My advice would be to look into things one at a time while also avoiding taking the sledgehammer approach. Based on what you mentioned, some things you might want to look into:

Look into some encrypted cloud storage/backup options. Filein comes to mind but there’s plenty. I’d recommend against self hosting your own cloud in most cases (like nextcloud) in most cases it is both less secure and less private especially on a VPS - and if its on a home server it makes your backups less redundant.

Try doing more stuff in web browsers, web wrappers, or front ends. Unlike an app, there’s a lot less sneaky stuff a web browser can do, even if it’s the same platform. The Brave browser does cookie isolation and progressive web apps well, it might make a good second browser dedicated to progressive web apps. Apps like newpipe are great for YouTube and piped/invidious for yt or nitter for twitter are two good examples of front ends.

Installing apks is easier than you might think, and if you install FDroid it’s three clicks (download, allow installation, install) and worth checking out. Once it’s installed you can treat it like any other app store, and in combo with Aurora (on FDroid) you can get about any app without going through a Google account.

As for email, you can forward emails from a gmail account to a proton account. And as for content, consider trying to follow via RSS (you can follow just about anything with RSS one way or another).

For social media look into activity pub and nostr. Just about any alternative social media is going to have the crazies from one or both sides of politics kicked off of mainstream platforms, but federated and decentralized platforms allow you to pick and choose a lot more.

Last, as the phone goes, whenever possible try disabling background data and setting aside pre-installed apps you don’t want to use and going from there. A step up from that would be to uninstall/disable them (either in settings or adb bridge for those you can’t disable). Custom Roms would be the biggest leap, and the most technological. If you’re going to buy a phone with the intent of installing one, Graphene beats everything else hands down while still being one of the easiest to install.

Good luck

Rufus or registry editing during installation can both dodge the requirement if you need it.

Mozilla’s funding comes from Google (not all of it but enough that all their other finding source’s wouldn’t even cover the bulk of the CEO’s salery). I doubt Mozilla is going to do much.

We can hope it doesn’t bode well for their ongoing anti trust case though

If I vaguely remember, symmetric encryption is more or less halved by quantom computers using the current encryption breaking methods right? That and just the growing computer power IF they continue to grow at a similar rate. 32 bit encryption used to be the military standard, now it’s a joke that a kid’s laptop could break.

Makes it potentially vulnerable to governments who are dedicated, but as long as the common laptop theif doesn’t have a quantum computer or a generic technical literacy and years to wait and we’re not making enemies with governments we’re all fine regardless.

69 … Nice.

I hope this doesn’t end badly for VMware. I use VMware exclusively in a professional setting, and partially in a personal setting. With everything I’ve seen it’s by far the most stable (Qemu seems to be close to bare metal in ideal conditions, but can get a little quirky at times to say the least) and beats out virtualbox in both performance and stability.

If it’s mostly in cash & stocks hopefully from my layman’s view they’re buying a valuable asset and not going to enshitify it for a quick buck when the debt bill comes in with an uncertain economy.

IPFS?

Maybe I didn’t word that right. Meant that they run out of the box, but if they break they can be repaired fairly easily.

DIY Edition Build it yourself and bring your OS, including Linux. Starting at $1,399.00

I hate to crap on a project like framework too much, but I fail to see the value it brings to the table compared to other options. 900$ for a Chromebook, 1.4k for a “DIY” laptop, 1.7k for the same laptop but assembled.

300-400$ used gaming laptops can be found on eBay, are repairable, and run Linux just as easily (minus maybe switching to official Nvidia drivers, but it’s still only a couple commands a way). For 1k I’m sure you can get a variety of very premium laptops.

Edit: by repairable meant they’re easy to repair if they break, not that they come pre-broken.

A monopoly in itself is not illegal, it’s the misuse of monopoly power that is.

Now there’s a million ways Google has been alleged to misuse it’s power, which is why there’s a court battle ongoing.

But even if a company has 100% market share (and the government/company/courts/public agree on how that market share is defined) as long as they don’t abuse their power no antitrust violations have occurred.

Edit: under US law. Also not a lawyer.

Bear forearms only. Doesn’t apply to any other animal

They say smart people think alike right? There’s a lot of duplicate content spread across similar communities, but I guess that’s probably because we’re all interested in similar things.

XKCD somebody else shared recently that’s sorta on topic

Just as a quick warning, I think /e/OS is still getting ironed out. It’s not fully de-googled and security updates can be significantly delayed. Not that it’s some evil or unsafe OS to be avoided, but it’s definitely with knowing if you end up going with it.

Thanks for the breakdown and the link, cool to learn about the new (well new to me) tech, sad to see it’s gonna probably bit us in the butt at somepoint.

I didn’t mean like they just strait up embed video.mp4 on page for the video, but as far as I understand on their backend they still have actually video files of various resolutions and such that they serve to you.

Even if the page isn’t giving you a copy of a strait up file in the way it might in 2000, the player is still pulling a copy of a pre processed video file stored on YT’s servers, and in order to have the ads as part of that same file in order to make adblock very hard to implement they’d need to re-process it any time they want to show an ad that hadn’t been already inserted into the video.

I could be completely wrong tho, I don’t work at YouTube and haven’t built a video sharing site before.

If they did that then they’d have to re-encode videos for each veiwer (which would require an insane amount of processing power), or give up on tracking and have contextual only ads.

Their only real option is to have ads as separate files and then use the magic JavaScript to tell your computer to play one file then the next, which is where adblock comes in like “naw, let’s not do that”.

As much as I love making fun of Apple, isn’t it all Apple silicone made in house? If they’re not coming with Nvidia cards and Apple is not open to the idea of people modifying their computers it shouldn’t matter how easy it is to install Nvidia graphics (not to mention Nvidia Drivers are a pain on Linux sometimes too).

POSIX is just a set of Unix-like standards for software. Mac is based on BSD if I recall correctly, they had Xorg and stuff as an option to install and things aren’t 1 to 1 compatible but closely related.

robust networking

Dude you just gave me flashbacks to traumatic times trying to get Wifi to work on Linux

As weird as it sounds you can (with poor performance). With something like Limbo or Termux you can actually get Windows or any x86 OS running underneath Android on a phone.

Fun project maybe, but not really utilitarian though. Never used apple so can’t actually report on how well their emulation and/or translation layer is working on Arm.

I think the issue is that Netflix always had a lot of debt and thought they could grow a lot more. They had a really solid income, then suddenly their catalog was shrinking thanks to the million other streaming services while they simultaneously started declining in subscriptions right when the cost of debt skyrocketed (even if some of their debt is still at lower rates).

Not that I’m cheering on the price increase by any means, nor am I currently a subscriber. Still though in some way I can see why they’re doing it and have a feeling we’re just at the tip of the iceberg in how bad tech corporate services are going to get for a bit.

On an unrelated note, VPNs and/or I2P are cool things to check out.

Edit: One thing too to bring up is that password sharing may still be a breeze. If you set up a VPN - not a commercial one but you setup yourseld on either on a VPS or on your home network - as long as anybody is on it they’ll look like they’re from the same household.

My understanding is that they mostly haven’t, with a couple exceptions like a few ISPs offering to priorities to pings for gaming (as FeelThePower mentioned), throttle certain protocols (e.g. Torrenting), or refuse to carry traffic for certain sites (e.g. Kiwi Farms). All of this would be prevented under net neutrality.

As far as I’m aware though, an extremely overwhelmingly portion of traffic (like you’d have to do a lot of digging to find an example otherwise) already adheres to net neutrality since it’s pretty pointless for a company to spend resources and goodwill to mess with traffic.

I don’t think too much will change. It is nice in the sense it will prevent an ISP from doing things against specific sites, although like mentioned above most of the protections are theoretical ATM.

I’m not on IOS, but I’ve heard Brave browser on IOS has adblock so that might be a way to avoid ads. Sites like various Invidious instances run in any browser would also be a way to dodge ads.

Any browser that accepts plugins would also work, but I’m not sure if they exsist or not.