QubesOS. When you need security and don’t need to play games, this is objectively the best distro.

NixOS for me. It’s a package manager (a very nice, declarative one) that you can use on any Linux (or Mac), and there’s also an entire distro based on it.

I block meme communities and AI art. I’ll unblock AI art once the machines figure out how fingers work. I don’t block porn except when it’s outside of my interests (I’m not into men or furries, for example).

You might consider unblocking the meta communities - it can sometimes be illuminating to see how other places are run, and give you ideas to improve your own instance.

We don’t have downvotes on my instance, and it’s an amazing difference. I recommend it!

I generally just upvote everything I like, no real thought process involved.

I’ve been avoiding Amazon since 2010. No regrets. They crave your time, money, and attention, and they deserve none of those. (Same with Meta.)

The article that changed your mind really shouldn’t have. It’s mostly full of hyperbole. Like this:

“PGP does a mediocre job of signing things, a relatively poor job of encrypting them with passwords, and a pretty bad job of encrypting them with public keys. PGP is not an especially good way to securely transfer a file. It’s a clunky way to sign packages. It’s not great at protecting backups. It’s a downright dangerous way to converse in secure messages.”

Literally none of this is true - the author is presenting their particular opinions as general fact. I use AES through PGP, knowing that even future quantum computers can’t break it.

I wish they’d cut out all the 90’s references and pointless exaggerations, and stuck to facts. Then again, the facts-only version of this article probably wouldn’t make a strong case against PGP.

(Also, one of the links in the article, with the dodgy-and-harmful link text “Full disk encryption isn’t great”, includes advice to use PGP in it. Maybe the author should have read the references they were citing.)

Mercurial is worth trying, and you can use it as a client to Git too! Just be aware that Mercurial’s branching is not the same - but if you use Mercurial’s “bookmarks”, they’re actually compatible with Git branches.

As someone who routinely watches YT through Invidious and NewPipe, I haven’t changed my habits.

The Electoral College.

People need and want various levels of abstraction, type system control, and even just syntaxes. In these cases, it’s easier to switch languages - or make one - than to implement a solution in a language that would fight against your needs.