About reducing useless extensions, please don’t use nor recommend cookie autodelete and I don’t care about cookies (which has been acquired by avast or some similar company iirc).
Firefox (and any other modern browser) has settings to delete website cookies on exit and to block third party cookies, while giving the ability to whitelist for both features.
For the annoying cookie popups just enable the adguard annoyances lists in ublock origin, which you already want to install on a browser anyways.
I don’t know about ansible, sorry
Ame provides a wizard that runs with fairly elevated permissions to apply a set of scripts to the system.
The changes are more or less radical depending on the playbook (the set of scripts) you choose.
I’ve been using AME 10 for some years now and I’ve been really enjoying it. It removes windows update, ms store, XBOX apps and all windows telemetry and ads.
Very polished experience overall, but not recommended to those who do not want or know how to mantain their system (stuff installed through chocolatey needs to be manually updated through CLI, even auto updating software, and you might need to find alternative apps to do stuff if the original ones are too integrated into the system, like Minecraft launcher)
Take a look at ameliorated.io
If you don’t want to put in the effort, the most time efficient way is just to install windows 10 LTSC (long term support), and slapping portmaster or adguard on it, with some telemetry-blocking DNS.
Feel free to ask for more info if you’d like to know more
Don’t use barinsta or bibliogram, they’re dead projects as of now.
We have proxygram these days https://codeberg.org/ThePenguinDev/Proxigram/wiki/Instances
No, brave is not bad for your privacy. There has been some controversie but no dealbreaker so far imo.
If you’re on mobile I think brave has hands down the best UX (not necessarily UI but I like it a lot), on desktop I recommend firefox, which has a lot of custom themes to choose from (https://firefoxcss-store.github.io).
I personally like and use https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix
It was founded in Russia in 2009, then moved its headquarters from Moscow to Cyprus almost 10 years ago, in 2014 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdGuard
They’ve been a solid presence in the privacy scene for years now, contributing to spread privacy awareness and not incurring in a single major controvesy/scandal so far.
They’re legit imo, and they provide solid services
Not sure about the basis for the claims of “shadiness”
Exactly, there’s just no reason to use anything other than firefox on desktop
On mobile IN MY EXPERIENCE Firefox has always been unbearably slow. I’ve tried everything: getting it from play store, F-Droid and github, using the beta and nightly version, tried it with and without extensions: it sometimes took 10+ seconds to load some pages, I don’t know why. It’s been like this on other smartphone models too.
That’s why I use brave from mobile, it’s blazing fast and it has a lot of nice features, starting from the amazing bottom bar to their solid integrated adblocker and dark mode.
I’m srey for the confusion, with “privacy scene” I meant orgs that fight for privacy/freedom on the internet, like Tor, EFF, Fight for the future and more. You can see who they donated to from their blog https://spreadprivacy.com/2022-duckduckgo-charitable-donations/
Source?