Indeed. If whatsapp isn’t on the list, then I have all the confirmation I need.

Not many indeed. There’s a switch in your settings to only show you games for your designated OS, or there are symbols below the games’ vignettes that tells you which OS is supported: win / mac / steam

Frustrating is famous games from the 32 bits era, where they would be available to Mac but work only on macos pre-10.14 and not from 10.15 when macos went fully 64bits. Which means on top of reduced availability, some of this availability would only work on a mac from 2010 or so.

I may loose some answers in searches since I only use DDG

I often do not read articles or information from websites if the gdpr popup isn’t solvable in a click but the site ask to click on a thousand toggles

Where I am at the moment, the lack of FB marketplace sucks

A lot of cultural info goes through Instagram here, so I have to be a bit proactive if I want to know what’s happening

I use signal or text when possible, but work is impossible without whatsapp

I posted the above for the sake of precision - OTOH, I had my workplace buy an ipad and that was impossible to setup without email + creating an apple id. I don’t care much (used work email), but still. Same with:

• Windows 11
• my latest kobo ereader
• Stay away from Sonos loudspeakers too

Since I’m borderline psychotic about this, I always create a temporary access point on my phone that I delete right after setup is done, over a disposable email address from simplelogin.com.

Disclaimer: Linux user through-and-through ; I have a modern “m” mac for some work specific applications.

Setting up a macbook today doesn’t require an apple id or even an email address. My warranty is with the non-apple authorized retailer I bought the computer from, I don’t use the software store (but I think it would work) nor do I use any apple services like itunes, or, without the apple id, I don’t have icloud backups. And I don’t/can’t buy anything from the store, of course.

I am able to update the os, I have just one notification in the settings about setting up the account but no showstopper at all.

So what does apple get from me? I’d guess crude location (from my vpn), hardware/OS version and maybe installed software? That’s not much, and since it’s a work machine it’s offline all the time, I can’t see that device doing much behind my back.

If apple is indeed looking deep into that laptop, then I guess they’ll see I also have Asahi on it. And maybe they are really really intrusive and notice I’m using that Asahi partition 80% of the time (;

Joking aside, if you need macos, it is possible to use macos. With some limitations: handle your own backups, get your software from the vendors and… And that’s it.

My proposition here is that your machine (current mac address) will be once online, through a location used once, with dns-leak protection - yes, your machine will be fingerprinted once, and if the only thing you do when using this particular config is pulling software from the opensuse repos, and pay attention to only ever after live your online life with the spoofed mac and another VPN location, connecting both gonna be near impossible. Who’s gonna fingerprint you anyway, if really the only use of the network is the Suse installer pulling rpm’s from its own repos? At that, Nord isn’t worst than any other since the internet provider for the connection can only sniff you going to some X location for an hour or so.

Extra Paranoid Step, do it from any public free WiFi across town or something.

You know, at the end of the day, fingerprinting works very well even behind the standard privacy protection we all know about. An interesting concept I read here was that the more addons / special stuff you add to protect you, the more “unique” is your profile, enabling efficient tracking!

Good luck with all this

Tumbleweed/ProtonVPN here

I’m guessing your use case require extra steps towards anonymity.

2 ways :

1. Download the needed .rpm from software.opensuse.org from another machine, transfer via USB, install manually from terminal or YAST ; it is gonna be tedious since dependencies will be missing and you will have to pull them, transfer them, install them manually.

2. (cleaner). It’s probably easier to wipe your system, re-install while connected behind either a PiHole or a VPN on your phone using HotSpot + a decent DNS provider and setting the VPN to target an unusual location. This time, do configure properly your machine including extra software that may not be available on the offline installation media. Reboot, configure, don’t use previous VPN location ever again.