The most important part is balancing your own safety with limited time and resources. Perfection is not achievable, getting as close as you can is not practical in most cases, and prioritizing safety a lot of times limits what you’re able to do. So you need to do a cost/benefit analysis on these sort of solutions and decide whether they’re worth doing, which is very contextual (and in the end, you’re going to need to trust something somewhere unless you reinvent everything on your own).

For instance, in the US if you’re a middle class cishet white male citizen who ignores politics, you’re biggest problem is probably ads, companies knowing your financial info, and tools being more locked down, so the reasonable response would be to use an ad blocker and switch to open source/self-hosted software when it’s convenient, but not to the point where you have to program all sorts of things yourself unless you really enjoy that. If you’re working class, time and finances is more limited so the extent to which self-hosting, paid services, and CLI tooling becomes impractical might be sooner. If you’re a minority, there’s not really much that can be done that doesn’t severely affect quality of life (like living in the middle of the woods with no technology if you know you’re being hunted by the government, which sounds fucking terrible but probably better than being sent to a concentration camp in a remote country). If you’re an activist or an immigrant or doing something illegal, compartmentalizing data that would probably get you in trouble onto devices (that you can afford) with a strong security setup that doesn’t touch anything else you own and doesn’t cross borders while verifying that the people you communicate with are also on a similar setup and doing other “paranoid” security/privacy measures (while being careful not to draw suspicions) is probably a good idea. If you’re trying to be private for the sake of advocating for privacy, then do what you want to do.

The point is to protect national interests, not reject free contributions from normal people for non-security critical but useful software projects which is just idiotic

Proceeds to use open source tooling with numerous contributions from US-based software developers

How the fuck is banning people in certain countries for something they don’t have control over from contributing to small projects like this doing anything but shooting the FOSS ecosystem, which already has a severe shortage of developers, in the foot?

By your logic developers in the US shouldn’t be allowed to contribute to free software either, after all the US is committing genocides and threatening to invade other countries

Personally I use a Guix template I made (Typst, LaTeX) which downloads necessary software/libraries and the LSP and pins the software versions, and I use the Helix text editor for editing. Not sure what the more common methods are. Also Typst’s package management is weird.

If you’re a nerd, also check out Typst and LaTeX. Being able to format your documents with pure code is awesome, and you can also define functions for different things, import libraries to generate graphs, and write comments that don’t show up in the document.

it increases your chances of getting accidentally added to confidential group chats

Street Complete lets you walk around and answer questions that go to OSM

Fedora Asahi Remix. Considering how the M1 has no official Linux support, it’s impressive that it runs as well as it does, and they have compatibility hacks to run Steam games and get Widevine to work. There’s still a lot of rough edges however, like no microphone (should be coming out soon though) or fingerprint, aarch64 software support is second class and tends to have more frequent bugs (cough Electron cough) that get ignored by package maintainers and some (even FOSS) software isn’t supported, I don’t think high refresh rate is supported yet, full disk encryption isn’t supported (but there’s blog articles from people who figured out how to set it up), limited distro options, worse power efficiency so gets hot faster (just got a cooling pad to deal with this, get a Pro if you can so you have a fan) and battery life is barely different than what I’ve heard from Framework users so there’s not really much to gain atm. Currently only supports M1 and to a lesser extent M2, and also the fact that you’re dual booting makes the soldered overpriced SSD space even more limiting.

As far as distro support goes, Fedora Workstation is the only distro that has official support. There’s other options with community support but there’s a higher likelihood of stuff being outdated or not packaged (i.e. Arch Linux ARM doesn’t have the same level of community support as normal Arch Linux). I haven’t tried NixOS or Guix System on M1, but I use Nix/Guix on the Fedora install. aarch64 Guix packages keep breaking making it annoying to update and issues tend to be ignored (also certain core packages don’t like the tmpfs 16k page size so you need to make it use /var/tmp instead), aarch64 Nix is a lot better but support is still slow to where Signal is several versions behind and has been broken for weeks despite there being multiple pull requests with fixes, and both Nix/Guix prioritize x86 over aarch64 for builds so it will need to compile a lot of things from source.

Agreed. I got the 16/512 (max specs) M1 Air for a decent price for the performance and battery life, and I currently run Linux on it, but I’m constantly bottlenecking both the RAM and SSD and it sucks that I can’t upgrade it, will probably get a Framework when it dies

Great battery life on macOS, although turns out a lot of it involves software-related optimizations since with Asahi Linux it’s barely better than x86

Alternatively they could decompile it

This happened to a bunch of people yesterday, I ended up being one of them and my feed turned into absolute insanity, now it’s back to shitposts

Probably because it has an algorithm

Stuff like this is why I’m nervous to take any medications for my mental health

The CEO has shitty stances on certain things but everything is basically a frontend to Google/Bing/Brave which are all also shitty so the entire search engine market is fucked from an ethical perspective

Kagi isn’t privacy focused but it doesn’t use your data for ads either. The main benefit is good search quality and more control over the search results.

If you slam on the brakes it makes the ad extra large

I use the FairEmail client