Not to shill for Apple or Google, but it’s definitely important to draw a distinction between first party telemetry and straight up distributing malware. If we can’t we honest in our framing then there is really no reason to take what we have to say seriously.

There are many reasons why you don’t want to do this. Flatpaks dont touch PATH, the sandboxing makes it difficult, and flathub doesn’t distribute CLI programs, being the main ones. So yes, it is technically possible, but so cumbersome as to be unfeasible. Snap on the other hand does implement a pretty frictionless method for running CLI snaps.

Again, you guys are making me defend snap, I’m not even an Ubuntu user. However, when you blindly state things that are incorrect, you denigrate your own position. This whole snaps are slavery echo chamber is extremely tedious. Its no different than people just parroting political opinions they saw on instagram. Use the best tool for the job. If that’s Ubuntu, great.

Roads are also a tool for drunk drivers.

See how silly that sounds?

Snaps run CLI programs. As a server operator, snaps are at times genuinely useful. This sub betrays itself as being mostly hobbyists by not understanding that flatpaks only work for GUI apps.

that is certainly a downside.

This is an objectively false statement. There are at least one scenario I can think of where Snap is better than flatpak.

Edit: You guys really don’t know what objectively better means huh.

Ubuntu is fine, people’s objection to it is largely ideological. For a band new user you probably wouldn’t notice. Ubuntu also has a more modern desktop than Mint, and a much larger user-base and therefore much more guides and support, though Mint is based on Ubuntu so it’s probably not that different.

The big thing with Ubuntu is that you are sort of at the behest of whatever Canonical want. They have a track record of pushing their own way of doing things and not really giving a damn whether or not users like it. The big one is Snap, their attempt at a universal app packaging pipeline which uses a proprietary backend. Snap does have some benefits over flatpak from an engineering standpoint, but many dislike them. If you feel ideologically opposed to Snap, just use Debian, it’s easy enough to install these days. It is also worth noting that Snap can be removed from a fresh install pretty easily.

Abolish Facebook

All of these morons are the same dumb assholes who 3 weeks ago wanted to rice their Arch installs to be as minimal as possible. Now they’re re rolling a vibe coded reskin for babies. These are some of the dumbest people alive

Funding for what? Some dotfiles? I literally don’t understand why forking Arch would require a third of a million dollars.

Changing PW managers is dead simple. Takes like 5 minutes. There are a handful of great OSS options.

I’m a little out of the loop I guess. Why do all these corpos care about this dork’s Arch reskin?

Invidious likely isn’t profiling you. If it worries you that much, you can stand up your own instance. It seems like a fun project.

That said, you absolutely don’t need to justify your desire for privacy here. I totally understand you. I’ve kind of landed on a “best effort” approach where I just try not to break shit but use as much privacy focuses stuff I can and check if my browser has a randomized fingerprint on EFF’s coveryourtracks.eff.org/, which you should visit. I use Helium and a small number of addons and that’s it.

Here’s the bottom line. You’re not going to be able to disappear on the internet without a massive and cumbersome effort which is not worth it relative to what I am gathering about your threat model. The very first thing you should do when considering privacy is 1. What you want to keep private and 2. Who you are trying to keep it private from. At the end of the day, you sound like me. I want to keep my browsing history and as much of my personal information as private as possible from data brokers, advertisers and my ISP. For that you need a layered approach. 1, VPN with no logs like mullvad. 2, Encrypted or at the very least recursive DNS resolver. 3, A somewhat randomized browser fingerprint. The last one is tricky because it’s actually just impossible. You can use stock librewolf to share your fingerprint with other users but imo that doesn’t work for my use case, as there are some pretty radical changes to the way I would have to use the internet, so I use Helium, which uses fingerprint farbling, and call it a day.

In the end, that works for me. It’s important to remember privacy is a spectrum. There is no such thing as total anonymity, everything you do to make yourself more private is productive and helpful. It’s about assessing your threat model and taking the correct steps, not trying to become a ghost, because that will drive you nuts and your internet browsing experience will be so degraded you might as well not even use it in the first place.

I started both around the same time. I switched careers from being a chef at a pretty high level. Started getting into systems and got engrossed in it. So the selfhosting was just an aspect of my education.

I’m glad that works for you.

In the words of that one guy from Casino: Why take a chance? A VPS is peace of mind for a cup of coffee a month. I like to be sure the things I need to keep safe have as many opportunities to remain that way as possible.

You should not host anything that’s going to be public facing on your home network in 2026, period. Get a cheap German VPS and go nuts with it. There’s simply too much at stake opening up your home router/firewall for such little gain. Plus, being a residential IP behind NAT might just make it straight up impossible.

I host my own email and a matrix server. I would never think of exposing my home network to the internet. I use tailscale to get into the homelab, anything exposed to the net lives somewhere far, far away.

I use netcup for my email and matrix. It’s extremely reasonable.

All it will take is for the reverse uno card to be implemented at a large enough scale against proprietary software before companies throw a pissy fit and this will all go away. Alternatively GPL could stipulate that AI implementation would trigger copyleft protections.

This whole thing is stupid and in such bad faith. Maliciously clean room engineering open source software just to get around pesky licensing issues will cause so many more problems for these morons that already leech off the hard work of open source devs anyways. They literally have a steady stream of free software and all they have to do is NOT steal it. That’s it. Just don’t be a fucking evil goon, that’s the only stipulation. They’re shooting themselves in the foot so hard.

But no, having free access to the hard work of others isn’t enough, they have to hoard it for themselves, like everything else in this deeply rotten civilization.

They will nuke your account after 14-30 days if you don’t comply.

Thanks for taking the time to share that with me. I am no Zionist. However, I do pose the question, because of Red Hat’s stewardship of Fedora, do you believe that makes Fedora morally compromised? Because Red Hat develops systemd, does that mean all Linux distros that use it are thusly compromised as well? ARPANET, the technology that the modern internet stems from, was developed directly by the US Deprtment of Defense. Can a leftist then morally use the internet? I don’t mean this as a sarcastic strawman but as a genuine question in good faith. I myself don’t have an answer, probably a bit yes and a bit no. I will point out the distinction that while Fedora doesn’t have control of what Red Hat does or does not to, it does have direct control over whether or not to implement these age verification laws in question.

What about a distro like Universal Blue, which is directly downstream of Fedora but not affiliated with it organizationally? Where do we draw the line between consent and simple happenstance? Everything is connected to a Nazi, a Zionist or colonialism if you dig deep enough, we live in capitalist hell-world, it’s the foundation of our very society. Consent is implied an in many cases, unavoidable.

That being said you have given me quite a bit to think about and if anything have solidified my decision to move away from Fedora. I hope you don’t interpret my response as adversarial in any way like others who have responded to my post. Cheers