As a rule of thumb, I expect that Asus as a business only cares about adbock from two angles:
A feature to slap on the box for advertising.
A B2B feature for helping business management make workers more productive.
To the first, there’s little incentive to ever update the lists after you’ve bought the device, so it’s quickly outdated. To the second, it’s like to be far more optimized for Amazon or Newegg, then for Reddit. Between the two, I don’t generally expect them to hold a candle to pi-hole and similar software.
Let’s start simple: You should consider hoping from Linux Mint to LMDE if you haven’t already.
As a user, you have no obligation to participate in the politics between the Ubuntu and the Mint Development team, but if you’ve followed the controversy and agree that Ubuntu is being a bully, this would be a small yet material way to show support.
what am I missing?
Every Linux distribution has a purpose - a reason its author thought it was worth the effort of creating it. Some are grand, others are silly, etc. When you explore distros, you’re telling the community which ideas resonate with you. Popular ideas will replicate, unpopular ideas will be abandoned.
Also, switching distributions makes it harder for business to ‘capture’ the Linux demographic. The mere act of switching occasionally means that tools to import/export/manage your data stay relevant. This literally fights enshitification.
Finally, and this is a matter of personal taste, but I like trying different versions of Linux for the same reason I try different flavors of ice cream: It’s fun; and even if now and then I get a bad flavor, I feel enriched by the experience.
Yes, at the beginning of the pandemic it was discovered that Plex Inc had been tracking, reporting home, and selling user watching habits to advertisers. Basically the exact thing many Plex users were trying to get away from.
This inspired many developers (who were otherwise stuck at home due to said pandemic) to fork Emby and thus Jellyfin was born.
It’s funny - some of my first Linux experiences was to try out compiz-fusion back when it was new about 20 years ago. Wobbly windows is the key feature that I fell in love with Linux over. Or rather a compositor that provided great control over the desktop experience that made it fun, and people like you were angry back then that nobody needs eye candy. Nowadays, composite graphics are standard in Windows, Mac, Gnome and KDE.
I’m glad that the community overall has grown up, and that most distros focus on being usable by every user, not just power users
µBlock Origin is great for browsers that support extensions. But that won’t get most Android TV ads or Apple TV users. And I suspect many of the people with pi hole also use µBlock Origin for redundancy.
I’m trying out Purely Mail. Unlimited email addresses across unlimited custom domains.
I have a cool setup where I have setup an email account at service@service.mydomain.tld, but it’s setup as a catchall for *@service.mydomain.tld (and allows gmail-style tagging). This means I can fill out service forms by inventing addresses on the fly like LemonadeStand+Signup@service.mydomain.tld and the email shows up in one unified inbox, the subject line will include [LemonadeStand], and the message will have the flag ‘Signup’.