Nothing suggests that WhatsApp’s encryption protocol has been broken or that Meta can read the contents of your conversations.

Nothing prevents them from reading the messages prior to encryption or after decryption.

Domain registration information is public and accessible via whois. If your domain registrar has privacy services use them. They usually mean that instead of your name etc it will display the info of the privacy proxy.

Try https://flathub.org/en/apps/me.iepure.devtoolbox

The annoyance is no notifications

Not true. I have GrapheneOS with no Google blobs in a profile where I have Signal from play store (via Aurora) and notifications work perfectly. Signal itself will turn on the no google mode for notifications if not available.

They were already losing before MS bought them.

Try Flatseal.

You should be able to do it in all androids.

Personally, I absolutely hate the /e/OS launcher. It reminds me too much of iOS. And I honestly hate it.

You can install whatever launcher you want. No need to stay on the default (don’t like it either). One of my old phones has /e/os and I’m using Zim Launcher.

Arbitration typically tends not to be as neutral as a court. A court will always look how laws apply in a particular case. Arbitration may not do that. Arbitration takes power away from the consumer. Arbitration is not a court of law. It’s a dispute between an individual and a company. Don’t know how things are in Switzerland in this regard but I fear that it’s not as neutral as a court of law would be. Especially as the arbitrator is pre selected by the company.

Also in their TOS “No Class Arbitrations, Class Actions or Representative Actions.” i.e. if the company would screw over dozens of people they can only complain one by one even if they are all the same case. If a class action or class arbitration could occur the company screwing over dozens of people it could be viewed as a whole hence it might be determined that what they are doing is systematic, and if it would be in court it could be seen as illegal.

Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer or any kind of legal expert.

In their TOS: “XVII. Dispute resolution by arbitration”

“Binding Arbitration. – you – waive your and NYM’s respective rights to have any and all Disputes arising from or related to these T&Cs resolved in a court.”

A big red flag.

Couple of additions:

• translate -> deepL (AI based with a free tier (no account required)), or for websites FireFox has a builtin offline translation tool
• drive -> Filen (Zero knowledge, E2EE)
• search -> Kagi (paid), or one of the listed

Also check the Fossify apps.

Also Aurora store. It’s just a front-end to play store. One should also ditch all chromium based browsers for couple of reasons

1. Chromium is fully controlled by google
2. It enforces mono-culture in web browsers (it’s the internet explorer of $currentYear).

Haven’t used those but probably pretty similar.

Use Gparted boot disk. It’s a nice GUI program. It can resize partitions on the fly with data on them. It will move data within a partition if needed. I have successfully used it on XFS and BTRFS, YMMV. The usual advice of backup anything important is valid.

Tumbleweed. Stable rolling release distro.

You are completely missing the point here. You replied to OPs comment about licensing with a comment about incompatibilities in code. My comment was about licensing.

If anything, based on the article and your post all I noticed is ‘how disgusting people many GPL proponents are.’

If wanting to keep FOSS as FOSS is disgusting to you why are you in this community in the first place?

Edit: Not once did I mention whether or not I agree with the posted article or the OP.

Your criticism omits the passages about usage of the MIT license over the GPL (the ones I quoted in the post).

I’ve addressed it:

  Why are you so sure that there will be incompatibilities? The stated goal of the project uutils is ‘to be a drop-in replacement for the GNU utils’ and ‘differences with GNU are treated as bugs’.

You did not address it. Possible incompatibilities in code level is completely different thing then releasing them with a not copyleft license. MIT license allows that a closed sourced version can be created that could, in theory, be used to replace the MIT licensed versions in what ever distro uses them. Copyleft licenses, like the GNU GPL, don’t allow this. Recreating a well established and used core utilities, in whatever language, as a replacement to use, at first, in your distro and licensing them with a permissive license undermines the whole purpose of FOSS.

A fascist state.

FOSS developers don’t develop distros. Distro maintainers package that software into distros. Linux, KDE, GNOME, systemd, GNU software etc are just single pieces of the puzzle developed individually.

The distro is closer to the old proprietary OS. So the enduser just has to learn other “new” software, the OS doesnt demand a learning curve but just replicates the Win/Mac experience.

There’s always a learning curve with new things (software or otherwise). In case of Win why would we want to go back in time in usability? E.g. Cinnamon and KDE are far superior in UX compared to Windows. Also in Linux distros you can actually fix problems unlike in windows.

I’ve been using Linux as a daily driver since 2018 (thanks Valve and Proton) and in my experience things just work (if they are supported) and thing like headset don’t just randomly stop working because reasons unlike in windows. In windows you then run some troubleshooter that can’t fix it, reboot several times while praying to whatever gods you like and hope for the best. If that doesn’t help you start searching online and only find vague instructions that might help but no solutions.

Missing software compatibility

What compatibility? If user insists on running some windows only software it’s expected to run into problems.

the need to fall back on the commandline are just some of the problems.

So? Even windows and macOS has a command line. It’s easier to help with problems if you instruct them to run some command (though running random commands of the web is not really a good idea security wise) then trying to navigate them to some gui which might not exist in their distro. Even in windows users are told to run commands in the command line to try and fix problems e.g. sfc /scannow and dism <whatever>.

Now you are thinking: But just install Linux Mint and they probably do most of the things in their Browser anyways.

In AD 2025 this is true in most cases. People just use social media, some webmail, youtube, read news etc. The OS is just there to start the web browser.