Grateful for everything you guys have taught me

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.

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Nice. Welcome!

Not sure about others, but I frequently tldr content with lmarena.ai & the likes. No biggie (:

Don’t think PG directly contributes to FOSS projects in any official capacity.

Though, you raise an interesting point if they should consider doing so.

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5G modem issues on the 7a or iPhone? If on 7a, mind elaborating or linking me up? Are those issues present in regular 7 or just the 7a? Cheers.

Yeah, PG is far from FOSS contribution or support. It is at best curating, but even then the curated options aren’t based on FOSS principles or philosophy. Its mostly sticking to its name of privacy guides, nothing more :slight_smile:

In the big leagues already lol

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Well… About that…

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I know PG doesn’t directly contribute to FOSS projects, I meant that as a shout out to everyone in the forums/community here like @SkewedZeppelin who are involved with developing and maintaining such projects :slight_smile:

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From my personal experience with the 7a the modem does strain the battery pretty hard while using 5G, which tracks with what I’ve read about the Pixels from the gen 6s onward since they all use the samsung manufactured modems. I haven’t had issues with signal strength or texts/calls not going through luckily. I’ve heard that the pixel 10 modems are being manufactured by TSMC so hopefully those modems will perform significantly better, fingers crossed

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Lol definitely doesn’t feel like the big leagues

I’ve only heard this about the SoC, not the modem. Unfortunately it is very likely they’ll stick with an Exynos modem even if they finally do their own SoC design from scratch and bring that to TSMC.

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Wow! What an incredible journey. This is going to sound stupid, but do you have a background in software or engineering? I’m asking this, because although I still consider myself a newbie, I’ve been in the privacy community for a while now, and I feel stuck at the very moderate. You described a lot of technical things that I still find incredibly intimidating, like moving to Linux. But not just sad, CLI is absolutely terrifying to me. If I have to do any tasks that involves CLI, I’m guaranteed to give up quickly.

I wanna get better at the nitty-gritty technical stuff, but I find it hard. Kudos to you!

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Thanks for the correction, that’s actually a huge difference from what I had mixed up in my head. Hopefully even if they stick with exynos modems the new SoCs will provide some improvement

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I actually have zero formal background in software! Technically I am an engineer (process engineering) so I guess the engineer research brain helps a ton. Command line stuff isn’t scary at all, just follow reputable documentation for anything you’re using it for, and most importantly don’t just run random scripts. Honestly once I got endeavourOS set up I found the CLI stuff so easy and streamlined. Just start with the basics, find some tutorials, practice a lot.

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Thanks.