I do. I like it. I don’t think it tries to fill the same niche as Arch, as a former Arch daily driver.

I had that happen once, but I found that it worked with duckduckgo’s email aliases forwarded to my own domain’s email.

fwiw, the latest pixels have 7 years of support which should be long enough to cover the phone till it breaks. But yeah, I’m with you about the e-waste, it’s awful for the environment to have to throw away a perfectly usable phone because of a lack of security updates.

Linux phones definitely are a thing, but depending on your threat model, they may not be enough. There isn’t a smartphone which is 100% open-source from all hardware, to firmware, to software. But there’s a variety of phones that are known to run Linux. The Google Pixel 3a is known for working very well with Ubuntu Touch. There’s also the PinePhone, Purism phones, and there will be others too that support “desktop Linux” (specified for pedantry, since Android is also a type of Linux I guess).

You also don’t need a smartphone. They do still sell “dumb mobile phones” that just do SMS and phone calls; I’ve bought some recently. You can get them for really cheap too, like in the range of 20 USD/EUR kind of price. I don’t think that particularly contributes to privacy since these phones are also proprietary and easily backdoored, but I suppose then it’s missing out on much of the spyware that smartphones have installed as software. If it’s location data you’re worried about, sticking it in a faraday cage should be good enough, but if you need to receive unexpected calls that won’t work. If you’re paranoid about the mic recording, while I think that would be an unlikely and unfeasible way of spying, you could also physically block that by putting the phone in something soundproof, but again you’d need some way to hear that the phone is ringing. For camera paranoia just tape over the camera.

You mean getting a privacy-respecting phone? You could get a Pixel with GrapheneOS as one of the most popular options. There are also a number of OSes and phone manufacturers competing in the privacy-concerned market you could look into. Note that privacy is not the same thing as security, and for security, GrapheneOS is the clear winner.

Use end-to-end encrypted email if the people you’re emailing are willing to set that up (not hard, but a lot of people have learned helplessness when it comes to tech), and/or you could host your own email. I don’t think there’s much point to looking for an email provider that “respects privacy” because that’s simply working on a pinkie promise that they don’t read your unencrypted emails. I suppose it’s better if they claim they don’t read your emails, than if they don’t make that claim at all, but beyond that I don’t think it matters with external email providers.

I don’t know of FOSS “one-stop-shops” but these services should have APIs you can use and write scripts to mass-delete. It wouldn’t be particularly hard or time-consuming, and you can also publish your scripts so other people can use them instead of writing your own.

I guess you could keep your phone in a faraday bag and take it out when you need to make a payment. But then you’d be liable to be charged any time you have your phone out, unless you go out of your way to remove the card from the case, which defeats the point.

Once got a wrong number text from a human on Signal but that’s it

The reason why Fairphone charges so much is because their selling point is ethics, and they claim they put sustainability of raw materials and fair pay for workers first. Whether or not they check that goal, companies like Google, Apple, etc definitely keep their prices low by paying workers in the global south pennies.

Last 4 or so phones have all been GrapheneOS (I’m not buying new phones all the time to be clear; I use phones till they break; I’m just a long-time user) and yeah I’ve really had no problems to speak of. I currently have a separate profile with Play services for certain apps, and also just to isolate non-privacy-respecting apps that I have to have installed for whatever reason.

Almost all the apps I use are FOSS apps who are aware that a significant amount of their userbase will be using various AOSP forks so I’ve not run into any app compatibility issues. Even back when I used banking apps, I’d used 4 different banks’ apps on GrapheneOS and all of them worked completely fine. Now I don’t have a banking app because I won’t install proprietary software unless I actually have to for some reason, and I can bank on the web just fine.

“datum” is the singular, but you’re right that it’s not really grammatically plural since you’d say “the data was stolen” not “the data were stolen”. I think the latter would technically also be valid; my interpretation would be that the latter is “countable” plural, so there are specific discrete datums that were stolen.

I think “couldn’t get past partitioning the drive” means they managed to partition the drive but couldn’t get beyond it ie couldn’t do any more after that.

Almost no one using Windows installed it.

I think Windows installs are really common, at least going off of the size of online gaming communities who generally build their own PCs.

You do not risk going to jail, come on lol. People are so dramatic about doing the most minor unenforced crimes I swear

Which one are you calling fringe? These are all popular distros, with the exception of maybe Gentoo but that’s still very well known even if not that many people daily drive it. Also still makes sense in this context to include a well known distro that’s also known for being relatively hard to install

Really? Never installed win11 but I remember win10 installs being similarly straightforward to e.g. a calamares install or something like that.

Unless law enforcement is out to get ya

Seems like a huge oversight in privacy communities, which are frequented by people with state actor level threat models.