Lucia [she/her]

Basically, you don’t want everything be dependant on a central authority - this is a single point of failure. If there’s a big security vulnerability in your web browser, but you use a standalone mail client, your mails are most probably safe.

This also adds up to built-in adblocker - who knows if Vivaldi devs will ever go evil and sneak in exceptions in their adblocker? Or if they will sell their web browser, just like their CEO done so with his previous browser, Opera.

You can add UBo filters to block instances

Also OP post is about privacy not bloat

OP is concerned about Pocket integration too, so I assumed they may not like it.

these features will only improve your privacy over using some webmail.

Does their built-in mail support any good encryption? The last time I used Vivaldi a mail feature wasn’t really that private. Also, using dedicated email client like claws or mutt is even better from privacy perspective.

All google stuff is either removed or toggleable from settings.

They can’t remove Manifest V3 though.

What’s wrong with that? It’s a good deal larger than mozilla’s

Yes, and it’s under Google’s control. And, again when I used it last time, you need to enable some google stuff to install extensions from the store.

I am thinking of moving to Epiphany (gnome-web) some day, but I may start missing the vim-like interaction with qutebrowser.

There’s a WebKitGTK-based web browser called Luakit. Pretty good from my experience, although webkit can be problematic at times.

Yep, also they don’t integrate Pocket in the browser, they just have a built-in email client, note-taking software, RSS reader, calendar bloat. Also, Vivaldi is based on chromium (as such subsribed to all Google’s bullshit), and uses Chrome extension store.

Honestly, OP, just stick to Librewolf, it’s privacy-respecting and actually open-source, pocket’s disabled, UBo’s preinstalled.

Fluxbox or IceWM as a more standard, familiar floating WMs (both are pretty customizable too).

WindowMaker is my goto for standalone window managers, it’s look based on NeXTSTeP OS from 90s, so it doesn’t look like yet another ripoff from windows or macos (both are ugly IMHO), so it’s pretty unique.

If you want minimal and keyboard-oriented, cwm is THE wm for you. The main problem is that default keyboard shortcuts are really bad (openbsd fanatics will say otherways, but when shortcuts are spread around ctrl+, alt+, and ctrl+alt+, it’s really far from good), so I recommend tweak them or to find someone’s config.

If you want a desktop-agnostic file manager for these wms, I’d recommend xfe - it’s somewhat obscure for some reason, but it’s really, really good. Can’t recommend more.

As to install, all of these should be in your distro’s repo. Fluxbox may come as two packages (fluxbox2 and fluxbox3), the first one is the last official version and the second is the “community edition” - a fork, basically.

At least on Void Window Maker package is called WindowMaker, with capitalisation. Since Void sticks to official naming, other distros may have the same name.

edit: Also, it’s worth to mention most of recommendation on this thread are tiling window managers (awesomewm, i3, hyprland, etc.)

Do you want a tiling or a stacking wm?

I’m not really into security-focused distros, but heard good things about QubesOS. Also, what about OpenBSD?

It may speed up your boot time, at least it happened to me on Void (maybe the reason is how minimal this distro is though). I personally prefer runit over systemd in how it handles services, but honestly you most probably won’t notice a much difference - definetely not worth reinstalling whole system.

Ubuntu fonts works pretty good for me as a general UI font tbh. In text editors I prefer mononoki over monospace, it’s a bit prettier IMO, although in terminal I use terminus because pixel fonts are cool.

These are basically system requirements for Firefox (well, except for disk space, obviously). It doesn’t matter much how lightweight your system is when you launch a modern web browser.

Cool. Good luck on your linux journey!

Mint is great, my brother used it as his first distro and had no issues whatsoever while I suffered with Fedora.

I’d personally recommend trying fedora 1st

Fedora is even slower though. In my experience Fedora on hdd loads as slow as win10. MX is great though, as well as antiX

I doubt they need the latest kernel, their machine is ancient…

True

FIFY

Thanks, somehow messed it up.

Good to know! I will also check it out soon. Infinity was my only reason to use reddit actually.

So, I have a few options. (kinda in order)

Linux Mint is the easiest one from the list, but all of them except Solus are fine. I personally recommend Mint or Debian, Debian Sid if you want latest kernel.

KDE Plasma (love the looks of it, though is my hardware enough?)

KDE should work fine, maybe with a bit of tweaking?

XFCE - LXDE - LXQT (because of “lightweightness”)

I daily drive Xfce and even on a beefy PC this DE is really great. It may not look cool by default, but it’s very customizable and powerful. And Thunar (xfce file manager) is really good now.

Cinnamon

Another good option

it’s because of Infinity for reddit.

There’s a fork of infinity for Lemmy, called Eternity. Not sure if it’s usable now though.

I don’t think the reasoning is privacy, because people would instead need to go to the other site where they can be tracked even more easily.

When you go to a privacy-hostile website via a link, you know what you’re doing. But with embedded videos you can be easily deceived to open a link before you learn it’s hosted on an unethical website.

But we switched from Reddit…Not really known for being privacy friendly… People that are concerned about their privacy will know what to do/not to do.

The fact that people were abused before doesn’t mean we have the right to continue abusing them. That’s unethical. And that’s weird to distringuish people who ‘conserned about privacy’. That’s people who know how embedded videos can be used to track users, and those who don’t know nonetheless deserve privacy online.

Thanks for sharing, I’ll give it a shot. Glad to hear I’m not the only one having trouble with microblogging - it seems people nowadays are really quick to adapt to a new platform, while my social ineptness holds me back.

basing everything on following people gets pretty messy and annoying pretty quickly.

What about following tags? I heard you can do this on mastodon.

it actually shits me that the two platforms can’t interoperate better, as there isn’t any good reason other than the two platforms lacking appropriate features, with mastodon kinda being the more annoying culprit in that IMO.

I have my hope for kbin, although they still have a lot to improve, I think they’re moving in a right direction.