The intention wasn’t to be a direct response to the OP, but to be a general statement of advice.

Don’t use ExpressVPN, they and others make money off of your data.

They asked for an alternative for youtube, not to youtube.

They can’t force you to stay in this shithole.

Not yet, you mean.

For desktop I use the FreeTube client. For mobile, there’s various options line NewPipe and Revanced. But these are all Android Only.

20% is a far cry from what it used to be, and it also depends on your use case.

I’m spend my time online 60% on lemmy, 30% on YouTube, and 10% elsewhere.

Pihole was once a good adblocker, but as more and more websites realize ads being served from an external domain are easily blocked, they too push their ads through their own domain.

Pihole is still good for some pages, but mostly, its useless as an adblocker.

So this is how it will start.

First it will be a back and forth war of Anti-adblockers vs Adblockers

Then when the Anti-Adblockers start to lose, which they will, then they’ll come crying to various governments with massic PAC campaigns among other insane garbage about how “Adblockers are Piracy!” and that they need to be banned.

This will not end well.

Well it’s because AMD’s drivers are just shit period. But most users on Linux use the Mesa drivers which are far superior to AMD’s proprietary drivers.

Nvidia is very much anti-Linux and anti-user.

They’re more focused on the server market these days, which makes their Anti-Linux sentiment hillarious.

If this isn’t your first round on linux, Try Debian, set it to use non-free contrib packages and set the appstore to install apps as flatpaks before native.

Avoid using Ubuntu based distros as they run Snap packages which are just a general nightmare for users.

Snaps make sense for servers, but the only reason Ubuntu forces it on users is $$$$.

as an aside, sms 2fa is the worst 2fa as sms is completely unencrypted.

had a phone number attached, just removed it, it allowed me to use my authenticator as verification.

The other side of that being Security through Obscurity.

If you’re not running all your stuff through a major well-known host like Google or Amazon you’re less likely to be a target than if you’re just self-hosting.

Supposedly Google and Amazon have “good” security, but they still get hacked.

Cool. Now fix the other issues with Linux VR.

VR is literally the last reason I have a windows install at all.

enthusiasts become industry professionals.

And if substantial documentation were the only thing that kept networks from security and absolute anarchy, then all of the internet would be lost.

It’s not documentation, nor is it absolute knowledge that brings someone to understand a sane amount of security. But also trial and error.

One of the most important first rules of security is, start testing in applications that pose the least amount of risk.

If you’re looking into hosting your own DNS server, you’ve already proven you understand a lot more than the average user does about networking in general.

opening ports on a private network is fine as long as you exercise a sane amount of security measures.

You do have two DNS options on most devices. A Primary and a Secondary. If you’re worried about your primary’s stability/reliability, put a different dns as your secondary that you trust.

casusally skipping millenium edition because most people opted to buy windows 2000, the enterprise server os instead.

Windows 2000 couldn’t run games because it was based on Windows NT and the NT Kernel. ME was still based on DOS. XP frankensteined the NT Kernel and DOS to somehow make the most stable, longest running and best windows ever.

And 20 years later they’re bleeding marketshare.

The difference is social precedent.

The fight for transparency when computers were young either failed or wasn’t present at all.

Now we’re left with the more difficult issue of actually trying to convince people that this is necessary.