Thanks a lot for this. I’ve saved this comment as a resource to come back to later. Though from your reply I feel maybe you overestimate how experienced or knowledgable I am with this sort of stuff haha 😅. Any research I’ve done regarding this has come purely out of frustration at brands shoving ads down my throat and inconveniencing me in general. Or piracy. It’s not as though this stuff isn’t cool or interesting, I’m kind of just more motivated more by resolving inconvenience than a massive passion for software and programming. But what you mentioned sounds pretty cool and if I don’t find it too difficult I think I’ll try out a lot of what you mentioned. Also I understand the logic to decouple yourself from brands hoarding your data and tracking your activity, it is certainly a valid concern these days.

I meant to send you the link of gnu.org mb

Looking at the website this sounds really interesting, and I’ll definitely look into it more. It says this is separate from linux, I assume it’s similar? I’ve never properly used linux before as an OS, I’ve used WSL a few times running programs for downloading movies or anime or whatever, but I still needed to look up commands and follow directions from the github page. Like I was saying before I’m still very new regarding all this.

Firefox isn’t really a free browser in the sense of freedom

Well I know there’s tor browser and duckduckgo, I hear those are the most private and secure, but idk. I found tor was pretty slow for me and duckduckgo doesn’t have the same amenities google does (though maybe that’s changed nowadays, google has certainly gotten worse, but back in the day that was my main reason for not using it).

Ad-free =! private

I assumed so, I’m just not very knowledgable on which programs are better or worse regarding privacy. I use these because I just wanted to get rid of ads and those were the easiest and most popular options. Also it’s hard to know what to trust in terms of downloading programs, like one that’s popular is at least trustworthy enough that heaps of others downloaded it and survived lol.

so while something like gentoo will be considered hard, something like debian has a very easy process of downloading it on a flash drive

Yeah I think I used unbuntu or debain on WSL.

Have you tried torrenting?

No, I know a little about it but I usually just want to watch something without downloading it yk. So streaming it from some shitty soap2day clone or whatever is just a lot easier than going through a whole process. I know it’s irresponsible, but ublock blocks pretty much all of the malicious elements of those sites anyway, and will warn you before visiting anything potentially dangerous. And I have it set to always ask me before downloading smth, so on the off chance one of these sites tries to download some bullshit I’ll be able to stop it beforehand.

You can customize in settings.

I started using blorpblorp.xyz frontend, someone else told me that it’s not open source, but the layout/UI is so attractive like it’s basically exactly the same as the “new reddit” layout. And if blorp turned out to be keeping my lemmygrad account details it’s like a dumb reddit username and an auto-generated password so I doubt it would be very useful to them.

Anyway thanks again!