A dedicated place to share all of our wins! Welcome to our 54th 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’ll be going live for last week’s wins 2025-05-09T21:00:00Z
Successfully and fully ditched big tech & moved to Fedora!
– Moved to Fedora Workstation and Silverblue (I had two mini PCs lying around). The transition was smooth because I had already done a lot of prep work already and had been using it every now and then to learn how to use Linux but I did a fresh reinstall with Fedora 42 and set it up in a more intermediate-advanced manner.
– I am now using and have set up my MacBook Air as a glorified NAS/streamer box that I have set up with Jellyfin so I can stream my media library from my Fedora. And macOS going forward will only be used for select official important government and corporate paperwork that absolutely requires Adobe Reader.
– Fedora Set Up Info:
Set up Wireguard VPN via the terminal with killswitch enabled (using ProtonVPN), set up many FOSS apps to make Linux easier to use and manage, no major issues and everything seems to work smoothly as I’m mainly using Flatpaks with browsers as system packages - giving up and letting go of big tech is indeed possible (unless you absolutely can’t give up MSFT Office and Adobe products).
I’m now enjoying the FOSS and big tech free digital life!
I increased my usage of locally hosted LLM’s significantly to replace a lot of my web searches. It’s impossible to be tracked when no data is being transmitted, ha! Been loving the new Qwen 3 series of models.
I’ll just see how OpenOffice works before deciding if Libre is better or not. I used Libre on Linux and I wasn’t happy with it.
As for gaming, there is also Wine but I’m playing big ever-expanding games (Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves) that are simply better on native platforms. I will follow your advice at some point and make some comparisons.
If you are interested in using fedora kde but for someone with No formal Linux knowledge, I would recommend Aurora linux. It made by the same people who make BAZZITE.It is more stable and have atomic nature with the updates. So you can easily roll back any updates that happen to break your system. Update can be set to automatic and gets applied after the next boot. So your work won’t be interrupted while the updates are happening in the background.
If you have any relatives That don’t have much of technical knowledge but they want to just browse the internet for cookbooks, recipes or just watch YouTube videos I highly recommend it. You don’t have to touch the terminal for everyday use.They have necessary codecs and the proprietary stuff easily Installed, so you don’t have to add external repositories, just start working.
The difference is that I suggsted him bazzite specifically as gaming is an issue for him and a notable point. Bazzite is the same branch as Aurora, but with packages and various customizations specifically targeted for gaming. Aurora on the other hand is more of a everyday distro not focused at gaming at all, and the aurora-dx spin is targeted for developers. Both are valid, but for gaming along with everyday use I’d still recommend bazzite for him.
Sure, but I meant for not much technical people in their lives. Even the 80 year old grandma could use this without any problem. You just have to just setup and forget it. All the updates and necessary things happen automatically. it is self maintaining. Even if an update failed, it automatically goes back to the old version.
Even if you want more advanced settings for power users, you can easily get the necessary package by the development options. It is a distro for all.
Hi, can I dm you about a project to get Hoyo games on Linux, Maybe preferably on signal, simplex or E2EE email
by doing this you agree to keep it between us and between the project as hoyoverse (and in extension WuWa) is very strict on it’s IPs
as for WuWa it’s a bit more nuanced however you can replicate my setup by kind of dual booting for that (unless things changed). Yes you can keep using Mint and stuff for this.
But I do prefer GNOME. If I wanted a KDE look, I would have rather chosen Cinnamon but I think its time to give KDE another try to see if I still hate it or if I’ve come around.
Previously I convinced my partner to use Signal (proud to say we’re using Signal as our main communication method now ), and I said I was hoping to get more of my friends on there.
While that hasn’t progressed much, I did have one friend (who’s already into privacy) ask me to talk to them outside of Discord, and I chose Signal.
The recent Discord news has certainly given me a push (and good reasons) to switch, and I’m discussing switching with another friend now. Hoping to update you all on that soon.
Other wins these past two weeks:
Have been trying out Lunatask for tasks, notes, journaling, and relationships after seeing @Henry’s video on it, and I’m liking it a lot (especially the relationships section!)
Switched from NextDNS to Mullvad DNS after I noticed I was having DNS leaks. Has been nothing but great for me so far, likely not going back since I didn’t use a lot of NextDNS’s features.
Switched to FUTO Keyboard, really nice to have multilingual input on an offline keyboard without switching keyboard layouts.
Mostly switched from Tubular (NewPipe) to Grayjay, which can cast to the TV with FCast, it’s nice to watch my YouTube feed on both mobile and TV without logging in to my YouTube account. Been having issues with playback as of late so I do fallback to Tubular sometimes.
I’ve started slowly building up an offline music library using Seal and CuteMusic. I don’t listen to music very often, but hoping I can build out a library of my favorites and start listening to it. I prefer that over listening to whatever an algorithm thinks I want to listen to.
I have my TOTP codes on my password manager, Bitwarden, and I don’t feel like getting them off of there (yet), so I decided for now to at least put 2FA on my password manager and store its TOTP code on Bitwarden Authenticator (a completely separate offline auth app)
Reinstalled some of the FOSS apps I use on my phone, after I realized I could’ve installed them with Obtainium instead of through Aurora Store. Switched from vanilla Signal to Molly while I was at it.
Switched to Firefox Focus on my phone as the default, currently keeping Brave around for my non-ephemeral browsing needs.
In the (currently slow) process of switching my personal email from Proton Mail to Tuta. Not really that necessary, I only use it for account logins (largely aliased through addy.io) rather than communication. It’s mostly just that I’m personally not big on the whole Proton ecosystem and the almost “big corp” vibe that they have, plus the Switzerland situation. Tuta running on renewable energy is nice as well :]
Lastly, not exactly a win (yet) but I’ve been strongly considering deleting my personal Instagram account since I’m not using it a whole lot even just for messaging. And getting notified for every message does get annoying when almost all of them are just friends bombarding me with Reels.
Adventures in Linux Workstation … I tried to switch to NextDNS and completely killed my laptop’s wifi. I ended up Installing Linux Mint (it’s what I had on a bootable thumb drive at the time). Not a fan of Mint so I downloaded Workstation again.
Lesson One: Make sure I know what I’m doing before making changes.
Lesson Two: Keep a copy of my OS at the ready.
Once I got the laptop up and running I started working on a “Linux Reinstall” document. In this file I have my wifi passcode, terminal commands for installing ProtonVPN and other apps not available in Flathub. I also have a decent list of tweaks and apps I want installed from Flathub.
I thought about creating a system image. Years ago I did this on a Windows machine after tweaking the system. When it came time to install from the system image all I got was a completely stock install. I was pissed, lol. Anyone know if that’s how it is on Linux?
The first time I installed Workstation (about 2 weeks ago) it took me a couple of days to get everything set up. The second time installing, which was on Friday afternoon, it took me just a few hours.
I have been a subscriber of Techlore on YouTube since September 2020 and also started following on Odysee. I want to thank @Henry for the amazing videos—I have learned a lot.
Since then, I’ve started using DuckDuckGo and occasionally Brave Search. The browsers that I currently use include Zen, Brave, Vivaldi, Mullvad, TOR and DuckDuckGo.
For email, I mainly use Gmail for work and important notifications, but I also use ProtonMail for privacy. Last year, I switched to GrapheneOS on my Pixel 7 and use my secondary device, an iPhone XR, for Apple Wallet.
I have been using Bitwarden password manager for a long time and also recently started to use Notesnook, Ente Auth, and Nextcloud (to syncing my contacts, calendars, and reminders). I also started to use Jitsi Meet when connecting video calls with friends instead of Google Meet.
Over the years, I’ve mostly used Windows and macOS. This week, I installed Fedora 42 (GNOME) on my 2015 MacBook Pro, and I’m really enjoying it as my daily driver, especially with GSConnect enhancing my experience with my Pixel 7.
Moving to Fedora from macOS and using Jitsi Meet has been the new wins adding to my list this week in terms of open-source and privacy focused software.
Took a better look at Filen and switched from Tresorit free account (very limited).
Being open source and file versioning on the free tier are the main reasons. Both are E2E and support Linux.
Bought a lifetime starter subscription since it’s starting to look like my go to option for cloud sync.
Recently lost an SSD, I’ll need to see what comes of it but all backups are good and it should still be under warranty (less than a year old).
While I’m waiting on that this has resulted in me reviewing my PC setup and old accounts again.
Either deleting or updating accounts with expired passwords on my Keypass database.
Welcome to our 54th week of privacy & security wins 
), and I said I was hoping to get more of my friends on there.
)