I’ve not looked into anything yet… I’m reaching that age where I’ve just become closer to 50 than 40… and I find myself starting to become reluctant to dive in and learn a whole new OS after decades of trying to learn everything.

I started buying games on steam, way, way back in the 2000’s… long before any of the enshitification began… and you’re not allowed to own anything any more… I switched to GOG for buying games, as I do own them and can download and keep them for life… But after being converted away from… erm… acquiring games via alternative methods… I’m looking to acquire them again… even games that I bought and paid for simply for the hassle free experience of not needing to be online 24/7 and having DRM degrade the performance.

Have you tried using grayjay for youtube access without the tracking and data harvesting?

As for office software, libreoffice is something I’ve been using for ages now, I’m stuck on windows 10 for the moment… really need to dive into some form of linux… thinking proton as I do game a fair bit.

I’ve currently got a pixel 6 pro phone, and a HMD T21 tabelt… would really like to install lineage OS on both if possible… don’t know where to start. I used to have a wileyfox phone 10yrs ago, which used cyanogen OS… which I do believe forked into lineage OS. So I know how good the degoogle aspect was back then, plus the increased security measures built in.

I block as much as I can across all devices, and do my best to render what they can collect worthless… I use a VPN 24/7, block all scripts, trackers and cookies, sandbox sites in their own containers… quit facebook 13yrs ago… use mastodon, lemmy, signal & telegram only… have to suffer a whatsapp account for family only. Proton mail linked to an @duck.com email… so I never get emails sent to gmail, I use an old outlook email alias for spam signups and only check it if I need to confirm an email addy.

I’ve turned of everything I can with my phone, from location to anything to do with ai… I refuse to buy ‘smart’ devices that can be bricked or updated remotely from some company servers, or forced to connect to them to simply work… I own what I buy, so never buy digital goods (aside from some games from Steam/GOG) and only pay for Netflix streaming service… maybe I should roam the 7 seas for stuff too.

I’m thinking about building a pi-hole and setting up home assistant to eliminate the 2 internet connected devices in my home whjich is the thermostat for my heating and the solar/battery system which I use to monitor the data from the house.

In some countries you can, I believe Canada is one of them… at least I believe it’s legal to do so in Toronto.

I used Anonine (Sweden based) for 10yrs and never had a single problem visiting any site… I use a VPN 24/7 because I value my privacy and don’t want every fucker tracking my everymove and that includes my ISP.

Recently switched to Proton because streaming from legal sites like iplayer and netflix had become impossible unless it was turned off. Proton actually works with them.

Look… if you’re the sort of person who still uses chrome and thinks a vpn chrome extension is the bees knees… well… that’s on you.

P.S. Microsoft have the perfect tool for you too… it’s called ‘recall’