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14 days agoI remember reading a lot this past year about Mozilla fretting about their market share and trying to figure out how to grow their user base. Did I hallucinate that? Cuz their actions lately appear to be driving users away. Are they taking notes from Google or is there some other MBA making these brilliant changes?
Well said! I really enjoyed reading this post. I’ve been interested in this topic for over 20 years but I feel like you delivered a bleeding edge analysis of the current state of affairs much better than anything else I’ve read. In particular, this post and the supporting docs crystallized the difference between privacy and security for me. I’m interested in both but had taken it for granted that enhancing privacy always benefitted security. Now I see how my own personal desire for control over my systems does involve some trade-off with security. There is a lot of food for thought here!
Unfortunately, I don’t appreciate any of the current options for a more secure desktop. I hate the direction Microsoft is taking Windows since 8.1. I’m familiar with the telemetry workarounds and found them to be volatile and fussy; it feels like I’m constantly swimming against the tide with them. And the new forced update paradigm is terrible. All too often their forced updates either remove functionality, control, or features, if not straight up break my system - worse than any Linux experience I’ve had. Not to mention forcing ads and “AI” into everything. Basically I don’t want to be an obligate beta tester or constantly manage workarounds for “features” I didn’t agree to. I could go on and on.
In my opinion, the Mac ecosystem is similarly terrible with respect to user control and transparency. I loved Mac back in the early 00s but since then I find them infuriating to use whenever I encounter a seemingly solvable problem. And I hate feeling trapped by a corporate ecosystem.
Google isn’t much different from the other two, with the additional issues of privacy violations, incompetent (if not hostile) leadership and anti-consumer behavior.
Qubes sounds problematic at best but I may explore secureblue. I had a terrible time with Fedora when I gave it a go last year. Trying to encrypt the boot drive with BTRFS and Snapper was apparently beyond my patience.
I’d love to see an Arch based distro take up the task of creating a security and privacy focused spin. And I eagerly await the day that Graphene works well on devices other than Pixels. That would be ideal to me.
I’ve saved your post and will be re-reading it. I would vote to make this a sticky for the near term, if that were a thing. Thank you!