Not to get all sappy or anything but I’m giving all you guys a thanksgiving shout-out for all your unbelievable hard work on FOSS projects and being such an invaluable resource for newbies like me. Before I found Privacy Guides I had zero knowledge of digital privacy and cybersecurity. I’m talking like, reusing the same password/email/phone number on 47 different sites, no 2FA, no password manager, no adblockers, reliant on Google/Microsoft for pretty much everything. Yeah it was bad.
Barely two years ago I didn’t even know what a DNS server was–I was attempting to troubleshoot latency issues on my bf’s playstation and one of the posited solutions said to change the DNS server, and I’m sitting there thinking “wtf even is that?” Then that led to an article explaining why you shouldn’t use your ISP’s default DNS, then suddenly I’m tumbling head over butt down the rabbit hole. I swear it totally blew my mind when I learned about adblockers from this site and within a couple months I had spun up pi-hole and never looked back.
Since then I’ve switched my main email to Proton and slowly extricated myself from most of the Google/Microsoft ecosystem with some exceptions–I still need my gmail account for some things, and I’m still in the microsoft universe since I switched from PC to xbox for gaming which allowed me to permanently kick windows out of my computer and join team penguin.
(Unfortunately the majority of the games I play have that goofy kernel level anticheat nonsense, but I didn’t want to dual boot windows and linux since I’ve heard nvidia gpus don’t play nice with that setup.)
The linux guides on the main site were probably the single most helpful thing I’ve read so far because my security knowledge was/still is kinda barebones and I had no idea that linux had some serious security considerations to account for before switching. I chose EndeavourOS + gnome for my first distro, and it took a bunch of tries to properly set up sandboxing and understand what I was doing, but I’m extremely happy with it now. I’m thinking about giving Void + musl a shot sometime in the future.
My other big project (and yes you have full permission to call me a skid) was getting Nethunter running on a nothing phone 1 to learn more about offensive security. I actually did that maybe a year before switching to linux on my PC which in hindsight was probably a terrible idea to have kali/nethunter be my first ever introduction to linux. After getting it set up I realized I had nowhere near the level of netsec knowledge necessary to understand all the kali tools so I started using OffSec’s courses to learn more before I really try to play with nethunter. (Like I said, total skid moment.)
As soon as the pixel 10 drops next year I’m ditching Apple and moving fully to GrapheneOS which I’m super excited for. I currently have GOS running on a pixel 7a and use it concurrently with my iphone but the 5G modem issues definitely take a noticeable toll on the battery life. When I’m at home on wifi though I pretty much exclusively use the pixel. Aside from google fi and gmail almost every app on my GOS set up is from their stock apps, Accrescent, or the DivestOS repo.
I didn’t intend for this post to get so long and rambly, just wanted to show you all some love and appreciation and show where my privacy/security journey has taken me in the past two years thanks to this forum and the main site. Thank you all SO much for everything.
