This argument is so common that it has its own Wikipedia page.

And what else do we have for anonymous online payment? Gift cards are not available everywhere.

Rethink, for example. Also allows denying an app internet access, if your OS can’t do it by itself.

I also wonder what connections it normally makes and how many)

I wonder what happens if you deny the app internet access? The permission for it is separate from “nearby devices” or “location”. Or use the firewall specifically for it?

Also yeah, the whole situation is messed up, never thought headphones could require an app :/

I tried Vanadium when the install was fresh. The adblocking is just not that good… For example, on one of the sites it blocked the ads, but left out the giant HTML elements they used to be in.

I wonder if this can be removed at compile time, like Pocket.

Weird, conduit.rs links an entirely different Gitlab page - https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit, with the docs being at https://docs.conduit.rs/deploying/docker.html

I prefer Conduit instead of Synapse - it is lighter on resources.

I meant telemetry to Google and/or manufacturer. With grandma, I can at least install Linux on her laptop and say to message me there (that’s pretty much what I did with mom).

Yea, but a typical cellphone is not as easy to make private as a typical laptop or desktop. Lineage has some tradeoffs and not accessible on all devices, and Graphene needs even more specific, quite expensive hardware!

Did you have trouble setting up XFTP one? SMP was fine but XFTP seemed to have some error in the systemd settings provided in the manual.

I am suspicious of it because you pretty much cannot host a node. Well, you can - but you’d have to deposit an INSANE amount of money (like $2k or something). While Simplex, even though I do have a concern with its initial centralization by the power of default, is decidedly easy to selfhost.

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Signal is annoying to use if you don’t have a smartphone you can trust, since they do not allow registration from desktop. So either an Android VM or Signal-cli. But maybe it was just a one-off bug that the desktop client didn’t bind to signal-cli for me. Still, the fact that you need an unofficial command-line application just to register makes it not exactly user-friendly.

To be fair, pretty much all major XMPP clients have adopted OMEMO encryption, so doesn’t seem like much of an issue.

Effectively not encrypted, requires a smartphone, can be anal about bans, etc.

I don’t like physical copies. For convenience, I would be ripping it anyway, and then what? CDs and DVDs take up way too much space, then I would have to eiher throw a perfectly working disk away (which just feels bad) or bother selling it (which is not even guaranteed). I understand it if you’re into the collecting aspect, but I am personally not. If I was really set on paying for the media, I would rather go for a DRMless purchase. Or if it is not available, do it like with my Steam games - buy a DRMed copy and then pirate a DRMless one corresponding to it.

What settings presented most trouble to you, just curious?

Google and MS are the entities you’d definitely want to keep your data away from, no thanks. And Proton doesn’t work with normal mail clients, which is kind of a dealbreaker. I remember seeing a comparison chart somewhere with an assortment of other services.