Budgie is very much not KDE.

You can go with your wife, you know?

Yup! Monopoly alright. I'm lucky to have my bank's app working like a payment entity on Android, without having to go through Google Pay.

That's the premise behind AdNauseam, albeit only for ads and not general navigation: It clicks all the ads in the background, so the data won't ever target the real you.

To a "newbie", what does this mean? I transitioned to Linux full time less than a year ago and settled with KDE. Will this affect me in any way?

5 years??? You change cars every 5 years?

I thought it was too smooth and the rearview mirror on the third image proved it. What are you doing there??? 😂

Option 2. It's the most robust. You'll never lose it (provided you have the redundancy), you can use it offline, you can transfer it using a USB pen, it's available in all platforms, including web. I've been using this for 8+ years, on my phone, desktop, laptop, company computer, etc. I store it on a personal cloud (and on each machine, of course, by syncing).

Why?

If it's music, it's on Soulseek!

I can't do online shopping without accepting a notification on my bank's app. That's not "social media and chat apps".

Ploum makes a very interesting point on his blog: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

They talk about examples like Google Chat being XMPP, becoming very big, changing the standards that look like other XMPP users/clients are subpar and then killing "federation" but no one complains because everyone uses their product, so it's not a big disruption.

While I don't think this is it, because Facebook is huge and ActivityPub isn't (XMPP was the most used protocol then), this happened and can't be ignored.