Lol nice username

Hey, I fucking hate this just as much as you do. I’ve voted and participated against these policies at every step of the way, but I am not wealthy or politically powerful, I live in a state where my vote is diluted at the national level (California, one of the states with the highest citizen to representative ratios), and when I try to explain these consequences and dangers, all I get in return is apathy.

Edit: typo fixes

There is a rational reason for it - some types of software expect Ubuntu during their installation and usage (especially game server panels for some reason), and I’d imagine they wouldn’t work properly if Mint was closer to Debian than Ubuntu.

I’ve found Mint to be more stable compared to my Ubuntu installations because the Mint team doesn’t include the fluff and bad design decisions when making releases.

(Like never requiring snap)

If you want my two cents, Mint’s default Desktop Environment (Cinnamon) is far more windows-like compared to Ubuntu, and Mint includes more quality of life applications for less tech savvy people compared to Ubuntu out of the box. (Mainly graphical apps for updates, backups, disk management, etc…)

I first tried Ubuntu when I was starting my Linux journey, but it didn’t really click until I used Mint. Save yourself some pain and go for Mint first :)

Edit: Also, Ubuntu contains ads for things like their “Ubuntu Pro” update service, and they’re known to commit some tomfuckery when it comes to installing apps and compatibility (see Snap Controversy)

A removable physical or electronic SIM on a system that has full control of inbound or outbound traffic (linux phone) would still be a whole lot better than nothing. Imagine having a switch to reliably sever any heartbeat signals between the tower and the device at any time.

GrapheneOS already runs google play services in a sandbox that doesn’t have core access to the device’s functionality (you can lie about giving apps storage access or location data, for example), and because you already have alternatives to ad-based services (CoMaps, Thunderbird, etc…) you should be safe from telemetry often hidden inside of popular apps like Google Maps.

Nothing’s bulletproof, of course, but the difference with GrapheneOS is that you can see what’s going on, grant permissions selectively to certain apps, or opt out entirely by only installing F-droid apps or using Graphene’s FOSS suite. You don’t have pre-baked telemetry at all, so nothing for them to harvest.