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.

Calyx with Micro G does have benifits, but isn’t quite as good as sandboxing, and also doesn’t have some of the other degoogling and security Graphene does.

If you have the time + know how to keep up with Arch, and want the latest packages or need the latest drivers, then go for it.

If you only want an Arch install experience, then fire up a virtual machine and stick with Endeavor or switch to a stable release like Debian on bare metal.

But most importantly, if it brings you value (in productivity or experience) then whatever you decide isn’t a stupid decision.

Not sure you can, unless you’re using a Pi Hole. Vanadium doesn’t accept plugins to my knowledge.

Do filters cancel a notification? If so you can send them to a generic folder that doesn’t notify you.

And if you don’t want to give them an email that matters consider simple login. It’s owned by proton and will give you a few addresses for free.

What, social lives? Get outta here with that nonsense and be a hobbit like the rest of us :)

Seriously though, if you’re thinking on a phone I’d reccomend just creating a second profile instead of getting a whole new device. The apps won’t be running when the profile is running, and as a bonus you can usually restrict the profile’s permissions. Also consider checking out web wrappers (e.g. frost) or PWAs.

On a desktop you can always just use the web version, bonus points if you auto clear cookies or have a separate profile.

Edit: if you already have a spare then that might work better than profiles.

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.

As others are saying, that’s not really an option unless you’re really dedicated. IF it has an unlockable bootloader you could technically get to compiling and tinkering to get everything built, but in order to get a phone all set you’d need to get the right drivers and do a whole lot of tinkering (like full time job levels of building and tinkering) kind of deal to get it built. Phone’s aren’t so plug and play like computers.

If you there’s no rom support and/or a permanently locked bootloader but you want an OS without x y and z you can always try to fire up ADB bridge and disable stuff. You could also accomplish the same by rooting, though it’s a bit of a security risk (though not as overblown as some people say IMO).

I disagree with this post being downvoted. Manjaro has had a number of issues, including forgetting to renew a cert a few times, accidentlly Ddosing Arch, holding back repo updates but not AUR updates breaking systems, and some allegations of missused funds.

If you’re searching for something, I would also personally reccomend against Manjaro, simpy for the reason that you are less likely to wind up with something broken on most other distros. I do know some people who swear by Manjaro though, and if you’re using it or set on it then that’s fine too (the best OS is the one that brings you the most value).

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To acutally answer the question above, though, the best distro is the one that you prefer. Platforms like Steam manages it’s own updates and software so the stable/rolling debate doesn’t really apply here. Same with anything installed with distro agnostic package managers (Flatpak, Snap, Appimages). As far as most gaming setups drivers are the only real difference between distros (and you can always change that yourself manually).

I believe so, though I went without swap for a while myself and never noticed any issues. When in doubt a 1gb swap partition can’t hurt.

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

• Calibre - eBook manager/reader
• Gparted - disk tool
• Keepass - password manager
• VLC - the greatest video/music player
• Waydroid - run android apps

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.

Debian or Alpine would be perfect. Debian has bigger repos, better hardware compatibility, and maybe a bit more stability. Alpine is scary lightweight and a small ISO download.