Brave uses their own index. Qwant and Ecosia have partnered to build their own index as well.

LibreOffice and OnlyOffice are both compatible with MS Office formats. LibreOffice is more popular, but OnlyOffice has better compatibility with MS Office files and the interface is very similar as well.

I do not know when you last tested Filen, but all of those work for me. They had a major update several months ago with a rebuilt desktop app and added the virtual drive functionality.

Brave is open source.

I used Thunder for a long time, but I have been giving Arctic a try lately and like it. I will likely give Mlem another shot after the next update. Voyager is another great one, but I have not used it for a while.

Overall, there are a lot of great Lemmy apps and I love that most of them did not get abandoned after the initial wave from the Reddit exodus died down. I think we have more high-quality Lemmy apps than there were for Reddit.

Go for a prepaid provider and give out as little personal information as necessary. Avoid the major carriers directly because they need a social security number.

That said, mobile phones are inherently not private. No matter what provider you choose, they will be able to track your location using tower triangulation. Even if you give a fake address, it would be pretty easy to identify you if you always have your phone on at home.

The Google backing. See ublock Origin for example. Google wants less effective ad blockers because ads are 90% of their business. Google removed manifest v2, which is needed for good ad blocking capabilities. Now Chromium, and any browser based on it (Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, etc.), also lose it. Some have said they will manually add it back in to their browser, but that will only be possible for so long as Google’s upstream Chromium base further diverges.

The massive market share of Chromium-based browsers also gives Google near complete control over web standards. There are many websites that use non-standard functionality that only works in Chromium and not Firefox or Safari. Developers also will not adopt new standards unless Google chooses to as well because there would not be enough users to justify it otherwise.

TLDR: Control over Chromium gives Google extremely strong influence over the web and their interests likely do not have much overlap with yours.

This is very disappointing.

Correct. That is why it is often referred to as amd64.

I am pretty sure it says LINMOB as in Linux Mobile, but I agree that is an absolutely terrible font.

The official Syncthing app is no longer on F-Droid either. Syncthing-Fork is and will continue to be supported.

The official client has, but Syncthing-Fork is still being developed.

China just wants North Korea to keep existing to serve as a buffer. If North Korea falls, it would almost certainly unite with South Korea. Then a very strong ally of the United States with many American military bases would directly border China.

What we would need on the long run is simply replace email with a common standard

That would be ideal, but realistically, if email ever goes away, it would be replaced with a proprietary locked down ecosystem. Likely a messenger app. Link a WhatsApp or Facebook account and you will get messages and notifications through that. I just do not see current tech companies supporting a new open standard for communication.

Despite all of emails flaws, it is one of the few remaining universal forms interoperable communication with little vendor lock-in. It would be great to have something more modern, but not at the expense of openness and interoperability which is likely what would replace it at the current time.

Ladybird is still very early in development and is not even targeting an alpha release until 2026. There are no binaries currently available, so the only way to even test what currently exists is to compile the source code. I am excited to see a new competitor, but I also do not have high hopes given how difficult it is to meet all of the web standards. Given the increasing number of websites that have problems or limitations with Firefox, I do not foresee Ladybird ever getting to the point where it could be reliably used by average people. I would love to eventually be proven wrong about this though.

Servo also has nothing to do with Mozilla anymore. It has been a part of the Linux Foundation since Mozilla laid off all of the developers in 2020.

Intel is ruining Intel.

Voyager is definitely the most polished and great for those who used Apollo for Reddit. It is also very actively developed. For the Android users who do not mind the iOS aesthetic, Voyager is one of the few Lemmy clients on F-Droid.

Thunder is also a great option. I personally prefer its UX more than Voyager, but it is not quite as polished.

A GitHub issue was opened for Syncthing-Fork, so it will be worth watching that to know whether it will continue to be supported.

This does not apply to the server. Only the client app is open source. The server is proprietary.

Despite not being easy to find, most news sites still have RSS feeds. They are great for just getting the news from sources I trust instead of big tech algorithm recommend blogspam. It is also possible to get RSS feeds from subreddits and Mastodon.