Basically, you don’t want everything be dependant on a central authority - this is a single point of failure. If there’s a big security vulnerability in your web browser, but you use a standalone mail client, your mails are most probably safe.
This also adds up to built-in adblocker - who knows if Vivaldi devs will ever go evil and sneak in exceptions in their adblocker? Or if they will sell their web browser, just like their CEO done so with his previous browser, Opera.
You can add UBo filters to block instances
Also OP post is about privacy not bloat
OP is concerned about Pocket integration too, so I assumed they may not like it.
these features will only improve your privacy over using some webmail.
Does their built-in mail support any good encryption? The last time I used Vivaldi a mail feature wasn’t really that private. Also, using dedicated email client like claws or mutt is even better from privacy perspective.
All google stuff is either removed or toggleable from settings.
They can’t remove Manifest V3 though.
What’s wrong with that? It’s a good deal larger than mozilla’s
Yes, and it’s under Google’s control. And, again when I used it last time, you need to enable some google stuff to install extensions from the store.
I am thinking of moving to Epiphany (gnome-web) some day, but I may start missing the vim-like interaction with qutebrowser.
There’s a WebKitGTK-based web browser called Luakit. Pretty good from my experience, although webkit can be problematic at times.
Yep, also they don’t integrate Pocket in the browser, they just have a built-in email client, note-taking software, RSS reader, calendar bloat. Also, Vivaldi is based on chromium (as such subsribed to all Google’s bullshit), and uses Chrome extension store.
Honestly, OP, just stick to Librewolf, it’s privacy-respecting and actually open-source, pocket’s disabled, UBo’s preinstalled.
Fluxbox or IceWM as a more standard, familiar floating WMs (both are pretty customizable too).
WindowMaker is my goto for standalone window managers, it’s look based on NeXTSTeP OS from 90s, so it doesn’t look like yet another ripoff from windows or macos (both are ugly IMHO), so it’s pretty unique.
If you want minimal and keyboard-oriented, cwm is THE wm for you. The main problem is that default keyboard shortcuts are really bad (openbsd fanatics will say otherways, but when shortcuts are spread around ctrl+, alt+, and ctrl+alt+, it’s really far from good), so I recommend tweak them or to find someone’s config.
If you want a desktop-agnostic file manager for these wms, I’d recommend xfe - it’s somewhat obscure for some reason, but it’s really, really good. Can’t recommend more.
As to install, all of these should be in your distro’s repo. Fluxbox may come as two packages (fluxbox2 and fluxbox3), the first one is the last official version and the second is the “community edition” - a fork, basically.
At least on Void Window Maker package is called WindowMaker, with capitalisation. Since Void sticks to official naming, other distros may have the same name.
edit: Also, it’s worth to mention most of recommendation on this thread are tiling window managers (awesomewm, i3, hyprland, etc.)
Do you want a tiling or a stacking wm?
I’m not really into security-focused distros, but heard good things about QubesOS. Also, what about OpenBSD?
if there will be some exceptions.
lemmy.world and mastodon.social decided not to defederate threads.
It may speed up your boot time, at least it happened to me on Void (maybe the reason is how minimal this distro is though). I personally prefer runit over systemd in how it handles services, but honestly you most probably won’t notice a much difference - definetely not worth reinstalling whole system.
Ubuntu fonts works pretty good for me as a general UI font tbh. In text editors I prefer mononoki over monospace, it’s a bit prettier IMO, although in terminal I use terminus because pixel fonts are cool.
I’m not sure how this hypothetical issue that may happen in a far future relates to what issue I addressed in my comment, actually.
By ‘sane blocklists’ I meant small and auditable blocklists actually. There are instances like programming.dev, lemmy on sdf and the instance I’m on that don’t preemptively defederate from other instances. That’s what I meant.
things get complicated when there is defederation involved
More of that, only comments from instances defederated by your instance won’t be shown.
I can imagine whitelisting to become more popular as Lemmy user base grows and communities become more suitable for lurkers and non-techies who know nothing about federation.
Data for your instance: https://defed.xyz/check/eviltoast.org
It’s such a contrast seeing blank blocklist after using Beehaw and blahaj honestly. Small instances are so much better tbh. And this tool is great, thanks! I hope we’ll figure out how to get a list of blocked communities somehow. This lack of transparency is so annoying.
We can compose a list of instances with sane blocklists for each software and audit from time to time.
I don’t mind big blocklists honestly, the problem with auditing is purely on a UX side - if we would have a way to sort/filter isntances by software and have some kind of grouping (“all of these instances are on a list of badies”), it wouldn’t be such a problem.
What’s really a problem is whitelisting. It’s proactively punishing those who use small/personal instances, and not federating is much easier than defederating, so it’ll more probably be abused by admins.
Tags would be so good for Lemmy actually. Instead of creating new extremely specialized community we could use tags to help those who want this kind of content find it in a less focused community, preventing segregation of small Lemmy user base. And when certain tag gets enough traction we would create a community for it.
Instead we have sorting mechanisms that actively punish small communities and big communities mostly driven by news (e.g. c/technology).
Oh, I see. Yeah, it’s fixed now.
I think the problem in this case isn’t freedom of speech, but the ability to scream so loud that other voices can’t reach the audience. Corpos and governments use their already established influence to control narrative.