Eww no, I definitely don’t want them to take any pointers from big tech. Their anti-spam methods are way too restrictive and invasive to your privacy. I don’t want to give my phone number to websites just to sign up. And I cannot even view Youtube videos or Instagram posts because they are blocking the IPv6 address of my 6in4 tunnel which I need because my ISP doesn’t have IPv6 yet. I have to sign in to “confirm you are not a bot”.

I try to use FOSS as much as possible, but I am not willing to give up video games, so I do have steam installed. I also need discord for communication with friends I am playing with. I only use these two on my desktop computer. On my laptop I don’t have any proprietary software running in userspace, but of course it still has proprietary firmware blobs and proprietary UEFI firmware. I also have an old Thinkpad X220 running coreboot and with ME disabled (HAP bit set, ME technically still runs, but halts after hardware initialization) and unnecessary ME components stripped using me_cleaner. And my home server also runs coreboot with ME “disabled” and stripped but it has a BMC with proprietary supermicro firmware and an LSI HBA that also requires firmware.

I tried various linux distros like ubuntu as a kid, but because of gaming I didn’t switch at that time, then around 2010 I got a home server and installed Arch on it. When Arch switched to systemd I switched to gentoo because I did not want systemd. In 2014 I switched to gentoo Linux on my desktop, but still had dual boot for gaming on windows. I tried various init systems on gentoo and then ended up using systemd anyways. Because I got sick of waiting for packages to compile I switched back to arch on my desktop. On my home server and laptop I used alpine linux for a while. I switched back to arch shortly after because I had too many issues with alpine on desktop. I still use alpine in VMs on the server, but others that I don’t touch as much like the print server run rocky linux. I also tried GPU-passthrough to game in a windows VM, but I never managed to resolve all the issues. Since nowadays most games run on wine and proton I never bothered reinstalling/fixing windows when it stopped booting a few years ago, so now I use linux only.