USB C to AUX adapters work for me.

Having a secure and up to date device should likely be more important

Yes. Many security updates come from upstream AOSP and then are put into GOS.

So when a device has stopped getting AOSP updates, it is unreasonable for GOS to continue support it. They can and I believe they have applied more critical security patches to just barely EOL devices, but this isn’t promised or expected.

https://endoflife.date/pixel This is for googles support. GOS may support a specific device a little longer than google but does not promise to and recomends getting a newer device.

Pixel 8a looks real good right now.

No adblocker built in, but Rethink DNS is a great app that will set up a local VPN and do firewall filtering and DNS filtering. There are other apps too and they should all work on any OS.

Personally I self host a VPN and pihole and stay connected to that

Grapheneos can be used almost identically to stock android. You can install google apps and use them or not. The biggest piece of it is the options.

There is no account associated to GOS. You can login to an existing google account etc, just like any android.

GOS has messages for SMS only. It had a Gallery app for photos and a files app for system files. There aren’t many apps it comes with, so getting alternative apps is easy. Mostly via Fdroid (or droidify for a more modern looking app). For a better photos app, I recommend “Aves” For a drive app, a private option would be proton drive. Notes app can be anything you want, but GOS doesn’t come with one. If you want to use google notes you can. I wouldn’t recommend it, but you can. There are lots on Fdroid to choose from.

As for cloud sync, GOS doesn’t do this, but again, you can use any other service you’d normally use to sync. I use Syncthing to sync a folder on my phone to a folder on my PC. That way I can have things like my photos easily on desktop and have backups.

As for app stores, GOS doesn’t recommend Aurora because they don’t sign the apps the provide, but I use it anyways, as it is the best way to get apps without a google account.

You definitely don’t need your own Nextcloud or Homelab. I prefer paying for hardware I own instead of cloud things, but both have good positives.

Also, your questions aren’t stupid their great! You’re just learning about this stuff that that’s amazing. Keep learning.

Little curl shell script that works:

#!/bin/bash

# Random_Curl_Request.sh

# CSV file containing websites
CSV_FILE="/home/user/Documents/randomSiteVisitor/websites.csv"

# Get a random line from the CSV file
RANDOM_LINE=$(shuf -n 1 "$CSV_FILE")

# Extract the website URL from the random line
WEBSITE=$(echo $RANDOM_LINE | cut -d ',' -f 1)

# Make a curl request to the random website every minute
while true; do
    curl $WEBSITE
    sleep 60

    # Get a new random line from the CSV file
    RANDOM_LINE=$(shuf -n 1 "$CSV_FILE")

    # Extract the website URL from the new random line
    NEW_WEBSITE=$(echo $RANDOM_LINE | cut -d ',' -f 1)

    # Update the website URL for the next iteration
    WEBSITE=$NEW_WEBSITE
done

That’s a good idea.

Probably just a shell script. Someone mentioned using curl so that’d be pretty easy

Yea. My issue now is finding a list of these sites

I like this. Is there some sort of list of safe sites that exists that I could use in a script?

Edit: something like this

Very similar yes. Trackmenot but for any site not just search engines. Although it may be a good option too

Yup. Tailscale+Mullvad isn’t a bad option, but I’d rather not depend on tailscale and a true local connection will always be better. But then you have to pay through tailscale and then more identifiable.

As I mentioned I have a server, and I use a VPN to connect always to it. This makes using a paid VPN a bit harder. The dedicated VPN IP should fix this issue but I haven’t looked into how difficult that’d be.

Wow yea this seems really good. And scary. Too bad it doesn’t seem to work with mullvad browser

More of my stats:

Fennec (privacy badger + unlock origin): 1 in 23301.0

Fennec private tab (privacy badger + unlock origin): 1 in 20712.44

Firefox hardened (arkenfox + privacy badger + unlock origin): 1 in 37281.6

Firefox hardened private tab(arkenfox + privacy badger + unlock origin): 1 in 31069.5

Mullvan browser (dafaults with unlock): 1 in 147.48