What features do you specifically want? You mentioned sandboxing. Anything else?
I’d say just keep it simple. If you’re comfortable with Debian then stick with that, study up and learn how to harden it. Kali, ParrotOS, Mint, Ubuntu…they’re all just based on Debian with different preinstalled apps and desktop environments. Fedora and Arch are kinda weird and unique, I’m not sure if I’d recommend those for anyone, unless you KNOW that’s what you need. Qubes seems interesting, I’m not familiar with that.
But I’ll point out that ALL of these distros are miles ahead of Windows in terms of privacy. So just by using Mint for a while, you were already ahead of the curve.
Why is it not mainlined into Proton, you mean? It uses proprietary (not open source) components. Proton is a fully open source project, and therefore cannot incorporate GE’s tweaks. But GE is free to continue making his special fork, and it’s a great option for most users that don’t mind using closed source software.
Damn, I’m looking around and don’t see any, even the cheapest Toyotas and Kias have a big touchscreen with Android and CarPlay. I’m not sure what happens if you take that out and replace it with an aftermarket receiver, but it appears to be possible because Crutchfield sells receivers for a 2024 Corolla: https://www.crutchfield.com/g_473950/Digital-Multimedia-Video-Receivers.html
I’m also seeing people online saying that there are cars made for businesses that still come with no “smart” features. But I have no clue how you would buy one of those, I doubt they have them at dealerships: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatcarshouldIbuy/comments/124n5qw/what_cars_less_than_5_years_old_are_recommended/
Or, you could just get a used car, save some money, and check all the low-tech boxes.
I don’t have a great answer to your question, but you might be able to find a relatively cheap car that isn’t “smart” and doesn’t have a touchscreen or anything. Do they make those anymore? Then, you could add an aftermarket stereo receiver to it, like some of the options in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t1GdI9UsEI
Yes, that’s still a “smart” stereo but it’s NOT connected to any of the car manufacturer’s metrics or systems, right? So the separation makes it seem more privacy-friendly to me. I could be thinking about this incorrectly, but it seems logical to me. There might be some stereo receivers that are more private than others, but you’d have to do your own research for that.
I don’t know how you could read that and think I’m defending them.
I’m just telling you how the world works. If you want real privacy, you need to PAY somebody with a rock-solid privacy agreement or fully host it yourself. Plex is neither of those things. Remember, if something that costs money to run is free, then YOU are the product.
What? Plex is not one of those open source, self-hosted, privacy-centric services. Plex can do whatever the hell Plex wants with your watch history, because you agreed to their broad terms of service that said exactly that when you signed up. You chose to run your traffic and authentication through Plex servers because it’s convenient, not for privacy reasons.
If you don’t like it, use Jellyfin. I’m personally looking into moving, as Plex seems to be getting slowly shittier.
This makes perfect sense to me. If you plug your phone in to your car and give it permission to access all your shit, then it will access all your shit, and store it locally so that it doesn’t have to re-download all your shit every time. If you don’t want your car to do that, then don’t plug in your phone and give it permission to do that.
Having said that, it is terrifying how much of our personal data modern cars collect. We should be fighting that, but this specific case was not the way to do that.
Yeah, you don’t need a Steam Link (device), you just need the Steam Link app installed on your HTPC. Or, you could fully install Steam, which has the Steam Link functionality built in. If you’re on the same network, you get the option to “stream” games from another PC. That would let you locally run games that your HTPC is capable of running, and stream the ones that are too demanding.
Minimum requirements for running Steam Link are quite low, so I bet your HTPC is capable.
I haven’t tried it out, but this is a thing: https://github.com/Merrit/nyrna