This is what I think: You cannot be 100% private, but you can be 95% private. Most of the tracking I want to avoid is from websites, mail and my devices OS.
With ublock origin in advanced mode, thunderbird + Protonmail, Linux (I’m dual booting and also have a windows VM for the things not working on Linux) and a VPN I can reach a satisfying amount of privacy without wasting too much time and effort. I’m also hosting an unfederated matrix server for private communications but I rarely use it.
To have better privacy than this I’d need a lot more effort, but the return wouldn’t be big enough, so I’m good. The only other thing I’d like to do is switching to a phone with grapheneOS or something like that.
Search engines such as Google need to rank results in some way, to decide which ones to display on top.
This algorithm changes depending on new developments, both cultural and technical, see Google recently putting results from reddit firsts.
One typical way to do this is checking “how many other websites are pointing at this result”, and since traffic is money, people try to game the algorithm by creating fake websites which links to the one they want to push.
Sadly KDE 6 broke a lot of stuff, the next Nvidia driver update 555 should fix most of those issues (it’s in beta right now).
For single issues with games you should specify more so we can help.
I’m using an MMO mouse (the ones with 12 buttons on the side) myself, and sadly there is no mouse with native support for macro on Linux, but a lot of them are supported thanks to developers (see Piper for example), which mouse is it?
Always dual booted Linux (ubuntu/mint/manjaro/endeavor) and windows (8/10/11) without issues. I think windows published an update (happened only once if I remember correctly) that wiped Linux partitions so yeah, it can happen, but to me that has the same chance of windows breaking itself because of an update (same with Linux). Honestly just take a backup and try whatever distro you like. If you just want to see what Linux is like you can use virtualbox on windows and install it on a virtual machine.
Dual booting is hard to setup the first time so you may want to have another pc with a guide and a forum ready for help. To me the hardest part was how to understand the partitions for swap/home/root/efi etc. but newer Linux installers have a wizard that usually does everything
Things to remember if you decide to dual boot:
- disable secure boot in the bios
- disable fast boot (I think that’s the name) or windows will “lock” the disks on hibernate
- keep your distro ISO image on a USB key with Ventoy installed to quickly restore any issue you may encounter. If windows overwrites the boot partition you can easily restore in 5/10 minutes without losing anything so don’t be worried about that
Put ublock in advanced mode https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-user-features and test if it’s enough for you. I use it this way and I’m pretty happy with it
Couple of weeks ago I wanted to change the intensity of the light bulb. I open the hue app and it tells me to download the new app, not allowing me to do anything else. I install the new app and it asks me to register… I still have my bulb at full light :D I’ll either find a compatible open source app or a light bulb that respect my privacy, I got a couple of tplink ones which were cheap and seems to work ok
This is just my personal list
- Ublock origin in advanced mode to block js like matrix did (or in basic mode on mobile/if you don’t want to waste time fixing broke websites)
- Decentraleyes to avoid loading libraries
- Cookies autodelete to you guess it
- Consent O Matic to auto consent gdpr banners
- Link cleaner to clean copied urls from tracking queries
- Redirector to redirect famous websites to their alternative front-ends (YouTube to piped etc)
You could redirect invidious to free tube