Just commenting this for those that may think free software is referring to price.
Free software is diametrically opposed to proprietary software, and not paid software.
Free software is free in terms of libre, not necessarily gratis. And there are corporations and individual contributors to free software that do charge for their product and maintenance of it.
In terms of telemetry, free software has the advantage over the proprietary counterpart.
It’s a lot more complicated to hide telemetry without the user knowing in free software.
You could always use a network tool, like iftop, to see network traffic on your PC. That could be a way too see if a program is phoning home. But you’ll probably want to use a suite of tools.
I’m not familiar with e/OS/ but fairphone recently released their phone to the US market with this OS preinstalled.
I think people often mix up capitalism with market-based economies. The former describes social relations while the former describes how commodities are distributed.
I’m personally not a fan of either. A planned economy geared toward people’s need, with the withering away of socio-ecomic classes (no more worker and capitalist distriction) just makes better sense to me.
If your on a budget, an older Thinkpad is a good choice. I picked up a X220 with a charger and spare battery off of Craiglist a year ago for $60.
Ended up going with Coreboot with a SeaBIOS payload and Debian OS.
It’s weird how upset people are getting over memes about sync. It’s a shame because the memes are pretty funny.
None of the FOSS advocates actually care that you use Sync unless they’re going to your house and uninstalling it when your not looking.
And there’s a lot of misconceptions about free software. Free Software is opposed to proprietary software, not paid software. All projects, whether free or proprietary require compensation of some kind, or else they wouldn’t exist.
There is a legitimate debate around if proprietary software is ethical. The whole existence of the free software movement is because the proponents of it saw proprietary software as unethical.