I would rather have your personal tips and tricks with regards to everyday digital privacy for desktop users.
So let's start with what to avoid:
- Avoid commercial social networks, especially these known for intensive infiltrating - Facebook, Twitter, et cetera
- Avoid mainstream "privacy-first" companies / "organisations" like Mozilla and especially avoid their "services"
- Avoid using non-free programs with network access - and if ye must run them (Like I have to run AutoCAD for me school) - run them isolated or in virtual machines (Example from me life, I run mentioned AutoCAD on Tiny10 (stripped-down Windows10) on virtual machine with no networking enabled)
- Avoid web-based pseudo-software - or simply avoid anything company server-based (or so-called "cloud"-based). Ye never really know what's done with that data ye give them
And now, in terms of desktop environments / web browsers:
In matter of DEs there's no problem what to choose: We have XFCE, MATE, LXDE && LXQT. I'd avoid GNOME and KDE since they are heavyweight, bloated and somewhat hard to operate.
In terms of web browsers, well, we have only firefox(-derived), plus to that which is only somewhat bearable - Not only it's heavy as hell, it's also unreliable and by default is configured to leak a lot of data.
Though unlike chromium (not sure actually), firefox can be configured to be privacy-respecting by:
- Disabling cookies (and allowing to place them only sites specified in exceptions) / Disabling all tertiary cookies
- Setting firefox to clear everything but "site settings" on close
- Disabling telemetry in about:config, changing every telemetry server to localhost
- Installing NoScript, uBlock, et cetera
- Disabling interaction data sending (as I rebember, it's disabled by default on Debian-packaged firefox-esr)
- Not using "pocket" or anything (anti)service-based from Mozilla
In terms of search engine - As for now, we have only free (as in
freedom) front-ends to these commercial ones - SearX(NG), Whoogle, LibreY, etc. Still better than using a commercial one like Goolag, Yandex...
Flatpak: yay or nay?
I have no opinion on Flatpak since I don't use it - I use either debian-packaged or tarballs