never tried flatpak, snaps were so bad as to never consider non-native installs or just use docker instances when I need to run something weird. so dunno.

whats the use case for a flatpak exactly? maybe im not the target audience???

this was great! I hadnt considered leaked passwords. I already use uniques, but damn if this isnt a great reason to. Thanks

Check this out, its a pretty good view into good practice, beginner, intermediate, and advanced, with recommendations. https://digital-defense.io/

There is so so so much, and they do get caught, and when they do we keep a peek into how invasive they are. As someone who has had to worry about being targeted by intelligence agencies and nation-states, I was completely blindsided by corporate/capitalist surveillance.

for example, look at this action by Meta, where they broke out of security sandboxes and exploited protocols in order to tie your browsing history (even private browsing) back to your identify saved in their databases back in meta land

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/03/meta_pauses_android_tracking_tech/

the amount of data that is being harvested and sold, and resold, is absurd, and the greater threat is not just that they are exploiting you, its that they dont care who the data gets sold to. Bad actors (criminals, etc) can and will purchase information they can use against you.

So, consider the unintentional ramifications of all that info being harvested and available in addition to the intentional ramifications of hyper greed, and couple that with the amount of available compute and you will see that you do not need to be a person of interest, everyone is a data point that can be and will be exploited.

I would encourage everyone to take their privacy seriously.

Just saw this. Feel like the alternate title could have been “When digital privacy went mainstream”, “I was into privacy before it was cool”, or finally “No I am not wearing a tin foil hat!”

hahah, nice. try and message me when you get a chance and ill share my notes.

Think im ahead of the curve on this one, but I applaud you! keep doing it.

or XMPP would work as well

There is a lot, and there are a lot of levels. I am working on this now as well. Escalating from where I was, its a learning process. Too much to type in a single comment/response.

If you would like more info on removing your info from the internet, reducing the amount of spyware on your android phone, de-googling yourself, or limiting how much info you spill while you browse, we can connect and I can share what I have been doing. Ive got plenty I still need to do beyond this, but I am happy to share my lessons learned as it were.

you are not kidding, this one is driving me crazy. no pun intended.

Im working on de-googling as well, from a privacy perspective. I am also looking at Proton for email. for

• google drive I plan to use K drive, https://www.infomaniak.com/en/ksuite/kdrive
• outlook, thunderbird (already doing so and its 1000 times better than new outlook)
• google maps, comaps
• chrome, duckduckgo browser

trying to think of the others, lol but im tired.

the two I heard about are mysudo.com and privacy.com. I think both are US only. Are they both based in the US? It didnt say on the privacy.com about us page

edit: yes, they are both based in the US.

any non-US based options that offer services to the US?

found it but was super limited. went into developer settings and enabled unknown sources but it didnt change the options. did some searches but cant find any way of really doing anything about it without rooting my phone. so meh.

amazeballs, thanks!

It didnt for me. I installed Comaps from fdroid the other day, and it didnt come up on androidauto. I guess I could try installing it from the app store and see.

this, 100% this. be afraid.

If the only thing holding you back from NixOS is my python comment, my issue was with Numpy, which really really demands that you install it globally. Pretty sure you can make it work by using a dev-shell, installing it globally in that shell, then doing everything else in that dev environment normally. I was newish to nixos at the time.

Otherwise I tend to fall back to ubuntu server, but only because it was something I knew. I prefered Centos7 back in the day before RedHat killed Centos. NixOS was my move from there. Been using Alpine as the os in my docker images, but havent really explored a lot of other recent linux os’s at the moment.

Ton of comments, and I havent read them all, but I wanted to ask if you really meant popular or if you wanted something for a specific reason. Easy for new ppl to linux, good for desktops, etc etc.

I dont really use GUIs on linux, except for when I want to have a fancy pants riced network monitor type situation. I am a big fan of NixOS except for python Dev stuff. Big fan of being able to clone a machine or recover a machine with a single conf file.

I have heard that Ukraine is a crazy fascist state. This seems to support that.

exterior interior ill grant you, mutant exterior… not enough drugs XD