Thanks for telling me lol. I remember sharing your enthusiasm when I started.

If you don't mind me sharing, here are some tools I use the most in the console:

• htop: resource monitoring and process killing. Mint has a GUI alternative
• btop: better resource monitoring, but worse process killing than htop.
• lazygit: amazing interface for git. Seems hard to get started, but IMO, not at all. There are GUI alternatived.
• tmux: multiple consoles and console manager. A bit hard to get started.
• nano: text editor. Reeaaaallly simple to use, prefer it over emacs and vi/vim.
• grep: you already know this one.
• cronjobs/crontab: allows you to run periodical commands. Say, a cleanup script all days at 7:08 AM.

Also, some GUI programs I love:

• KDE Connect: device pairing with your cellphone and PC. Includes remote mouse input, multimedia control and file sharing.
• Steam: Almost all the games I play on Steam run flawlessly on Linux.
• Stellarium: astronomy/planetary app.

Pick your poison lol. If you don't mind, we can start talking via ptivate message.

I got a Pixel and installed GrapheneOS onto it just 3 days ago and it's an absolute charm.

The peace of mind of running a phone whose OS is FOSS out of the box is amazing as well: no need to look for open source variants to apps, nor disable telemetry, nor uninstall trash and unnecesary apps, only to find out apps like Facebook cannot be uninstalled. Basically, a non-bullshit OS, with extra privacy toggles and app sandbox.

Maybe the duck was the friends we made along the way

Your argument is very weak, you are just citing a company that sells vegan food for animals, a very clear conflict of interest.

For instance, I can also cite some Google PR page on how much they care about privacy.

Disagree. They showed their arguments, and those seem pretty valid to me, even though I disagree. IMO being open, transparent and promoting community discussion is a good sign.

I have a fun story: I once traveled (not US) with some family members. My aunt had never boarded an airplane, and was nervous about security staff retaining her or something (she obviously was clear). So, when finally were past security, she exclaimed to my father "Brother, we passed! :D". Security staff heard her and made her come back for extra scrutiny xd

It is because it has what F-Droid considers anti-features. In this case, even tho the code is open source, it seems to require a non-libre dependency to measure distances. See https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/issues/2627 and https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/pull/3709#issuecomment-1039710672.

F-Droid is very strict with what it considers an anti-feature, and Android is very restrictive to properly work without at least one closed source library (thanks, Google), so I say you can ignore this, but it depends on you.

I changed the icon location, and my muscle memory still was trying to open them from the previous location, basically in a complete auto-pilot mode. That led me to a realization of how fucked up the situation was, and eventually helped me uninstall/reduce screen time of those apps.

Tangent note: I think browser fingerprinting is only a source of concern if you use VPN. Otherwise, your IP is already a good enough identifier, and quite likely doesn't rotate often enough. Please someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Being a number nerd, I can see the appeal for something like this (extremely bad quality of data aside), or at least I do frequently visit OpenBenchmarkin.org (similar concept than UserBenchmark, but open source).

I also know 1 person who is obsseded with constantly buying/selling parts for their PC, and for whatever reason still uses UB after I told them how shit it is.

My guess is that this will also resonate with some Intel fanboys.

All of this is more of an exception to the rule, but they need just a few bunch of people subscribing to generate more profit than before.

Your comment doesn't make sense, since home tools are not precise enough and that is not the manufacter fault. I suggest you read about Metrology

Public data still have licenses. Eg, some open source licences force you to open source the software you created using them, something OpenAI doesn't do.