Oof! I'm currently speechless. I need to research and digest this.

Giving this a try. Seems like a consistent method across machines and browsers if it works. Changing servers is a hassle and redirecting traffic to a frontend is not the best solution for privacy.

Not sure how it works globally, but in most western countries, If you've put your state-issued cash in a bank technically it's not yours anymore anyway. Read your terms and conditions. You've handed it over, either in person or digitally, and declared you no longer own it and is now the property of the bank. You literally consent to it not being yours anymore. They are not holding onto your money for you. When you ask for a withdrawal or purchase something with a card they honor the request by issuing you their second layer corporate credit in good faith, because it would all fall apart if you stopped giving them your money. They do this to protect themselves if they ever become insolvent or the market crashes. Legally they owe you nothing because you "gave it to them". These changes were implemented around the "Global Financial Crisis". To allow them to get away with these changes most governments have a law that says they legally have to provide you with a paltry amount if the bank becomes insolvent for any reason. You could have a million dollars in the bank and if they fail they only legally owe you the $1000 or whatever the amount your government has stipulated. That million is "their" money. You gave it to them!

So anyone upset about this new law, and you should be, and not upset about your bank should do some research. You've already consented to the money not being yours.

Here's a link to better understand money. There's more than one type of money. https://brettscott.substack.com/p/casino-chip-cashless-society https://brettscott.substack.com/p/the-luddites-guide-to-defending-physical-cash

Simple - Leverage and manipulation to comply.

You CAN opt out of using anything Meta offers. Just don't use that abusive corporate crap!

The fact that they really want to disrespect your privacy, scrape every last morsel of anything they can get there grubby mits on for serving you ads, and feed you altered propaganda and shit that they think you should see says volumes about you if you allow them to do that to you. It says a lot about the Australian government too then. Here's EU taking these greedy corporate monsters to task while Australia is talking about giving them EVEN MORE personal information by trying to enforce ineffective faulty age verification with biometric government issued ID on social media. Just walk away.

Bluetooth can be managed with systemctl and bluetoothctl.

https://www.makeuseof.com/manage-bluetooth-linux-with-bluetoothctl/

In my experience I find just running bluetoothctl to enter the interactive mode easiest. You can enter commands without prepending bluetoothctl. You can use help at any stage. So you want to use systemctl to make sure Bluetooth is running, then enter bluetoothctl. Make sure the device is discoverable and pairing is set to on. Start your [headphones/whatever] in pairing mode and run devices. When you see the device run pair <numbers/address>. Only use the numbers. You may have to go into settings and select the device in the sound applet.

My situation doesn't require a logout timer, but if I'm walking away from the PC I just use the shortcut Super + ESC. Alternatively, there's many ways you can create a basic Bash script that when invoked times down to a systemctl suspend command. Or possibly the hybrid-sleep option could do what you want. See systemctl -h for possibilities.

Blanking the login screen is something that will be implemented shortly. Maybe I'll work on a script for that because it annoys me too. Fortunately I rarely use it. I'll repost if I do this.

I really don't think the two years people are saying in this thread is realistic. The hard work and core is written. What is there is stable. I think they will get this completed much sooner. They do have a hardware business to support after all.

I'm using it every day now. I have one machine installed with the 24.04 ISO and it's working fine. There's some TODO items to come which I understand will be added by Alpha2. With a little command line knowledge COSMIC is perfectly usable now and is stable.

For secure private transfer use the Warp flatpak in Linux and Worrmhole William in Android.

The amount of times I've seen people request help because Pi-hole was not blocking/functioning properly, well a hosts file just ensures nothing leaves that you want blocked. Besides, you may have different machines set up to be strict or permissive depending on their use case.

Absolutely. These lists are created by server admins who collect what the firewall rejects, much like you see with the Pi-hole. They'll automatically block some ads and many threats too. Another tip if you're using Librewolf, Mullvad browser or Firefox with uBlock, enable more of the filter lists.

Use both.

That's a lot of progress! Worth the read.

Pi-hole is OK, but for good measure it's easy to set up a "hosts" file that blocks all that stuff locally. You can use your findings from Pi-hole. On Linux you just pop your entries in /etc/hosts, or other OS equivalent. Here are some curated lists. For Mozilla telemetry - https://github.com/MrRawes/firefox-hosts/blob/firefox-hosts/hosts Massive list for everything - https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts