I was pretty neutral towards Ubuntu, up until an automatic system update removed my deb Firefox and replaced it with the snap version, even though I specifically set the apt repo to a higher priority.

The entire reason I left Windows is because I don’t want (for example) Edge shoved down my throat after every update, and yet Ubuntu has gone and done the exact same thing with snaps.

After literal hours of fighting, the only solution I found was to fully disable automatic updates. With Pop OS I have all the benefits of Ubuntu, but I also get a company (System76) that does cool stuff and doesn’t try shoving snaps down my throat.

Magic Earth (while not FOSS, it’s privacy oriented though) can do this.

There’s also Transportr, but AFAIK it’s been unmaintained for quite a while now, so it may not work / stop working soon.

Adding to what others here have already said, I’d definitely download Signal and see if you can get any people to move from WhatsApp/Telegram/whatever to Signal.

I don’t know much about iOS apps, but you could look into more privacy focused YouTube clients, and possibly 2FA clients too (although that’s a bit of a controversial topic on iOS AFAIK).

I saw you mention in another comment that you use Amazon Alexa for smart home appliances. Depending on interest in selfhosting / time / motivation to move away from Amazon, you could look into using Home Assistant instead. It even has a Lemmy community: !homeassistant@lemmy.world.

Yep my mistake, I confused ShadowSocks with Cloak.

I’m afraid your best bet here will be using WhatsApp.

Edit:
FindMy (for Android) might also be usable for that, but honestly if you just want it to work I’d still vouch for WhatsApp.

Signal supports a single momentary position, but not live location.

What worked for me at my old school was using a ShadowSocks proxy. Basically what this does, is it takes all your traffic and just makes it look like random https traffic (AFAIK). ShadowSocks is just a proxy. The description fits the Cloak module, mentioned below.

I believe multiple VPNs support this, for me with PIA VPN it’s in the settings under the name “Multi-Hop” (PIA only supports this on the Desktop App, not on mobile).

This technique is pretty much impossible to block, unless you ban every single VPN ShadowSocks Proxy IP. If that is the case for you (chances are practically 0), you could also selfhost ShadowSocks in combination with the Cloak module, however this method is a lot more complicated.

Push Notifications don’t really exist for Lemmy yet, as they aren’t supported in the backend currently:

https://github.com/aeharding/voyager/issues/1027 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2631

As someone else here said, your best bet is probably monitoring your Inbox RSS feed.

Quite a few cars also still have a SIM card hidden somewhere, which can be removed. The location of it varies widely though and they’re usually pretty hard to find.

That’s incorrect, Graphene OS has Android Auto support.

I was very disappointed with the (default) Camera after switching to Graphene, luckily you can just download the Pixel Camera (including all the Pixel optimizations) from Play Store on Graphene OS or download it as an APK bundle from some other sites (downloading the normal APK won’t work, it has to be the bundle).

I significantly prefer it for car navigation, it seems to always pick ‘more sensible’ routes than Organic Maps. Also the live traffic is very nice to have.

I prefer Organic Maps when I’m on foot, ie. walking through the city or hiking. Imo it feels less cluttered when you just want to look at a map.

Edit: Another big plus for Magic Earth is transit support. It’s not as good as Google Maps, but it’s certainly better than nothing.

While not FOSS, the closest thing we have to a drop-in replacement would be Magic Earth. It uses openstreetmap data, supports fully offline usage, has satellite images (only online though) and best of all, no tracking or telemetry.

You could use OBS to setup a virtual webcam, which would then show your receipts.

We always freeze all our bread, we don’t eat it fast enough for it to not go bad (is this a weird take??).

But yeah thawing bread in the microwave is roughhhh, we either use a toaster or just let it thaw at room temperature.

Damn even though you explained the abbreviation I still read it as Wife Approval Factor for a second and was very confused

I use Bromite on Android whenever Firefox mobile decides to die