I'm still kinda new to Linux (started using this year 😅) I already made it to my main OS, even if I still missing some things which I used on Windows, anyway. What I wanted to ask you guys, what recommendations do you have for Linux Mint (Cinnamon)? In terms of security, optimization, (a way to make the UI looking modern ;-;) and privacy? I would be very interested in what you do guys to optimize your Linux setup :) I'm pretty technical, so there is nothing which could overwhelm me (probaly).
Regarding the UI and the look and feel, I can highly recommend catppuccin as a theme in basically whatever you want. I use it on Mint Cinnamon as well, and find it very good looking!
#YouTube is making the watching experience worse on #Firefox and Microsoft Edge.
I didn't believe it the first time I heard abt it, since it sounded more like a conspiracy theory than a actual thing, but it's true. Google does add 5s timeout specifically to Firefox and Edge users when they try to watch a video on YT. If you want to know more about it, Mental Outlaw make a very good video abt it (Link: https://youtu.be/v4gXhmzQztE ). I think Google did this, to get people moving to Chrome since the majority will think this is a browser issue, nobody would expect YouTube to purposely doing this. In the attached Screenshot you can see that YouTube checks the user agent of browsers to see if it's Edge, Firefox or not. You can bypass this by changing your User agent to chrome.
Edit: Due a lot of people saying a lot of different things abt it, I want to say that I'm not 100% sure abt how exactly this works, there is a inbuild delay by Google, but who is actually affected, there are a lot of different opinions abt it. I wasn't able to verify this myself in LibreWolf, but this could be the case due my intensive hardening I did and this is just a result of what I found in the code and what Mental Outlaw and others shared across social media, if you got different or additional infos abt this feel free to comment and I suggest everyone ti also check the comment section.
To add… if you install the DuckDuckGo browser app on your android phone, it will block all the trackers in your other apps!
Fair warning though, you will likely feel a bit of shock & horror to find out just how often you’re being tracked, and what sort of data these apps are sucking down relentlessly and constantly. Even the ones you haven’t used for a while.
Good news! Brave for Android now let's u use your favorite uBlock Origin Blocklists!
Under Settings > Brave Shields & privacy
Can you now add custom filterlists and edit Brave's default selection of the already avaible filterlists. Some of you now that this was possible before too (via brave://adblock) but at this time it had no UI and wasn't a official feature, now you can easily add, remove and customize fiterlists via the the settings.
Blocking variations.brave.com which is used for A/B testing could potentially break Brave's functionalities. For me did Brave's "forgetful browsing" feature broke which seems to be disabled by default if you block this domain.
Little Rat - a browser extension for monitoring other extensions
"Little Rat is an open-source extension designed for network traffic monitoring. Easily view, monitor, and block traffic from other Chrome extensions on a per-extension basis."
I use it myself and I think it's a very useful extension for everyone who uses more than just few extensions for different purposes and don't fully trust them that they send no data as the developer promises, this extension can monitor the network and act as a firewall per-extension basis.
Isn’t piling on browser extensions generally considered bad practice as it increases your attack surface (bad for security) and makes you more easy to fingerprint (bad for privacy)? This seems like a useful tool to use and then uninstall, but if you don’t fully trust something then you shouldn’t really be installing it at all!