I'm totally on engineeringgamings side. Both apple and Google are both bad companies imo but the Android operating system is probably the best thing Google has made and you have the ability to use it without any of the Google services.

I take advantage of side loading on a daily basis with repository's like f droid and accresent as well as obtanium for installing apps from the source. And for the few apps I need i can use the aurora store all with never signing in with a google account.

For me the main feature of Android is side loading and I can take full advantage of that with no google account. In my opinion the idea of an ecosystem is a negative, i want the ability to not be locked in to any specific hardware or software vendor.

That's an awesome story. And it really goes against what a lot of people talk about online who often say linux is harder than windows but it's not unless you need windows or macos specific programs.

Kde works great for me, I don't have any special hardware. I have used it with fedora and bazzite.

After trying out many different app launchers on f-droid Kvaesito is what I found to be the best. Kvaesito is very good and is what I use it allows you to swipe down and eminently start searching for apps.

My biggest problem with it (and it's a big one) is ocasionally it will just freeze and stop working until I lock the phone and turn it on again. (maybe you won't have this problem just try it out)

Yeah for sure, what is a link agrigater?

Wait I did this to my main drive everything went black is this suposed to happen? will it start working again?

Welcome! I'm not as brave as you I'm still dual booting.

There are ways to send all of your internet traffic over tor. For example tails os does it by default.

And tor is definitely more secure than a vpn. Any VPN company can just log all your internet traffic and sell it if they want to. Compared to tor you will need to gain access to at least 2 nodes that the internet traffic goes through in order to get any mildly useful information, that is significantly harder than with a VPN.

Also I just wanna say arguments like these are so fun to read

I want to talk to people online but reddit is too yucky. Lemmy has a better community than reddit and it's not for proffit open source decentralized and all the other things that I love.

how do you change swappiness?

Yeah I have a samsung too it sucks that they have basicly no suport for custom roms unless you go with something really old like the galaxy s10.

I have used brave search which was really good I really liked the ai search although i moved away from it after seeing how bad google ai search was (saying things like its a good idea to eat rocks due to not being able to recognise satire) and I managed to get brave to do the same thing with a different onion article so i dont really trust any ai search now. At the moment I use searx it's incredibly private especially if you are willing to self host (I am not) and you have so much customisation you can use any search index so you don't have to worry about bad results.

Qwant also seams really good although I haven't tried it, same with ecosia especially if you like planting trees although I use an ad blocker so that doesn't work for me.

Imo there are so many great free browsers it's not really worth paying for a browser.

I also don't recommend duck duck since it used to have a tracking deal with Microsoft. It doesn't have it anymore but I think it's enough to lose faith in it.