 now and a whole lot happier to be honest.

thank you at the time I posted the link to invidious was not working and I didn’t think to check peertube.