I read that as the animal mice, and I was wondering why Meta was hiring mice.

As per usual, the answer is “depends on your threat model”. For a lot of sensitive communications, the centralised design and therefore ability to correlate metadata is a no-go. But if you’re just using it e.g. as a WhatsApp replacement to message your friends, it’s fine. It’s still the most polished and normie-friendly e2ee foss messenger.

People have their preferences for UI and UX. I use Aerc because I like modal editing (ie being able to write my emails in vim) and keyboard nav. Using a desktop email client rather than webmail client from a provider gives me that freedom.

Besides, I don’t actually have a webmail client I can use lol. I host my own email and host the IMAP server but I don’t host a web interface.

I know about Tailscale. I don’t use it because I want my VPS to be exposed to the internet; some of my services are supposed to be public. And those that aren’t, have their own authentication systems that are adequately secure for their purposes. I just don’t need Tailscale so I’ve not bothered with the setup.

I’ve had my VPS exposed to the internet for a while and never been pwned. No professional experience. Use SSH keys, not password authentication. Use FDE if physical access is in your threat model. Use a firewall to prevent connection on internal-only ports.

Vaultwarden will store your passwords encrypted (obviously) so even if your database does get stolen, the attacker shouldn’t be able to read your passwords without your master password.

Signal is fine for normal/social chatting. It is centralised which makes it much harder to obscure identifying conversation metadata, and I wouldn’t recommend it for comms with a state threat model. I like SimpleX for addressing those issues.

If you just want to chat to friends and nothing else, I probably would recommend Signal for the most polished experience and most widely adopted open-source private messenger.

The middle ground is the middle ground between user freedom and corporate control. Which is not a spectrum you want to be in the middle of.

This is like getting a pay rise that’s below inflation. That’s a pay cut. And this is a loss.

And I’ve installed apps with adb install file.apk, your point?

Pretty sure they meant a smartphone with a desktop OS installed on it (eg Linux phones), not just “phone that looks kinda like a laptop but still uses Android”

Most people who build software from source do it for reasons other than trust. Could be for fun (I imagine the main reason why people do Linux From Scratch), could be for the same reason that compels some people to use Gentoo lol. OP didn’t say what their motivation was.

edit: nvm, in other comments OP has said they’re concerned about an xz style of backdoor. In any case, I would still be interested to read about someone trying what OP is suggesting.

It’s great to see a mainstream OEM work with GOS. I really hope Motorola will make phones with an actual headphone jack. That’s my no. 1 complaint about modern Pixel hardware.

On duckduckgo.com it’s unfortunately enabled by default though. You have to go out of your way to set your search browser to noai.duckduckgo.com if you want default AI disabled (which you’ll want on e.g. private browsing windows/any browser that autodeletes cookies when you close it). It’s extra hassle because most privacy web browsers use DDG by default, not the noai subdomain.

That’s why you don’t keep clothes if you wore them while committing a crime. Burn them.

People play games for different reasons. A lot of people play games to relax, and challenge themselves doing serious stuff. It’s literally fine for things like cheats to exist (and there’s no such thing as cheating for singleplayer games anyway). If someone wants to make their singleplayer game easier, or to skip a particularly hard section, or whatever, it doesn’t affect anyone else in any way, so let them.

OP said they’re not that tech-savvy. gopass is likely overpowered for their use-case.

They should be pretty on it for security updates. Librewolf is also hardened compared to upstream Firefox so if security is a concern, you’re probably better off using the fork anyway.

If it’s so easy to “use wrong” then it’s badly designed software.

Nobody’s saying it’s mandatory. People don’t want their web browsers to be full of bloated AI slop. Why should there be the AI components of Firefox on my hard drive if I’m never going to use them? Why should my web browser be full of low quality features I’ll never use? It’s enshittification. Not to mention the very quote you’re pasting specifies that it’s opt-out, not opt-in.

It increases the workload for fork devs the more crap they have to remove from upstream and the more the fork deviates from upstream.

I don’t know what websites you’re using, but default uBlock Origin works completely fine with all the websites I visit, and it doesn’t use AI. It just uses blocking rules.