Signal is really simple and has a sizable userbase now. I’ve worked with people in non-tech companies and they’ll have signal installed because theres someone in management that cares for security to a degree and does official nonofficial team communication with signal

Element/Matrix I think has a chance. The newest Element X app looks a lot better on the phone and on desktop. It’s progressing to good user experience

F-Droid is different. It distributes apps that have been validated to work for the user’s interests, rather than for the interests of the app’s distributors. The way F-Droid works is simple: when a developer creates an app and hosts the source code publicly somewhere, the F-Droid team reviews it, inspecting it to ensure that it is completely open source and contains no undocumented anti-features such as advertisements or trackers. Once it passes inspection, the F-Droid build service compiles and packages the app to make it ready for distribution. The package is then signed either with F-Droid’s cryptographic key, or, if the build is reproducible, enables distribution using the original developer’s private key. In this way, users can trust that any app distributed through F-Droid is the one that was built from the specified source code and has not been tampered with.

…

If it were to be put into effect, the developer registration decree will end the F-Droid project and other free/open-source app distribution sources as we know them today, and the world will be deprived of the safety and security of the catalog of thousands of apps that can be trusted and verified by any and all.

it’s been asked a lot and I’ve seen others respond about how the passcode and account username that were added in the last few years are steps in the process to make accounts not dependent on phone numbers. I’ve just given them the benefit of the doubt that someday we won’t be tied to a phone number anymore

I have comaps installed but overall I don’t think it matters a great deal which open street maps app you use, they’re all really similar. I try to contribute business info when I remember to do so but there doesn’t seem to be any yelp/google business equivalent. Need something that hosts user reviews and pictures and some way to moderate that in a decentralized enough community way. Can’t beat Google maps without the business pages and crowd sourced data

This is easier to set and forget. I’m cool with subscribing and occasionally doing a one time donation when I’m feeling spirited

The free is enough for me but I’m willing to pay that sub to support them

Fossify launcher is buggy but at least it’s always been open source to my knowledge. Actively developed. All the fossify application. I use them

One of the reasons I prefer Matrix even though anyone I know in real life uses Signal so I use Signal practically everyday but Matrix sparingly. Federated matrix servers. I worry how resilient Signal can be if enough countries ban it, not really confident in the US or EU countries or any countries long term for encrypted chat for the Signal Foundation, and also signing up with phone numbers. Phone number providers being another point of regulation

I think Proton mail is worth it just to diversify off Google but I don’t lend much faith in how effective privacy will be with email. The free service is enough for that. If I wanted more faith in encrypted communications, encrypted chat applications. I sub to proton for drive and VPN. ProtonPass has all the email aliases for throwaway websites

The US just pulls headline. I remember a long time ago seeing the CCTV setup in the UK and being pretty WTF is going on here. Then I remember Czech Republic talking about internment camps citing US Japanese internment camps as a good example of justification. Then I remember Italian court cases over seismologist not warning people enough/not being predictive enough to prevent deaths in a major earthquake. Or the groping of a girl and being let off because it didn’t last enough time for it to be considered bad by the judge. For all the headlines the US has. Then of course I feel like it’s been at least 15 years of trying to pass anti-encryption/anti-privacy laws. US makes headlines, but something about European conservatism/traditionalism/paternalism makes the whole continent feel like a powder keg to me. Also the neo-Nazis

Your numbered list, yes that’s the steps

With the other person’s answer, you have a choice when interacting with a block chain.

You run a node that directly sends commands to the blockchain, this one uses up more storage as it downloads the blockchain but it’s the one that requires least amount of layers of trust

Or you use a wallet that uses a trusted 3rd party full node. That’s why open source is important for these wallets. This is really easy and convenient and in most cases uses open source software and is built on years of community vendors operating in good faith. These lite wallets, they run on practically anything. You manage the keys to your wallet; it’s the keys to authorize transactions.

The “heavy lifting” is delegated to another computer. Heavy lifting in quotes because the idea of blockchains is to be decentralized so one pillar idea is that it should be pretty cheap to run a node

Even having a full node, unless you want to mine, it’s really just storage and download. If you want to support the network a bit, some upload so others can download block chain history from you too.

It’s like how in Linux most users now just trust that the package maintainers for the distributions package manager is delivering legit software when you apt/dnf/etc software from the default sources

If you’re not going to run a node yourself, you’ll have to accept some level of trust. Also with an open source wallet, you can with certainty point your lite wallet to whatever full node you want, your own or one you trust

Once you have Monero in your wallet, when you send it it’ll be anonymous to the receiver and people won’t be able to look at the block chain and see people’s balances and transaction history. You can buy some monero on an exchange with your bank account and withdraw to get started with familiarizing yourself with crypto. Good enough in my opinion to at least learn. Exchange knows you bought Monero from them but after it’s gone from them, they won’t be able to trace around where you send stuff to

If it’s not available on any exchange you can easily move money into, you may just need to buy a different crypto and use another exchange/service to exchange again into Monero. There will be fees. Trocador is regularly mentioned from what I remember

Actual anonymous acquisition, you’re going to need to find a person in real life with monero to exchange something for it or you physical mail exchange and they send you Monero. Tough to find. Don’t know how LocalMonero is doing these days in usage/existence

Actually making payments, you got to find places that take it. Not a lot. You can pay for Mullvad VPN with Monero. Getting paid in Monero, 3 niches layered there. One is doing something people will pay you for, those same people being willing to pay in crypto, the people also having Monero. That’s tough.

Wallets, Monero website, you can probably trust Wikipedia Monero page to send you to the official website. On desktop you can download the software that downloads the whole block chain and it’ll have a GUI to send Monero and a place to copy an address for people to send to. Mobile, Cake wallet is popular

But really the hard part in my opinion is finding businesses and people that take and pay with Monero. You’ll acquire Monero to use but struggle to find places to use it for

Other non-tech version is selling things that sounds exactly the same but by some roundabout explanation, they can assure you it isn’t multi level marketing. Also drop shipping, storage unit flipping, whatever buy/sell eBay store empire

My expectations are higher now. I thought it was going to have a PowerVR GPU but it’s the high end Mali GPU

Right now it’s not packaged up for easy use but KDE has supported Raspberry Pi’s for ages so I wouldn’t be surprised if you ran Plasma desktop, it’d be simple to build and install. I’d wait until they got it back onto the KDE release cadence with everything else though for simplicity

For anyone who wants to test this out, you can do as Devin did by installing Plasma Bigscreen on a Raspberry Pi using postmarketOS, though you would have to compile it yourself or pull from the nightly repos to get the latest changes.

The hardest online privacy is not operating in a way that just links all your “private” activity because you logged in around enough places to link them together and at least one place somewhere can be linked to your real identity

I would guess Telegram if the users hit the toggle wherever it’s not default. After what you’ve listed and Telegram, I’d guess Matrix/Element

I don’t know if it’s the same law but they’ve already said they’d move countries, anywhere with laws suitable for the service

The more users on Jellyfin the better shot it has at getting more developer attention and users willing to contribute financially even if just occasional one off donation. How it goes with any open source application. More users, more developer interest, more feedback from users, subset of users willing to financially support the project

You ever try Alpaca?

https://flathub.org/apps/com.jeffser.Alpaca

Open source alternative to LM Studio for simple chat with local LLMs