im not a proton shill, but they have a wallet. wouldnt any paid secure wallet option work? and yeah, i wouldnt trust google either

never tried flatpak, snaps were so bad as to never consider non-native installs or just use docker instances when I need to run something weird. so dunno.

whats the use case for a flatpak exactly? maybe im not the target audience???

There is so so so much, and they do get caught, and when they do we keep a peek into how invasive they are. As someone who has had to worry about being targeted by intelligence agencies and nation-states, I was completely blindsided by corporate/capitalist surveillance.

for example, look at this action by Meta, where they broke out of security sandboxes and exploited protocols in order to tie your browsing history (even private browsing) back to your identify saved in their databases back in meta land

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/03/meta_pauses_android_tracking_tech/

the amount of data that is being harvested and sold, and resold, is absurd, and the greater threat is not just that they are exploiting you, its that they dont care who the data gets sold to. Bad actors (criminals, etc) can and will purchase information they can use against you.

So, consider the unintentional ramifications of all that info being harvested and available in addition to the intentional ramifications of hyper greed, and couple that with the amount of available compute and you will see that you do not need to be a person of interest, everyone is a data point that can be and will be exploited.

I would encourage everyone to take their privacy seriously.

If the only thing holding you back from NixOS is my python comment, my issue was with Numpy, which really really demands that you install it globally. Pretty sure you can make it work by using a dev-shell, installing it globally in that shell, then doing everything else in that dev environment normally. I was newish to nixos at the time.

Otherwise I tend to fall back to ubuntu server, but only because it was something I knew. I prefered Centos7 back in the day before RedHat killed Centos. NixOS was my move from there. Been using Alpine as the os in my docker images, but havent really explored a lot of other recent linux os’s at the moment.

Pretty interesting. It is a rabbit hole, you say well I dont trust this so I secure it here, and then you have to trust the next layer down. Eventually you have to have some level of trust. But I think its pretty cool none the less.

Ton of comments, and I havent read them all, but I wanted to ask if you really meant popular or if you wanted something for a specific reason. Easy for new ppl to linux, good for desktops, etc etc.

I dont really use GUIs on linux, except for when I want to have a fancy pants riced network monitor type situation. I am a big fan of NixOS except for python Dev stuff. Big fan of being able to clone a machine or recover a machine with a single conf file.

I think if you are using any meta app on your phone yes. I would assume yes, if they put in the time to figure out the security bypasses then I cant see why they would limit it to one app. I removed all meta apps from my phone.