Please don't fall in that trap. Authoritarian attacks on citizens have always been neatly wrapped in either anti-terrorism or protect-the-children propaganda since the dawn of politics. This is a very obvious and delibirate attempt to further remove freedom from the common folk.
I just rewatched Minority Report a couple weeks ago for some reason. There was this scene where Tom Cruise had to get a new set of eyes because he got automatically identified everywhere. Everyone in the movie was constantly bombarded with personalized ads everywhere they went.. That movie is over 20 years old and they knew exactly what was coming. Fucking scary shit...
Really depends on who you're asking. I won't even use Signal since the service requires a phone number. So Telegram was never on the table to begin with. I use XMPP and SimpleX in case you're interestead in reducing your metadata footprint.
I'll add my 2 cents to your very well written comment.
My biggest gripe with flatpaks notably, is the more difficult integration into the system. I use about a dozen flatpaks, and for every single one I had to tinker with flatseal to give them the correct access permissions, that I had to research online. One specific flatpak coulnd't even work with those additional permissions. Half of those flatlaks also will not follow my system theme and their GUI looks broken or out of place.
DDG is miles ahead of Brave. But the company behind it has a deal with MS to feed them user data. They're transparent about it and the motivation isn't nefarious. But still, it's a thing. Now obviously, FF has deal with google, so I guess it's more of a "pick your poison" situation
I've set up my old phone to forward me 2fa sms messages from my burner sim cards to my actual phone. Allows me to keep my phone number private. Pretty easy to set up with something like macrodroid.
I almost never see FreeFileSync mentioned in those threads. It's the only GUI based app I know that also gives you options to not copy file deletions for example. Also has the option to be automated with crontab. Backups are not fragmented or repackaged so you can browse them just fine. Encryption can be done with Veracrypt.
Please don't fall in that trap. Authoritarian attacks on citizens have always been neatly wrapped in either anti-terrorism or protect-the-children propaganda since the dawn of politics. This is a very obvious and delibirate attempt to further remove freedom from the common folk.