Agreed on using Firefox/LibreWolf and uBlock Origin, I love that combination. I think the thing is that Google Chrome is much faster than Firefox on Android phones (I don’t mind, I hardly ever use mobile to browse), and long time habits can be hard to break for some people.
On the Fediverse with micro-blogging like Mastodon, Pleroma and similar there is a hashtag which is related to work. I forgot what the exact hashtag is but I saw other people recommending it whenever people ask for job opportunities. If you get a match you may be able to contact them directly via email. Good luck!
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.
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]
If you a home user with your computer or laptop inside a LAN you would not really need a firewall, unless you start to use applications which expose its ports to 0.0.0.0 rather than 127.0.0.1 (I believe Redis server software did this a few years ago) and do not trust other users or devices (smart home devices, phones, tablets, modems, switches and so on) inside your LAN.
If you are running a server with just a few services, for example ssh, smtp, https, some hosting company people I knew argue that no firewall is needed. I am not sure, my knowledge is lacking.
Application firewalls, watching also outgoing traffic :
If you compare Linux with some other Operating System you will see that on Linux for years an application firewall was non existing. But there is a choice now : opensnitch This can be useful if you run desktop applications that you do not fully trust, or want more control.
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.