TIL that Snapchat is an app used in 2024 without E2EE, Wikipedia article on Snapchat :
Encryption
In January 2018, Snapchat introduced the use of end-to-end encryption in the application but only for snaps (pictures and video), according to a Snapchat security engineer presenting at the January 2019 Real World Crypto Conference.[138][139][140] As of the January 2019 conference Snapchat had plans to introduce end-to-end encryption for text messages and group chats in the future.[141]
The Snapchat has a word-filter suggestion makes most sense. But then again Cloudflare is very popular on the Internet as the cheap and well-known MITM anti-DDOS tool.
I haven’t read much about i2p, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the government has their paws in there too.
You will have to trust something if you want to communicate, there’s also GNUnet, ZeroNet, DeltaChat, and probably a lot more.
From past forums reading I remember that a boot loader in Linux can have trouble booting properly when you use two different physical drives (Rather than one drive and different partitions), I think it needs to specifically get to know about both drives. Does this help ?
I believe that both VirtualBox and KVM (QEMU) can do USB passthrough. With either one you can have the full Windows OS running on your Linux desktop, which could be more comfortable than going for WINE. Here’s an example with KVM and Arch Linux.
Few years ago I had a collection of maybe fifteen old disks, which I wanted to get rid of, by means of recycling. First I wanted to check the content and then format all so I put them in an external enclosure. It turned out that some disks were unusable. A closer inspection showed that these were all a certain brand and type (Forgot whether it was Seagate or Maxtor or WD). These disks would probably still do fine in a desktop or server computer (Which I no longer had at home) but not with the external enclosure. Perhaps your enclosure is the bottleneck here as well.