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.

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.

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.

I do find it a bit funny that their adblock-block is to my knowledge just client side JavaScript. Ya’ know, the kinda stuff adblock is built to cutout.

Unless they’re going to be splicing up videos to put the ads into the same file (which would be astronomically resource intensive) or only allow YouTube in app and in seriously locked down Web-Environtment-Integrity browsers it’ll be impossible prevent a device from running or not running code as the user see’s fit.

YT isn’t going to drop premium any time soon. Subscriptions are astronomically more revenue generating then ads, and given YT was always operating at a loss until they stopped reporting revenue altogether premium will probably be the only route to scrape by.

Not to say they can’t enshittify it by raising prices and adding restrictions, but I can’t see them doing anything but trying to force more people to it.

I paid for it for a bit a while back, and it was decent. Of course free tools give considerably better features (adblock, sponsor block, DRM free downloads, better privacy). That and personally not wanting to financially support YT for a variety of reasons has kept me away from it for a long time.

They usually drop in price. They were just selling the 6a for $200 like a month ago, so given a bit of time you can get a good deal on the second-to-latest generation.

We’re seeing this all over the tech and tech adjacent space. Can’t grow forever at a loss, especially not with increased interest rates and a potential economic downturn.

My guess, if you want to have decent services we’re going to end up needing to pick few (or a suite of the basics) to pay for on a monthly basic and cut out all the “free” stuff that is/will get enshittified.

Pixel devices, devices with custom roms, and devices that you used ADB bridge to disable or uninstall “system” apps.

Only in the most remote deserts, wilderness areas and oceans can you find a sky as dark as our ancestors knew them.

It varies depending on what country your in, but I don’t think people realize how little of a percentage densly populated areas make up of the world. If you’re in the US unless you’re in a place like NY City a 20-45 min drive can get you to a place zero light minus occasional blinks from cell towers/planes/sattalites - and there will also probably be public land there you can go on for free.

And hey, look, the fact stuff like sattalites are interfering with observing the sky isn’t great, but if that sattalite is used for powering agricultural equipment and gathering agricultural data that keeps a billion people from starving to death I’d say that’s a worthy trade off.

Like a life saving drug with side effects, there’s always trade offs as technology and society advance. And mitigating side effects when possible are great, but I thinks it’s important we don’t act like the side effects are occurring in a vacuum, and I would rather live now than in the past without the tech we have now.

You can usually override zoom controls in the accessibility settings of most browsers. Comes in real handy for me