I experience little breakage with Librewolf, and when I do, maybe 75-85% of the time it is because the site only works with Chromium. I get extensions directly through the browser, I have not enabled anything as far as I am aware. And of course you can configure the cookie clearing. I quite like it, there are (in my case at least) not many exceptions you need to add before it works quite smoothly, but of course that depends on your usage.

Obligatory post mentioning that Freetube exists on Android as well. With Syncthing, I sync history, playlists and subscriptions. It's brilliant.

Are there any write-ups on the situation in Europe under GDPR-legislation? Mostly I read about the US-situation which seems like the wild west, but I can't imagine that it is perfectly fine in the EU either even if you opt-out of using their apps etc.

Wayland should be faster. What would you expect to happen? It should just work, while in the background EVERYTHING is changing.

I had assumed that I would get a somehow smoother experience (such as speed, for instance) or some other perceivable benefit, but I think Ramin Honary nicely highlighted the necessity of the change on the backend side. So your point is good, maybe I should just expect a smooth transition where I don't notice anything.

For Freetube, it should automatically detect running on Wayland and use that. But I had one bug on Freetube only on Wayland, may be an Electron issue.

If I run the executable after downloading from the GitHub repo directly, it launches in XWayland. The additional parameters I mentioned in the post used to work to launch it in Wayland, but not anymore.

It is assuming this is implemented in a way that forces all existing messaging services to implement this or shut down. In that case, you would want to build it from source from a point in time before it was implemented (or shut down). If that is not the case, then this wouldn't be much of a problem to begin with, right?

Wow, thanks a lot for this thorough answer. I see I need to dust off the old employment contract and see what it says - I've had an assumption that any ownership my previous employer has pertains only to any discovery that could be commercialized through patents and spin-offs - this is not that. This work is academic research, and I was required to make any publication openly accessible (with CC-licenses) due to how the work was funded, and this code base contains all the analysis tools that underpin these publications.

Learn Linux TV is number one for me - his Linux Crash Course has been an immense help in getting started using Linux for me.

Rechecked this now, and it's at about 5% now. The statistics seem a bit weird to me, unless there are some big seasonal changes. Your 12% was recorded in June and July. Maybe with less business activity during these months, the Windows share plummets in favor of home users who are more prone to use Linux.

Oh, I think this is very difficult. First of all because it is not a single reason why a future where privacy has eroded is a very bad thing, but rather many different reasons. This makes it difficult to know where to start, as it will depend on the person you are talking to what they are more receptive to. Concepts such as security, privacy, secrecy and anonymity are often confused. You have different actors you would want protection from, including corporate and governmental entities.

I don't think most ordinary people you meet will be bad faith actors though, but I do think many tend to take offense if you are outspoken against something that is proclaimed to be about protecting children. Why wouldn't you want to save children?

Some of the reasons below, but not an exhaustive list. As I said, difficult to know where to start.

1. You do have something to hide, even though you might not be doing anything illegal (to your knowledge). Most people dislike people staring into their living room from the street, and will install curtains or other ways to prevent it. Most people closes and locks the door when they go to the toilet. Most people do not say every single thought they have out loud. I think the disconnect comes from people not actually knowing what data is collected, and even if they do, they do not understand how this data can be used / misused to learn things about you or manipulate you, and the privacy threat of having this data stored anywhere even if it is not being used (i.e. risk of data leaks). In terms of manipulation, I think that the story on how Facebook nudged people to vote in the Scottish referendum highlights the creepy influence such a company can have on society, and this was already in 2014. Who's to say the owners of such platforms will not use it to sway elections their preferred way by using such nudging tactics on the population they want to vote, and not on the ones they'd rather stay home. We shouldn't have to trust that they don't abuse such a power.

2. What today might be perfectly legal, might not be legal tomorrow. Case in point are the draconian abortion laws implemented in various states of the US. Facebook had to comply with government requests to hand over chat logs..

3. What today is illegal, should perhaps not be illegal. We do not want 100% law enforcement, as that would mean that we consider today's laws final, however we are constantly evolving our laws. A recent example is legalization of weed in the US. How many have been incarcerated and had their lives ruined on charges related to weed? Yes now the same activities are in many states considered legal. Or homosexuality? Sodomy laws are not a very distant past in many countries (and still exist in other places of the world). If you had Apple or Google scanning your phones and flagging you to law enforcement for illegal activities. Effective mass governmental surveillance (and corporate surveillance that can be passed on to law enforcement) could potentially send countless people to jail on charges that could be legalized in just a few years.

4. Building an infrastructure for mass surveillance is not future-proof. You might trust your government not to misuse it today, but what about after next election? There are countless examples of less-than-democratic forces gaining power in Western democracies in recent years. We need strong protections against potential oppression/suppression, and not just soft protections that are easily swept aside.

5. We are dependent on journalists and whistleblowers exposing wrongdoing in our society. Lack of tools that ensure privacy and anonymity prevents this.

6. Even if our societies are not oppressive regimes today, many around the world are. Political opponents and resistance groups in such regimes need ways to protect themselves. Otherwise authoritarianism will have an too easy time to crack down on dissidents, making organized opposition impossible.

Yeah, it happens straight after boot, but it never resolves itself. And the process exists after reboot as well, so it seems that it starts running apt-get update and gets stuck / hangs.

I use a Xiaomi Smart Band 7 and pair it with Gadgetbridge, and it works fine for my purposes, which is HR-monitoring during the day, sleep and workout sessions. I rarely interface with the watch itself (which is by design), so if you want more functionality out of your watch, then this might be a little on the light side feature wise. I tend to keep Bluetooth off, so I connect to it maybe once a day to sync data with Gadgetbridge, which I again export for analysis. A bit clunky to connect - I have to search for it first in the Gadgetbridge app, and only when it has found it can I attempt to reconnect. Maybe this is easily fixable, but I have not bothered to do it because I only sync once a day.

You do need to obtain a key first though, which requires a login to the Xiaomi servers. I used a throwaway e-mail for the registration. Gadgetbridge has no access to the internet.

Yes, they are unfortunately not as opposed to surveillance by governments as they are by that of megacorporations. While I appreciate that they are trying to keep the likes of Google and Meta in check, I also very much dislike the several attempts to enforce data retention and essentially encryption bans.

That the Data Retention Directive was eventually annulled by the Court of Justice of the European Union gives me some hope that the legal system within EU can withstand these attempts, but maybe I am being too naive? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive