I was pretty suprised not to see Wells Fargo in the mix, but I’d bet they’re in the top 10. Regardless, they’re in the top 4 for oil funding, so that alone earns them none of my business!

A virtual machine is the move, I’ve had a great experience with virt-manager. Strongly recommend debloating the windows VM if Microsoft is getting on your nerves. Here’s my go to software: https://github.com/raphire/win11debloat

Worksorks on both windows 10 & 11. It’ll allow you to remove telemetry, tracking, and even software Microsoft prevents you from uninstalling. I just can’t get it to remove Edge. But MentalOutlaw has a fantastic walk through of the process on his YT channel if you want some guidance with the debloating process.

Baby

I have an old Fedora book which still has a Fedora 15 disk in it! Helped me realize on old PC’s to burn the ISO onto a DVD for installation instead of finding a work around for not having a USB boot option in the BIOS.

Sure, maybe on paper…but check this out: https://scheerpost.com/2025/02/01/did-a-trump-executive-order-just-cripple-the-global-us-regime-change-network/

Regardless, why is the only aspect of USAID which was “forked” into a Trump approved department specific for coup’s? Makes you think which, with nothing but love, is something it seems you should do more of when it comes to US policy.

The fact USAID is supposed to provide aid to people around world in need of help, yet this aid is just a smoke screen to cover for the funding of coup’s on governments which opposes the US empire…

It’s not just USAID. The BBC is actually funded by two branches of the US government.

Last year, the US State Department gave BBC Media Action £280,000.

The group says it used the $$$ to reach 100 million people in 24 countries with its programmes.

After covering the BBC’s public relations response, the article then goes on to say:

That sounds nice, of course. But when you’re aware of the role USAID has played as the ‘friendly face’ of US imperialism, more scrutiny of BBC Media Action is essential.

What I took away from it is that since the BBC is affiliated with this blatant US corruption, regardless of directly or indirectly, the specifics regarding the association needs to be known by the public.

NextDNS is the move, the clients are open sourced and they encrypt everything. Plus their free option covers all my devices, no problem. Highly recommended!

I’ve been really liking the KISS Launcher, it’s power is in it’s simplicity. It also looks relatively comparable with Smart Launcher. What’s super impressive about the KISS Launcher is that 93% of users that try it for a week are still active users after 3 years! So definitely worth a gander for sure.

You’re server’s #3 when it comes to monthly active users too!

When you sort by monthly active users, this is what you get:

What really jumps out to me is the fact .ml’s active users equals the total users. Not too sure what to make of it. I’d assume the mod’s delete nonactive accounts after a set amount of time or it’s just relatively small based on total users but everyone’s visiting at least once a month.

I just learned the dev of Phoenix forked Mull! It’s called IronFox (https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox) and has a F-Droid repo. I’m pumped on this, thanks a bunch for highlighting all this and to the original commenter for providing the link to Phoenix!

Well, since SearXNG aggregates results from more than 70 search engines and not solely Google, it’s a safe bet they’ll be fine regardless of Googles moves. However, sourcing results from Google may be impacted, but they still have many other options built in aside from Google. Whoogle being a proxy only for Google makes it reliant on Google, so their upstream changes will be very noticeable. This being the case, I’d say switching to SearXNG is going to be the best move as it has redundancy built in making it not dependent on any one engine.

With the deterioration of our ecosystem, it makes sense lifespans will decrease. But this one seems fishy. At the turn of the century, which preceded the discovery of antibiotics, the average life span was 32. Back then, childbirth was actually dangerous and the amount of kids dying under 3 years old was wild. These were the primary reasons for the 32 year average lifespan. Which means 26 in todays world is almost certainly a sign of fowl play…

Dark Reader is the best extention for this, pretty sure it’s open sourced too!

In 2019, the advertising/data science company System1 became the majority owner of Startpage. Based on this, I’d say it’s worth finding an alternative to Startpage.

Anyone of the many SearXNG instances is your best choice for balancing privacy and quality results. It’s open source, sources multiple search engines which you can control, is anonymous, and provides solid results. Here’s a list of active SearXNG instances: https://searx.space/

I’m pretty sure just using the “sudo dnf update --refresh” command in terminal will fix this problem. It will ask you verify those packages new repositories. After that, you should be good using the store again for updates. This is assuming you upgraded from Fedora 40 before these errors occurred.

I love the KDE plasma theme Underworld. It’s definitely black and pairs well with a ton of stuff. I like Breeze Dark as the global theme, Ball10050’s Black color, and Underworld for the plasma style. This makes it all primarily black.

I trust the DivestOS team while I have no clue who runs Cromite. Plus, Bromite being abandoned made me look into other options, which makes me trust Divest to keep Mulch running longer than the Cromite team I guess.