To add to the other commenters reply;

When Jolla does something, like make new software or patches, most of that is proprietary. They're creating their own thing, and nobody outside Jolla can benefit from their work. That's fine, but pretty much equivalent to any other corporate-owned mobile OS in terms of freedom, like Google's Android.

There's more open options, but they all have their differences. Ubuntu Touch (or really anything on UBPorts) has some components you would also find on Linux, but still uses the OEM kernel and proprietary Android device drivers. This means that devices are much more likely to work, but you rely on the OEM to maintain support for the device on Android. postmarketOS (and others, like Mobian) try to build most things from scratch instead. This means less hardware is supported, and functionality is often not great. However, all development is open, and they're trying to ensure there's little to no reliance on OEMs. This theoretically makes for much better (community supported) future proofing.

WhatsApp requires that you have a mobile device (Android or iOS) connect through the official client at least once every two weeks. They also monitor for "suspicious" API usage, and will ban accounts for using their service wrong (though it is very uncommon and often temporary).

The only mostly FOSS third party solution I am aware of is the mautrix-whatsapp bridge. The developer of that bridge also created Whatsmeow, a WhatsApp Golang library.

mautrix-whatsapp requires a mobile device to connect using the official WhatsApp app. It pretends to be a WhatsApp Web client, and allows you to send and recieve WhatsApp messages on Matrix. The bridge (effectively) requires hosting your own Matrix homeserver, so it's not a simple solution.

The company that now owns SteamDB has this bolded on their front page:

We acquire. We amplify. We conquer.

It can't really get more dystopian than that.

NexusMods themselves went to absolute shit, requiring an account for stuff like downloading mods, and getting a premium subscription for basic features like "Instant downloads", "Viewing more mods per page", and "The ability to choose a preferred download server".

SteamDB used to provide a completely free (in price) service, with no strings attached. This was by far the most common usecase of the service. Seeing the history of NexusMods and the company that owns it, this will change. The moment SteamDB requires an account for previously public info, or even a premium subscription, is the moment the service becomes unusable for most. Effectively, SteamDB is marked for death.

Check whether your BIOS settings show the system clock UTC or adjusted to your timezone.

Windows stores hardware clock time in your local timezone. Other operating systems usually store it in UTC. If you're dual booting, this could cause issues.

It's also possible that saving the current time to the hardware clock in silverblue/secureblue is misonfigured in some way.

For backups, see if there's support in rclone. You can set up encryption in rclone (crypt remote) as an overlay to other storage locations.

Once you encrypt your own backups, the privacy of the cloud storage provider doesn't matter much. The main things to consider are price, storage capacity, and reliability.

Ubuntu Pro requires users (both individuals and enterprises) to register with Canonical to receive security updates.

Microsoft is the company that approved the software to automatically download and run as admin when a specific device is plugged in. The OEM submitted malware and Microsoft approved it. Both are at fault for letting malware download and run on your device.

In the case of vulnerabilities, MS is fully aware of this happening frequently and has announced they want to do something about it, but hasn't actually done anything about it.

Monitors don't need drivers. Your GPU needs drivers, and you might need color correction for your monitor.

Microslop decided that any device that is plugged in might need drivers. They allow device manufacturers to specify an arbitrary program to be downloaded and executed by Windows Update, any time a device they make is plugged in.

No actually, that would be impressive. The DS is barely capable of decoding video. Getting that to work in real time, over the network, and low latency is a huge technical achievement.

This is just a text input and output connected to a remote machine.

Consoles have really been getting closer to more standard hardware over the last years. The WiiU was a mostly custom PowerPC box, with a proprietary version of wifi for the gamepad, and including hardware specifically to run Wii games. The Switch was a barely modified nvidia shield, with bluetooth wireless controllers. The PS3 had a fully custom CPU, and old models included PS2 hardware for backwards compatibility, the PS4 is x86_64 with a custom AMD GPU.

For the PS4/PS5, the majority of effort on running Linux is in getting it to boot in the first place. While some hardware does require patches to existing drivers (like mesa on PS4), or sometimes fully custom drivers (like the CPU fan on PS4), other hardware is completely standard, over a standard interface. Like the HDD and Blu-Ray drives on the PS4.

The big difference is that a game console is "allowed" to deviate from standards, as it does not need to be compatible with anything outside the control of the manufacturer. This results in often small differences that require changes to a kernel which wouldn't work on any other device.

The biggest reason why emulation is hard, is often no longer the custom hardware like it used to be, but the OS and other fully custom standards like a graphics API. The structure of games is completely different too. The old "ship the drivers on the game disc" like on the Wii no longer holds true on modern consoles, and emulators don't need to ensure the exact timing of an optical drive matches to get a game to work.

There have been some attempts to get modern console games to work through kernel patches and translation layers, see horizon-linux and fpPS4, proving just how close modern console hardware is to standard PCs.

All that being said, I don't think SteamOS on PS5 would work for multiple reasons. It's extremely difficult to get the process simple enough for the average consumer, especially with Sony quickly patching any exploits required to boot it. It's also not in Valve's business interest to make it easier and explicitly supported to buy a cheaper and more powerful standardized machine. As they would just be creating a direct competitor to the Steam Machine.

I have a setup similar to this, but not for ddos protection. If I were to get ddossed at a network level, my home connection wouldn't feel much of it, as my VPS quickly gets overloaded. I have been "ddossed" at an application level though, I hate AI web scrapers. Since the entire line from VPS to my home network is 1gbps, that alongside most of my server cpu resources got oversaturated with fake traffic.

(I say ddosed in quotes, because I'm not sure of the intentions of these AI webscrapers. Thousands of requests per second on a server that's usually seeing maybe 5 isn't "normal" traffic either.)

Since this installed a malicious dependency from NPM (and later with bunjs) in the pre install script, it would need at least complex correlation to catch. Maybe building and installing all AUR packages, which would cost far too much for the Arch team.

Individually and automatically scanning only the PKGBUILDs (the stuff actually on the AUR) would likely not have caught this.

That doesn't mean it's a bad idea to run a basic scan over every change, but it wouldn't magically "fix" aur malware.