Right, but still quite affordable compared to similar solution with Proton IMHO

Yeah, best combo for me too

You can try Frost, a web wrapper for Facebook: get in on F-Droid here.

You can also run it isolated using Shelter, another app on F-Droid, get it here.

Yep, update at night is good

Same for me, XFCE is light, stable and efficient. I believe that's the reason it's chosen for Debian as default DE

According to their Wiki, other Distros (including DE) are not supported/documented and if you do it's at your own risk. Personally, I wouldn't dare trying that.

Dell provides XPS laptop with Ubuntu on it. It works great and Ubuntu can be replaced with other distro ( I did successfully tested Mint and now Debian 11)

Own server but with very few things running on it...

Wow, great... Didn't know about needrestart

Works OK but makes your connection slow as hell... Not really useful for daily usage.

I don't think so, mostly it's hardening, and few security related software, all FOSS

But you'll need much more RAM, 8 GB is a bare minimum...

The kicksecure documentation is well written. Go here for distro-morphing of Debian 12, step by step things to do are pretty explicit and you can even copy the command lines if you think you'll make a mistake...

You have a link?

This is the best choice IMHO. You have a rock solid OS (Debian) and all possible taken measures to harden it with Kicksecure patch.

OpenBoard with gestures? Where? Version 1.4.5 has no gestures, and it's the last one... And three is no search feature for emoji, it's in the ToDo list

Windows... With this only word you already have all the abswers

TrackerControl is quite similar to NetGuard, but I find more user friendly and you have all features you need. Get the full version from F-Droid or from their Website.

For Nebulo, you can get it here, or F-droid, but the website gives you all useful info you need to know.

You're right for Pinta. Can't be 100% sure about Paint.NET to be fully open source but as it based on .NET it might be...

Well, GIMP is great but uneasy, not sure but Paint.NET on Windows is simpler but very user friendly and may be sufficient for your needs

Ans there's even no Chinese brands... Will be even much worse!

I do have TrackerConrrol + Nebulo, works like a charm

Agree to that, especially for video cards and Wi-Fi. These two can be hard to deal with... If your laptop is Wi-Fi only and you don't have a USB/Ethernet adaptor you may not be able to connect to the net at all

Yes, agree with you, especially your last comment: disable entirely IPv6

Hahaha... 😁

I honestly prefer to have Nebulo + TraclerControl combined. I never saw any ad on my mobile. Nebulo is great because it uses privacy-focused DNS server, while TrackerConrrol identifies and blocks any tracker as you want.

Buy popcorn and Walt for lawsuit...

Totally agree...

Same, Session is great because it focus on privacy. You can contact people only by knowing their public ID but you don't know their private ID which is used by the user to decrypt the messages. As there is no central server, nothing is kept outside of your local Session instance. Pretty decent to me.

Of course... I can't even picture myself not using a VPN, I prefer to ditch anything that prevent me to protect my privacy

Absolutely every website you visit or app you use, if they track such info of course.

Oh, very good points you mention here, definitively few red flags. As for the unusual traffic for your IP I experienced it because I'm using a VPN

I say Aegis... He he, great app

Can you tell us why Qwant wasn't a good choice for you? I heard they work hard on respecting privacy while providing good results... So I am curious about your experience

Not worse, but less repeatable. You don't see any difference in typing, it just help reduce fingerprinting

Keyboard is absolutely a thing to be careful with. On Android mobile, use OpenBoard for example. On computer, if you use Linux, also install kloak [https://github.com/Whonix/kloak], a tool that slightly delays randomly your keystrokes to help you hide your typing pattern that can definitively identify you

This is another reason why you should use a dedicated email for each service or account you use

The first rule of fight club is: don't use Facebook

It's important to distinguish privacy, anonimity and security.