hagar
I think you have a point there, but the reasons why Mint does not ship a streamlined version may be simply because the maintainers don't want to bother with a whole different context to build, document and support.
I do think there would be value in a less "batteries included" Mint. I disagree with people in this thread who claim the "whole purpose" of Mint is all the stuff it packs, because it goes far beyond the essentials. Mint develops a lot of GUIs for the user to be able to configure the system. I think just these plus the in-house Mint core apps would make for a sweet, lightweight and less bloated system that would have real appeal, but that would also mean more work for the Linux Mint team and perhaps it wouldn't really mean much for their audience.
I can't seem to block them by just enabling annoyances blocks on my end.
"EasyList – Other Annoyances" has this:
! Google signin popup
###credential_picker_container
###credential_picker_iframe
"AdGuard – Popup Overlays" has this:
! Warning: check, if auth using Google is not broken
||accounts.google.com/gsi/client^$third-party,script,domain=<several specific domains here>
My impression is that the rules want to avoid breaking Google sign-in completely, which this rule may do.
- Install UBlock Origin
- Click the extension's icon
- Click the gears icon for settings
- Open the "My filters" tab
- Add a line with
||accounts.google.com/gsi/iframe/select?*
Steps 2 and 3 can be replaced by going to about:addons, finding UBlock Origin, clicking the ... button and selecting "Preferences".
Your mileage may vary for performance. It really depends what OS and what hardware. In my experience saying all BSDs are slower at rendering would be too broad a statement.
If you've done Arch and Debian server installs, you'll be fine installing a major BSD. Just answer prompts and you are done, particularly if you are using the default disk partitioning scheme. Consider NetBSD. It's known for its wide hardware compatibility. X is pre-installed, just "startx".
Consider antiX. It's very lightweight, supports 32 bit and you'll have access to the Debian Repos.
It wouldn't be fair to say zsh is slow because ohmyzsh is slow. ohmyzsh is notorious for being a bit bloated. If you pull the whole thing, it makes a mess of your shell and you really can't tell anymore what is what.
It's possible to install the individual stuff you need from oh my zsh without pulling the whole thing.
I am a happy antidote user. With it, you can do something like this on your zsh_plugins.txt file:
ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh path:plugins/extract
Though ohmyzsh provides its own means to enable and disable plugins, this will allow you to cut that down to the pulling only of individual plugins in the first place.
Your mileage may vary, but other plugin managers may give you different ways to accomplish the same.
zsh is quite an advanced shell. You will find other shells that do things radically different and have their own bells and whistles, but if you are going for feature parity it may be hard to find a replacement.
Recently did something similar and yeah it seems Mint, specially LMDE in my case, is a great fit for such cases. It's on that sweet spot between being too bare and too bloated.
I'm not the biggest fan of VBox either, it's just very popular and full of sequential "wizards" to guide the user along the process of creating VMs, so it might be one way to get started. I'd much rather work with QEMU though.
That might be fun then.
QEMU can be as simple as this:
qemu-img create -f qcow2 mydisk.qcow2 20G
Here you are first creating a disk image with the format qcow2 and maximum 20G capacity. This is a QEMU disk image format that will take up very little space and grow as you use up the VM disk.
qemu-system-x86_64 -m 256M -cdrom alpine.iso mydisk.qcow2
This will start a VM with 256MB of RAM, the alpine.iso image in its virtual CD/DVD slot, and the disk image you just created as a virtual drive. This will come with networking enabled by default, so you'll have internet access from within the VM.
It should now drop you into the Alpine installation. Alpine is very lightweight so it's great for experimenting, but you could do virtually the exact same for most other flavors of Linux and BSD images out there.
Once you are done installing, you can power off the VM and then start it with this:
qemu-system-x86_64 -m 2G mydisk.qcow2
That's basically the same without the -cdrom argument, this time with 2GB of RAM. I find QEMU a delight to play with because it has sane defaults like that. Hope you have fun too!
I think you might like DIstroSea. If you'd like to persist your experiments, then likely learning how to emulate systems with QEMU or VirtualBox (the latter if you'd like a friendlier GUI-led experience, the former if you want to go full-CLI virtualization). QEMU is great in how lightweight and easy to create and discard self-contained VM disk images can be.
First of all, don't waste your precious time enjoying life with privacy worrying and fear. It's just not worth it.
I don't know why, but I get the impression the device you are struggling to make more private is a phone. If that's the case, the extent to which you can make things work is indeed very limited, so don't try to push it too hard.
You could use a tool like a firewall to have a more high-level control over all apps, like blocking them all and only allowing a few.
This may be less overwhelming than trying to block and contain each app individually. Now, you will still need to allow some Google stuff to have a Google phone work properly (to use the Play Store for example). If you want to go further, I'd suggest trying another OS other than Android, but that may make your phone even less compatible with what you are relying on, so it may be a better idea to instead try it on an old phone first.
On a PC, you have more freedom. Instead of trying to block everything from Google, for instance, you can rely on a separate browser profile (or Firefox Containers if that's inconvenient) for things that really need Google (e.g. Meet, work/school using Google Apps, whatever) and in your main browser profile you can rely on alternatives. For example, instead of trying to access YouTube behind a Google blocking extension, you could use Invidious or a dedicated app like FreeTube.
I hope you can feel more at ease with the sense of being watched and tracked online, but remember that's not worth loosing your best moments for if it ends up just causing more distress to you.