I have a friend / colleague who was a bit like this. It is a “see it to believe” situation. For her it was when she was at work and she watched her mouse stat moving on its own.
When she thought about how she never did anything bad on her work computer, but sometimes accessed her personal email… She got it.
And now she pays closer attention to things. Like in our city you’re pinged via WiFi when you get on a bus, but you can opt-out or jut turn of your WiFi, so she does that. And she makes email aliases now too. Nothing too serious, mind you, but she is 50 and figuring this out on her own and then teaching her friends and colleagues about it which is way better than going down the rabbit hole. Now there’s a bunch of boomers refusing to use Teams or access work email on their personal devices because she explained that they do have things to hide: the names and ages of their children and grandchildren, where they go for drinks after work, what they watch on YT, etc.
I don’t get into it with people though. People just write me off as some nerd, which is not the case.
Under X11 there is Openbox, bspwm, herbstluftwm, dwm, i3, Awesome, Ratpoison, spectrwm, Qtile, …
Under Wayland: Weston, LabWC, Wayfire, Sway, River, Cagebreak, dwl, …
I keep things pretty dull and use Openbox + LXQt. It is a stacking WM that is stable, and LXQt is snappy.
If you are looking for a light DE LXQt is very light, Plasma is lighter than it used to be, but it also has loads of features. Xfce has more options for configuration than LXQt and I think it isn’t quite ready for Wayland.
☝️ this is correct. GSF calls home and /e/ is a different beast. The founder of Murena and /e/ is on Fedi so you could drop him a message on Mastodon and see how he answers.
Of all the privacy-related changes I’ve made, Signal is the only thing I’ve managed to get anyone else to use.
It was a matter of saying “I don’t use WhatsApp anymore” and that was that. Some friends didn’t make the switch, but they know where to find me.
Quitting Facebook lead people to believe that I was in need of help, though. They thought I was crazy. Still, today, people ask me why they can’t tag me on FB or why I unfriended them. When I tell them I stopped using FB they’re shocked and say things like, “but you’re such a techy computer nerd guy.”
The LXQt DE is a good choice for older devices. The wiki has a guide for it but needs a slight update. It should still work but may require switching to edge.
Puppy Linux is a fine choice too if your computer is a little on the old side. Lite, Peppermint, Trisquel, antiX, and a slew of others are worth looking at.