Bestie Brave is literally just Chromium again. Not to mention the fact that their CEO is someone who got ousted from Firefox for being a tremendous bigot. It's not a better alternative to Chrome, it's just the same thing again. It you must use a chromium browser, use ungoogled.
Grats on Arch Linux install, S-tier distro for what it attempts to accomplish.
It feels like there needs to be a category in between conservative and paranoid. I'm probably 90% of the way over to tech paranoid but using Tor Browser and Tails is a little much.
Mullvad browser is a fairly new Firefox fork which aims to reduce fingerprinting potential while also having sane (paranoid) defaults. Developed with the Tor project. Basically the Tor browser but without connecting to the Tor network. Passes coveryourtracks.eff.org.
SimpleX Chat is a fairly new privacy oriented IM platform which seems to address many issues current ones have. Development is very active. E2E, video and voice calls, decentralized, doesn’t have user ID of any kind.
The fact that the favorite OS of the tech conservative is an Arch based distro and and a Debian based distro instead of pure Arch or Debian makes this meme inaccurate.
Tech paranoid all the way, although not the same type of tech paranoid as Luke Smith. The only good computer is one you have the hardware schematics to (i.e. virtually none of them). Thinkpads are just another brand of overpriced laptop. Besides the occasional steam game, I heavily prefer FOSS only and will flat out refuse almost anything that has drm. My unlocked bootloader android phone is so heavily locked down with privacy stuff that I cause Google to lose money merely by existing.
I fit somewhere between normie and conservative. Philosophically, I agree with the tech conservative, but I also have shit to do and when FOSS gets in my way, it's hard to justify it.
I use Firefox because it was an easy switch.
I used Signal until they killed sms support. Sorry, most of the people I know use a default messages app. And the day I force everyone I know to use Signal is the day they stop talking to me.
I dabble in Linux, but I main Windows because I'm not a programmer or IT admin. I know how to use it, for better or worse, and I don't have to memorize terminal commands to perform even basic tasks. Sure, gaming is getting better on linux, but it's still a compromised experience and I still, to this day, have to look up tutorials and terminal command every time I try to do anything on my Linux box.
But...wherever possible, I use FOSS software.
I like to call it the tech pragmatist. I agree with the conservative, but I'm not that smart and I got shit to do.
Wish I could just ditch Windows and Whatsapp for something else....... I've tried Linux but every time I quickly wanted to do something it first took me 30/40 minutes to get it working :'( was driving me insane after the cool factor of daily driving Linux went away
I'm a software engineer that uses windows and firefox, has no social media accounts (minus message boards), and owns a google pixel. Be confused. You can't stop me.
I watched one HTML video 5 years ago, and now I'm using a De-Googled phone, Linux, and get a more paranoid than I should when I see and Echo Dot. This is not what I signed up for...
Weird to put the Self Hosted podcast on the FOSS-only Gentoo user seeing that Jupiter Broadcasting has been on the contrarian "Red Hat is actually good" train.
Oh god, this meme. It's not something I've ever seen before, but it's so true.
God, Tor, freaking Tor. Bless it's heart, really, but it's practically unusable. At least for me. I was really getting into it, trying to use it as a daily browser, ran with so much less ram than all the others. But it's practically unusable! All the shitty websites I had to go on daily for School practically didn't work, and half the websites would always take at least 10-15 minutes to get working because they keep thinking I'm a hacker. Or it's just region blocked, and I have to spend SO MUCH TIME making new connections in the hopes it doesn't go to a single blacklisted country. Sometimes even with a phone there to authenticate, it just doesn't work. So I had Firefox anyway, it was literally what Tor was built off of. And because of how unbelievably inconvenient and annoying Tor (Or more accurately, how shitty the Internet in general has got, I really wouldn't mind logging in to every website every time, with a phone authentication every so often) was, I ended up just using Firefox and using Tor for dark web stuff. Essentially, what it's supposed to be used for.
Linux...man, Linux was always one of those things I wanted to get into, but thinking critically, it would be very dumb for me to do. Almost every single thing I do is required by a Windows app. Critical and niche shit, mind you. So essentially, it'd be the Tor situation all over again. I'd be doing effectively everything worthless on Linux while molesting my computer for a VM for windows, which I would be doing on a daily basis for practically as long as I use the computer. So I'm practically stuck being a normie. I try to do everything I can to stop all these companies and shit tracking me and have my machine running faster, like running scripts to debloat windows, but in the end, it doesn't amount to too much. I'm stuck a normie, no matter how much of a poser I act.
I feel like WhatsApp should be in the middle. The app is terrible, but the messaging is actually encrypted. We paranoids also appreciate Signal, and Element disappointingly gets no play here.
Also:
*believes not every company is inherently evil*
It's kind of weird, then, how they all end up doing evil stuff, including the guys that explicitly set out with the philosophy "don't be evil".
We can all tell conservative is supposed to be the enlightened one, but unless the creator is using a very malice-driven definition of evil (as opposed to including accidental evil) this line is an own-goal.
I self-host my stuff because it's cheaper, I run Gentoo since the last 15 years and use Chrome because it's just better and friendly. I also have a Xperia android phone and really, really don't like MKBHD.
I guess I am a cross between “Normie” and “Conservative”. I use macOS and Fedora daily, I watch MKBHD but also watch FOSS YouTubers. I use WhatsApp, but only because, in Netherlands, it’s impossible to live without it. I don’t use any Chromium, and I use Firefox, but I also use Safari.
Tech conservative, apparently. Although fuck big tech, you can achieve the sake thing with decentralised federated services or blockchain (in some cases).
Every attempt of me trying to use Linux on my main desktop (I do use it on other systems just fine) ends up with something not working due to Nvidia + Wayland or whatever. I kind of just want to get stuff done with my computer, and so me trying several Linux distributions rarely gets further than the experimentation stage. Windows 10 LTSC just works and whatever Linux distributions I tried eventually got in my way so much that I just couldn't be bothered anymore.
Not sure how much of a "healthy balance" Windows 10 LTSC + O&O ShutUp10 is, but I'm fine with it.
I never understood why people embrace Brave so much, I tried it a few times, but it just feels like a bloated version of Google Chrome to me with all its crypto crap. Firefox is solid, but I hop between browsers a lot, and I'm currently using the closed-source browser Vivaldi.
I even gave in to VS Code a while ago because it's widely supported with extensions for pretty much every language, framework and library imaginable. I tried JetBrains products (and I have an ongoing yearly license for their "All Products Pack") but I found some quirks/bugs where I had endless conversations with their support team not being able to fix the problem, and so I kind of moved on from that as well (except for DataGrip). My favorite editor of all time is Sublime Text to be honest, but it doesn't have good support for modern tooling anymore, and it can be quite cumbersome to get LSP to work right for your use case. I might give it another go at some point.
I guess I'm somewhere between the normie and the conservative.
Firmly in camp conservative (yikes)
Fav OS: Fedora
Fav browser: Firefox
Fav apps: Thunder and Element and technically feeder but only because I haven't had the energy to write my own rss feed consumer nervously in dart/flutter
I'm in the process of putting together my own next cloud and moving to proton mail. After that I'll be able to install bridges from a self hosted matrix to discord for people and teams for work. I use edge, outlook, and teams on my work computer but it occasionally connects to my home network so at some point I'll probably put it on an isolated vlan.
Where does Element/Matrix fit in here? It doesn't really seem like Paranoid like XMPP since people have been using it pretty regularly now, not just paranoid people.
Isn't tor like compromised? And most privacy based solutions are usually run by shell organizations that have ties with Five Eyes. Stuff like VPN services, proxies or some of those password managers.