I don't like corporations using the data I put online to train their AI either. I'd happily give it to people to train a FOSS AI tho. I've also contributed my voice to Mozillas Common Voice project, which is an open dataset that everyone is allowed to use. If it's something that everyone can use and benefit from equally, I'm happy to help. I'm not happy to help some corporation make even more profits tho. At least not without getting payed.
"They" in this case isn't the entire EU tho. There's a lot of different politicians there and Patrick Breyer, for example, was against this from the start. That's probably also who I'll vote for (or the Pirate Party, which he's a part of, I don't know how exactly voting works for the EU).
The fork was created when Audacity was bought and one of the first things the new developers were about to do was add opt-out telemetry. People didn't like that at all. From what I read in this thread, they ended up adding opt-in telemetry instead.
That's kinda what I meant. I don't think those people will even look at version numbers tbh. They'll probably just click update, let it install and that's it.
A VPN is enough for torrenting, as long as the VPN provider isn't logging. I personally use AirVPN because they have port-forwarding but I've used Mullvad before. I also live in Germany and I've never gotten in trouble.
The guide you linked seems a little outdated, Jackett has been replaced by Prowlarr, which is there to have a central location to manage your trackers. If you plan to use Jellyfin, you should also use Jellyseer instead if Overseer. The *arr services are the ones that actually search for the files to download by using the trackers you set up in Prowlarr. You don't need all the *arr services, I only have Sonarr and Radarr, which are for shows and movies respectively. I also have Bazarr for subtitles. AdguardHome is only for ad-blocking, might be useful to you but isn't needed. Idk why that's even in the guide. Flaresolverr is something I've never heard about and I don't use it, so I can't tell you anything about that. Heimdall is something I don't need because I use YunoHost, which has a dashboard already but it might be useful to you.
Microsoft really is the king of making confusing names...