That is stage 1.

This is stage 2.

deleted by creator

Some people like to rag onto Canonicals bad decisions. These include:

1. Putting ads in the terminal
2. Use of Affiliate links in the DE
3. The forceful use of Snap
4. The proprietary Snap infrastructure
5. The feeling of being abandoned, in favour of the server market (lack of desktop innovation)
6. Lens search, that allows company (eg: Amazon) tracking.
7. Anti-privacy settings enabled, by default.

If anything, they’re worse.

1. Brave is an advertising company, that blocks everyone, but them. Forcing over people and companies into their system.
2. They’re heavily in the blockchain ecosystem, with their own worthless crypto.
3. They take from open source projects (uBlock, Chromium, etc), but threaten legal action when someone forks them.
4. They install bloat/spyware on your Windows system (later claimed it was a mistake).
5. Brave, and its CEO is right-wing, lobbying against things like same-sex marriage.

I could go on.

It applies to most business.

1. You give a positive face to the market you’re in (Game Pass, Phil Spencer, pro-dev vibe, etc).
2. You buy chunks of the market (Activ-Bliz-King is a massive chunk), while saying it’s good for the industry.
3. You squeeze the company of its IP, while bleeding the market dry of money. All of which kills, or at least hurts that market.

Right now, Micro$oft is in the Extend phase.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Yeah, YT is the last holdout for me. It’s literally the only Google service I willingly sign up for. I’ve tried Piped/Invidious, but they don’t match YTs quality.

any technical solution short of DRM is provably impractical and unworkable.

Don’t give them ideas.

PIA is owned by Kape Technologies., a dodgy company, founded by a member is Israel’s Intelligence Devision. They’re known to spread malware, steal users data, and redirect traffic to advertisers. That being said, PIA claims that despite being owned by Kape, they remain in control of their day-to-day operations. I haven’t heard of any major issues, since the acquisition. Kape also seems to like the profitability of their (several) VPNs.

Up to you if you trust them with your data. Personally, I do not.

Sadly, yes. A Proton team member on Reddit confirmed it a couple years back:

Folder/label names are visible to the server (for filters and other reasons) as are email metadata. Message and attachment contents are encrypted and not visible to the server.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/hxomoy/are_mail_folderstags_encrypted_or_private/fzc6wry/

Do note that this is ONLY true for Mail. Calendar, and Drive does encrypt folders/label names.

Tutanota. I used to use Proton, but they don’t encrypt folder names, which is a deal breaker. Tutanota does, and they’re also a privacy respecting, reputable, decent service.

Adguard Home. I find it to be more feature complete, compared to Pi-Hole. Nicer GUI, more options, built in DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS, better client controls & detection, more domain information, better domain list blocking, and so on.

I moved from NextDNS, to Adguard Home. All self hosted, and accessed with a reverse proxy.

I think we are constantly progressing in that field. One issue for latency was that controllers used to contact your device, and then the server. Now they can connect directly to the server. Things will improve, like it or not.

For right now, I think the biggest hurdle is with ISPs.

1. Data caps can be quite common, in many countries. Essentially creating a huge limit on how much you can (if at all) play.
2. Most people’s router, and access point hardware needs upgrading. A lot of the stock router AIOs from ISPs are really bad. Creating a bottleneck before the data even reaches the servers.

Another hurdle I can see is companies profit sharing. Everyone wants a large cut, so I’d expect multiple streaming options… and many failures, like what we’re seeing on the movies/series streaming model… just with games it’ll be soooo much worse.

Did you get this sorted? I know the following works on 11, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it worked on 10.

First unplug the Ethernet cable, and when it asks for WiFi, press “Shift + F10”. In the opened command prompt type “OOBE\BYPASSNRO”. This will make the installer go to the legacy OOBE (Out Of Box Experience). Finish setup, before finally connecting to the internet. Don’t worry you’re not doing anything dangerous. It’s a simple registry edit.

Other than the FairPhone, which you already mentioned, nothing really matches all criteria.

I’d give a nod to the Pixel line, though. Google already offers 5 years of software updates, and the next line is rumoured to get 7. Plus Google allows Custom ROM support, which makes it a fan favourite in the privacy community. Granted it’s not as repairable as the FairPhone, and it’s not as eco-friendly, but it’s decent enough.

deleted by creator

It doesn’t really work like that.

They’re literally junk, that’s there to collect your data, while also sometimes charging you for the privilege. It’s snake oil. VPNs CAN help play geo-restricted games/content, and hide your IP from malicious gamers (eg: Dead by Daylight is known to leak your IP, to those you’re playing with), but beyond that… yeah, no. Any benefits you’re getting is placebo. If anything it’ll be worse, due to the added latency of hitting the VPN server, then going to the games server.

If you must use one, at least look at a VPN that’s privacy respecting. Something like ProtonVPN, Mullvad, Windscribe, or IVPN.

Games that just come out could be an issue regardless of distro. Sometimes Wine/Proton needs to fix a few things… no distro is going to help, in that regard. I suppose a more regularly updated distro COULD help with getting updates faster… but it’s usually nothing you cannot already solve with Pop. ProtonUp-QT is a great tool to help get you the latest Proton versions, including the Eggroll fork. It’s available as a Flatpak, so it’ll work on most modern distros (including Pop).

If you must switch to a more regularly updated distro, you have a couple of options. Nobara (based on Fedora) will give you a nice middle ground between your current setup and Arch. Speaking of which, Arch is a great distribution, with fantastic documentation. That being said, it IS NOT new user friendly. It WILL break, and you WILL need to look stuff up. You’re on the literal bleeding edge, of Linux. The Arch forums can also be quite toxic, in comparison to what’s available on both Pop/Ubuntu and Nobara/Fedora. If neither is appealing to you, consider OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s very up to date, but I often find it more stable than Arch.

1. KDE Project
2. Wayland
3. Open source drivers (especially Nvidia)
4. Lemmy
5. Mastadon
6. Scribus
7. Nextcloud
8. Firefox
9. Tutanota suite
10. Wine