Eh, no use crying over spilt milk, youre here now. :) Linux is still stuck in a weird cultural hole, its not your fault it took a while.
Ive always been familiar but a daily driver of windows. I started self hosting a year or two ago, and recently switched my office PC to Linux with a secondary win partition. Ive just never had issues with windows but I’m pretty tired of what they’ve been up too lately so for me it was time. Whenever I get around to grabbing another m.2 for my living room rig I’ll do the same for it.
This is the thing that gets me about that level of user. I understand basic users who dont care prefering windows, but I always kind of found it amusing to watch people “Linux too hard booo CLI…now excuse me while I learn to manipulate the registry, and run scripts/disable certain things via the checks notes CLI.”
You CAN take steps to limit your exposure in varying levels of effort, the problem is a lot of that means “not using the thing” (ie gmail, Facebook, etc) and most people are not about that life, gripe as they might.
I’ve paid for private email hosting for over 5 years, run grapheneOS on my phone, my fb is deactivated with messenger having limited perms on my phone and kept in an isolated container on desktop, self host a number of services like password management and storage - etc etc.
Am I safe from big tech? Not completely. There’s still 1000 ways your business gets out and about, and on desktop I still use YouTube logged in and all (no yt on phone though.) They’re still only getting a small fraction from me compared to other people though.
I know at least with art, AI is starting to eat itself with the massive output of content. AI is getting trained on more and more AI content and according to what I read at least its starting to affect new outputs.
Assuming thats true, it at least makes techie sense to me lol, I expect the same would happen to text based AI as well as more and more of the internet becomes exclusively AI generated.
Unfortunately your options are limited these days on devices with unlockable bootloaders, and iirc pixel is the only one you can lock again which is why graphene only supports them. My 8 Pro is solid, and if you’re worried about supporting Google, hardware sales are a drop in their bucket - they only sell phones to get you locked into their ecosystem.
To be clear, I’m not knocking other Roms. I just don’t have any experience with them. I know Lineage is pretty popular right now as well.
Been on Graphene for a bit less than a year, its been great. You’re correct about google apps being regular apps with no special perms, but also there are sandboxed user profiles so if you’re particularly concerned you can keep all your dependent apps over there with double sand boxed google 😛
Ive only had one or two issues with app compatibility but they have a setting to apply a less secure ruleset thats worked for me both times.
I’ve tried it both ways, the all in one seemed to do alright but I didn’t realize I needed the “login” info from that initial stage later so I 100% boned myself there lol. It never worked right again, I’m sure due to some lingering files I couldn’t find.
I’m fiddling with all my drives to dual boot anyways, maybe I’ll give it another go.
Biden is passing a number of laws that do precisely those things, including making ANY criticism of Israel “antisemitic hate speech” and opening up fast passes to strip any org they don’t like of nonprofit status. Also, you can not have a credit card but that means there are certain things you aren’t allowed to access and certain areas you aren’t allowed to live. Saying “IDC” doesn’t mean you’re less restricted, just means you accept your restrictions.
I’ve seen 3 different comments lately bitching some variation “if you don’t like America go deal with China’s social credit system!”
Ah yes a credit system meant to control behavior… Surely none of us have credit cards or losns because its the only way to do certain things like even finding a rental in some areas.
It strips the tracking data to and from the engines, so if you tuck it behind a vpn, GG.