A dedicated place to share all of our wins! Welcome to our 41st week of privacy & security wins
Now, this only works if you all want it to work. That means:
Don’t be shy! Even the smallest win is something you can share. The more of you who contribute the better it is for everyone
Be positive. Remember we’re all in different places of our journey. Someone enabling 2FA on their first account can be just as excited as someone who figured out how to install Qubes on their new system. Give each other some love!
I don’t know if this counts as a privacy win strictly but it did help me understand the possibilities of “self hosting” my own streaming service and the tech I need for it for what and how I want the same - so, I want to thank a fellow forum member @Kuebic for all the help and advice and suggestions this week.
I’ve started experimenting with compartmentalizing my browsing habits.
It’s been years since I’ve shaken up how I browse the web. Last time was when I discovered Vivaldi years ago and implemented vertical tabs and basked in the sheer amount of customization available.
I’ve been trying to change to Firefox as my default browser for a while, but their lack of vertical tabs has always brought me back to Vivaldi. The extension to allow vertical tabs and a config modification to remove the top tabs were close, but didn’t cut it for me.
BUT NO MORE!
Introducing the Zen Browser. Firefox with inspiration from the Arc browser. It has it’s rough edges, but it’s smooth where it counts, and I’m enjoying the focus mode along with incorporating tab compartments + workspaces + profiles to be more mindful of how I use the browser. Now to add some Arkenfox hardening to it…
I’m the opposite. I can’t use Zen because of the vertical tabs.
I tried to get used to it and live with it but i just could not get hsed to the UI like that. If there was a way to get horizontal tabs, I’d use Zen again.
It’s the off center screen with vertical tabs is what bothers me.
If you’re wanting to give Zen another chance, Zen has a “Focus” mode (Ctrl + Alt + C) where the side bar goes away, giving you essentially a full-screen (and centered) experience. You can still access the tabs by mousing over the left side or the shortcut Ctrl + Alt + S and it’ll fly in, but that might annoy you more than the window being off-center… I think it’s slick though.
Thought I’d mention this in case someone else might want to try.
Yeah, I did. I am not enlightened enough to forgo not seeing my URL bar with extensions and whatnot on the side and still want actively visible access to it at all times - including seeing my tabs.
I use keyboard shortcuts to move between tabs right or left or up or down in Zen’s case so I do need to see which tab is where.
Are you sure that you can use Arkenfox with Zen because they seem to already use another user.js template called Betterfox, but then they may have also integrated some of their UI changes to that file as well, so I’m not sure if you could just replace that with Arkenfox? @xe3 maybe you have more information about this?
Dont know if this is a win or not but I’ve came to terms that sometimes the practical answer is not the ideal answer
Ideally I’ve wanted achieve everything under FOSS and for the most part I have. But those last few things were bothering me. Perfectionism is a vice sometimes.
For better or for worse MacOS and iOS are too good with creative software and I’ve let idealism fight the truth
While Linux and Android remain my daily driver for private activities or hobbyist stuff and it is home to some of my favorite software I use daily I also need to be down to earth. Ever since this I’ve and stop trying fossify everything to the extreme and its bit freeing. I think physical compartmentalization is the best strategy for your security and your sanity. Although it feels a little privileged to say separate your tasks on different device, which is not an option for many. my ideal thing i would be getting by with less but this dedicated approach has made me appreciate the hardware WAY more than just having everything be general purpose. I’m noticing in many ways privacy and digital minimalism are heavily linked
I accomplished 2 things this week
1 Acquiring Monero From Cake Wallet to donate for Privacy friendly projects and Supporting the Community of course
2 switched most of Windows 11Tracking settings to off
And Enabled Encrypted Storage for my main drive
I am pleased with myself for having gotten a distro flashed onto a usb stick from a mac (nervous I would wipe out my mac), then installed it on an old thinkpad. It worked nicely once I figured out the extra stuff not explicit in the directions. I am working on trying tuta and mullvad on it or firefox that I can harden. I did get LibreOffice downloaded and started a database. My hands need a rest the keyboard and size of the laptop is far too big for me. I will get back to the hardening tomorrow.
I’ve started using the profiles feature on my phone, so all of the nasty proprietary apps now live under Elgoog, for which I created an anonymous Google account, leaving my main profile Play Services free.
I also successfully installed Gentoo (with IceWM) on my Raspberry Pi and, while I could not have full disk encryption, I did manage to encrypt my home directory with eCryptFS. It’s updating right now, though, so I’m praying that it doesn’t all fall apart tomorrow.
Well done! Last time I used NixOS, I couldn’t quite figure out Lanzaboote, so I ended up manually signing the boot files with sbctl(8) every time I did a rebuild.
Welcome to our 41st week of privacy & security wins 
