Don’t use Onedrive, Dropbox or Google Drive (all privacy nightmares). Instead:

• Self-host https://nextcloud.com/ (this is the gold standard of self-hosting a secure and private cloud storage, you just need your own server with the disk space you need. Open source)
• P2P and/or self-host https://syncthing.net/ (this will automatically sync files in shared folders between several devices. Best if you have one device which is online all the time. Will use the space on your own devices. Open source)
• Storage on a trustworthy 3rd party host: https://proton.me/drive (this is the most similar to Onedrive/etc. where you sync your stuff to their servers, so you don’t need to host anything, but contrary to anything from Google/MS/Dropbox, this is at least a reputable and secure/private host which doesn’t abuse or sell your data. Data is encrypted by default. Also open source)

Furthermore, accessing Onedrive from Linux might be painfully inconvenient because there’s no official proprietary client for it by MS. There are 3rd party clients but I’m not sure how good they are, also MS could at any point change their API or even block unofficial clients, rendering your unofficial client useless at least for a time period.

You don’t need to stop informing others, I think stopping is bad. Just tune it down a bit, don’t overexert yourself with it. Most will not care but it’s still important to tell it to them. At some point, they might realize why it’s a good idea.

Also, Google isn’t immediately killing Ad/Content Blockers like uBO, they’re doing it slowly. Which is much smarter. It will mean less resistance. Boiling the frogs (users) slowly has always been the best way of eventually reaching a certain goal, without too much resistance along the way. If you push the goal too fast and too hard, there will be massive resistance, backed by an immediate media backlash. You have to wait that out, spread it out, so that users and media forgets about it again. Also, uBO Lite for MV3 browsers is less effective, but many users won’t notice a difference yet. Next steps will probably be to make it less and less effective over time, while claiming it will be better for the users overall, like offer better security from malicious addons that almost no one installs anyway, or whatever.

Probably because Google is actively and frequently banning many Piped or Invidious hosts, and is generally currently at war with “alternative frontends” to YouTube in an effort to make users browse YouTube directly and consume ads there, or buy YouTube Premium. This is in line with their current fight for more ad revenues across their products and services. You probably have to either search for another public instance which isn’t banned (yet) from accessing YouTube, or host your own instance.

Pixel 8 with GrapheneOS

I’ll do a (simplified) Windows analogy, if you’re already familiar with Windows.

Microsoft Windows is closed-source/proprietary, which means only Microsoft has the source code for it, and only Microsoft is legally allowed to create or distribute copies of Windows. “Windows 11” for example is a “distribution” of Windows containing the “Windows NT kernel” (core of the OS) alongside other important software to make the OS usable, like a boot loader, service layer, graphical interface, desktop environment, and lots of included “system” applications like a file explorer, a web browser, apps to adjust settings, apps to display menus and task bars, and so on.

“Linux” by itself is just the kernel, the core of the OS. Which is by itself not a “usable” operating system yet, just like holding a CPU in your hand doesn’t allow you to use it yet. More components are needed for that. Since Linux is open source and under a permissive license, anyone (even you) can go ahead and create an operating system made with the Linux kernel. If you do that, this is called a distribution or “distro” of Linux. Since there’s not just one company allowed to do that, many distributions exist. They all made their own operating system on top of the Linux kernel. Even though hundreds of distros exist, only a handful of them are actually popular, stable, secure and recommended for general use. They all use similar, but sometimes different software to include in the distribution. Like the Linux kernel, most of that software is open source so it can also be modified or extended.

Since “Linux distribution” is rather long to write, people often just write “Linux” but mean the whole distribution, not just the kernel. These are just common inaccuracies in communication, but what the person meant should be obvious from the context.

Common and recommendable Linux distributions (= full, usable operating systems) include: Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE, Arch, Debian. These are full operating systems and they all include the Linux kernel at their core. Of course, the similarities go further than that. Most distros are similar enough that if you’ve learned one, you can also use any other with little additional things to learn. However, some distros are deliberately a bit more different or tailored to more specific users or use-cases, for example Arch targets more experienced Linux users because it’s a very minimalistic distro, it expects the user to know which packages he wants to install. It pre-installs almost nothing. You can think of this like “Windows Server Core” where it just boots into a minimalistic terminal by default, no usable GUI yet, but you can of course install the desktop environment and everything if you need it and make a full-featured desktop out of it. The distro just doesn’t want to preinstall anything which you later might not like, which is why it gives you the choice, but that makes it a minimalistic distro and it’s harder for beginners to use that way. Other distros like Mint are much more similar to the client editions of MS Windows in that they preinstall everything the user needs for a desktop OS and more, so that the user can boot into and use the desktop as quickly and easily as possible.

And then there are even more special-purpose distributions like Kali Linux which includes things like penetration testing tools (i.e. “hacker tools”), which makes it a distribution for IT security people, so they can boot into it and have access to most needed tools right away without installing much else (also good on a bootable USB stick). But usually, in general threads like this one, people don’t talk about specific-use distros, but about generalist distros which you can install and use as a regular desktop OS.

Desktop environments also exist on Windows but there’s basically only one, made by Microsoft. In the Linux world there are several to choose from. The most common ones are: KDE Plasma, Gnome, Cinnamon, XFCE. These desktop environments contain window managers or compositors, task bars or panels, menus, various tools like file managers, process viewers and text editors, and various background programs. This is all needed for the user to have what is commonly known as “a desktop environment”, because if you didn’t have one, you’d be basically staring at a screen containing at most a cursor and a wallpaper, with no way for you to interact with anything. Of course, these can look and feel different from each other (just like Windows looks and feels different than MacOS), and they have different features and strengths and weaknesses, but their goal is always the same. And as usual in the open source world, there’s not just one project but multiple, and out of those multiple a couple are popular, viable and stable enough so that they are usually included in most Linux distributions. Which is why most distros also give the user the choice to have a specific variant of the distribution with a specific desktop preinstalled. For example, Ubuntu also has Kubuntu (= Ubuntu with preinstalled KDE Plasma) or Xubuntu (= Ubuntu with preinstalled XFCE). These can have various names but in the end it’s just the base distribution (“Ubuntu”) with a different preinstalled “face” so to say (and you can change those faces or desktops from within the same distro, of course). Most other things are exactly the same between those distribution variants.

As a new user, you don’t need to learn about everything. Just pick an easy to use generalist desktop distro like Linux Mint and use the default desktop environment or variant which they provide or recommend by default. You can start experimenting with more choices later on if you want, but you also don’t need to. If you have something you’re comfortable using, then you can just stick with that.

No.

Communication/Social Media isn’t for corporations to do what they want with it, or to manipulate their users. It needs a neutral, open platform. That means open source servers and clients and protocols.

I find it worrying how so many people noticed the decline of Twitter happening live and now continue to move to the next corporate, closed-down platform. Until the next time, I guess…

In that case, you probably have to:

• Use Tor respectively Tor Browser (without any additional extensions, and set the default security level to “Safer” if possible with Facebook) to create a completely new, anonymous account on Facebook. Don’t enter any data there that could be linked to your person, e.g. no real mail address (use an alias, ideally a completely new one), no real names, no real data, also no real billing or delivery address. Literally nothing that could be linked to your person. Only ever use Facebook’s site within the Tor Browser, to ensure that your real IP address and browser data aren’t leaked. Never use their apps, never use your regular browser for it, also don’t use PWAs because that’s similar to using a regular browser, which reveals your real current IP address to the site. Unless you use a VPN to have a different IP, but you’d have to minimize your VPN usage just for that app interaction. If you continue to use the same VPN IP for other stuff as well, you could de-anonymize yourself later on. Mullvad or Proton are commonly regarded as good choices for trustworthy VPNs which don’t log or sell any user data, or at least there are no known cases for it (yet).
• Don’t add any friends on the site, try to limit your interactions with the site so that it can’t create a big psychological profile from you and try to link that behavioral data to existing persons (the more you use the site the easier this method might become for them). Behave slightly differently than you would normally.
• When you buy something, remember that you’d have to conceal your real delivery and billing data/addresses as well. Which is hard to do when you actually want to buy and receive something. Your payment data and/or address data can EASILY and instantly de-anonymize you, also in front of Facebook. So my suggestion for something still practical would be to have a relative or friend buy it after you arrange that with them, have it delivered to their address, and you pay them for it and gather it from their place. So in essence you need a proxy person to do the receiving and paying for you. If you want to sell something, that’s more inconvenient of course, but you’d also have to do it similarly.

The most problematic de-anonymizing data about you is going to be your real current IP address (which is revealed when you use a regular browser, PWA or their app, all with a non-VPN or non-Tor IP address) as well as billing or address data. In case you’re using their app, they’ll be able to gather even more data to de-anonymize you more easily.

Experience with relatives who had no prior experience with Windows or Linux: installing Linux for them was great, painless and also facilitates troubleshooting for me. No problems here. Mostly using Linux Mint for those purposes, it’s a great distro for non-techy people.

Experience with relatives with prior Windows experience (but no Linux experience): a mixed bag. Some use Linux happily now (thankfully), some returned to Windows because they couldn’t change their habits or have weird specific incompatibility issues with niche hardware which they also don’t want to solve in a different way. I’ve kind of stopped giving support to those, since I don’t want to give Windows support in my free time. I sometimes have to do it work-related, that’s more than enough Windows contact for me. I also refuse to give buying advice on any products by Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Amazon or Google, with only very few exceptions (e.g. Pixel phones, because they’re very secure and with GrapheneOS installed they’re the best general mobile phone option). It’s a bit of an ethical dilemma because I’d like to help the people but also don’t want to directly or indirectly support those companies. I always offer them help if they use Linux or the things I recommend.

Normally, no.

You’d have to set up a completely new account which you only ever access via e.g. Tor, then use Tor Browser on iOS to log into that account and only ever use your account exactly like this or else you’ll leak your current IP address as well as related data about you or your device to Meta. Also you’d have to never give any kind of personally-identifiable info to them. Then you’d have an anonymous account, but the goal of Facebook is to connect to other people you know. Once you add and talk to friends on Facebook, they might already know who’s behind that account, especially if you already had a different account in the past which pretty much had the same set of friends already. Also, remember that many people use WhatsApp (also by Meta), and WhatsApp collects among other things the whole address book or contacts list from the phone of each user. And most normal users don’t use contact scopes or things like that to spoof their contacts to Meta, so they’ll most likely get the real contacts list. That means if let’s say you have 5 friends named A, B, C, D, and E, and those 5 friends all use WhatsApp and have each other and you saved as a contact in their address book, then it’s even easier for Meta to guess with high precision that you are this person that knows those 5 people and/or who is known by those 5 people. So there are even other factors to consider, some of which are outside of your own control, because all the persons you know and want to add to Facebook give a lot of data to Facebook themselves as well, and that data also might be used to identify you in various circumstances. So you’d also have to behave anonymously when using your anonymous account. Which kind of goes against the whole thing of social media like Facebook. Since they monitor every user’s interaction on their website or apps, it’s likely that they’ll be able to eventually identify you once they’ve gathered enough data about your usage patterns, visited links on Facebook, contacts you added or which have added you, messages to contacts or from contacts to you, and so on. Simply using Facebook means you’re actively giving tons of data based on your usage alone to Facebook. It’s even theoretically possible for them to guess who you are based on your usage patterns alone, e.g. what you look at, what you type, how fast you type, and so on.

So yes it’s possible to get an anonymous account on Facebook, but it’s inconvenient, and probably runs contrary to your goals on that platform. Which is why I recommend to not use such platforms at all, and instead keep in touch with your friends via secure and private open source based messengers like Signal or Threema (Libre?) or any Matrix client. After all, services like Facebook are mainly for Meta to sell data about their users, that’s their primary business model (they almost don’t sell any products or services, they almost solely sell data about their users, that is basically the only way they make (a lot of) money. Well, and ads of course, but that’s closely linked together because the ad industry wants personally targetable ads, so it needs user data to better place targeted ads). There also isn’t a real need for such platforms anymore, because you can connect to friends in other ways on various other platforms, the only hard part is getting your friends to stop being lazy and switch to something more secure or private. When Facebook got big, it might have been the only social network of its kind, but these days tons of other, better options exist. So get your friends and contacts to move to something else. Or if they don’t want to move with you, then maybe they aren’t that important to you to keep in contact with.

Using Facebook in any other way, shape or form (e.g., using their app, or using their website with your real IP address) is very likely not going to be anonymous to Meta. They’ll automatically receive your current IP address (which on its own might already be enough for them to establish a link to your person, since they also have trackers in place in lots of other apps and websites), and on top of that various information about your device or browser (which, again, can be a key factor to link your current usage data to your person), if you use their app (which you shouldn’t ever do) they get even more data on you (not just you, also your contact list, nearby devices, and things like that), because those apps require so many permissions and have so much tracking integrated that it’s a whole treasure trove of information that’s being sent about you and your device, and they’ll interconnect all that data with the other data they’ve gathered about you or your device(s) in the past (which, as a rule of thumb, will always be much more than you think they’d have). An app with integrated tracking is always more harmful to your privacy than using their service from within a web browser, because the app can read much more data about your device compared to the web browser. (But be mindful that some web browsers (especially the proprietary ones like Chrome, Edge and Opera) also have quite a lot of tracking capabilities inside them.) So using Facebook in a somewhat normal or convenient way and at the same time wanting to remain anonymous to them is basically impossible.

Also, you’ll never be anonymous to government-based mass surveillance (who are collecting almost all network traffic, constantly) when you use your real IP address online. Anywhere. Your real IP is always connectable to your real person for them (also in retrospect). Even if they can’t look into encrypted communication data, like the contents of chat messages or what you did on a specific website, they can see the metadata, among that is which hosts you contacted, and when, as well as more unencrypted details, and such metadata can already be very revealing. To quote the ex NSA chief “we kill based on metadata”. Protecting yourself against commercial-based surveillance by companies like Meta is more realistic to achive (at least partially), because it’s easier to avoid or evade commercial tracking (by blocking all or most of their tracking methods like app-integrated trackers, tracking Javascripts and cookies on countless of websites, and so on) than it is to evade someone who’s sitting directly at all relevant network cables AND buys additional data from companies. Lots of easy-to-use tools exist to counter or limit commercial surveillance, like ad/content blockers, blocking host lists, PiHole, ad-blocking DNS servers, open source software and operating systems (because they are almost always free of trackers and surveillance tech), and things like that. It all minimizes your exposure to these data hoarding companies. And the less data you transmit overall to such companies, the better. But if you also want to protect yourself against any government-based mass surveillance, you’ll have a much harder time than that. You’d need to always use different IP addresses (again, via Tor or VPN etc.) and avoid having anything leak out that can connect your other IP to your real IP. Which is hard.

It’s an important milestone as it’s the only effective way to make PC gaming available on operating systems other than Windows (i.e., reduce one of the Windows monopolies). Still, Linux gamers shouldn’t take it too far. I’d advise everyone to still not support game studios which are openly hostile towards Linux gamers. This especially includes the ones who rely on client-side anticheat tools and then use those to block Linux gamers even though the game would run perfectly fine on Linux as well. Please do not support such games or studios (e.g.: Epic Games, EA, Bungie, Riot). Thanks to Proton, there is still a massive number of Windows games that can be played instead.

Winter is on its way out due to climate change. In around the year 2100, it’s estimated that there will only be 3 seasons left, no winter. And summer will be much longer and much hotter. So the 3 seasons will be spring, then a 2-season long summer basically, then fall. That’s it.

But you can already see the disappearance of winter today because there’s much less snow and it’s much warmer than like 30 years ago. (Speaking for Germany)

• GUI: Thunderbird
• TUI: neomutt
• Android: K-9 (soon to be Thunderbird)

• No good operating system preinstalled by default
• No headphone jack anymore

I’m barely still a Millenial. Which is kind of cool. I don’t like the “generation names” before or after that much, and I liked that I grew up with non-invasive tech and non-existent smartphones during school. I was able to grow up with tech but none of the tech I dislike today. Also, tech was still easier to understand back then. I was able to learn how to create web sites for example when HTML, CSS, JavaScript and CGI was still in its infancy and not very complex yet. Of course I learned the growing complexitty as it all developed but the point is that it kind of grew with me. Which probably made several things easier to get into in the first place. Also, I still grew up with almost forgotten values such as privacy, and my whole youth life (as well as dumb things you did when young) isn’t available online and therefore “gone”. I kind of like it that way.

Dumb user friendly (having no particular background): yes

Dumb user friendly (having Windows background): no

Windows knowledge makes learning other OS harder because Windows is the weirdest OS out there.

Windows will continue to get more and more user-hostile as time goes on, and they want everyone to have a subscription to Microsoft’s cloud services, so they can be in total control of what they deliver to the user and how the user is using their services/apps, and they also will be able to increase pricing regularly of course once the users are dependent enough (“got all my work-related data there, can’t just leave”).

The next big step that will follow after the whole M365 and Azure will be that businesses can only deploy their Windows clients by using MS Intune, which means MS will deploy your organization’s Windows clients, not your organization. So they’re always shifting more and more control away from you and into MS’ hands. Privacy is always an obvious issue, at the very least since Nadella is CEO, but unfortunately the privacy-conscious people have kind of lost that war, because the common user (private AND business sector) doesn’t care at all, so we will have to wait and see how those things will turn out in the future, they will start caring once they are being billed more due to their openly known behavior (driving, health, eating/drinking, psychology, …) or once they are being legally threatened more (e.g. your vehicle automatically reports by itself when you’ve driven too fast, or some AI has concluded based on your gathered data that you’re likely to cause some kind of problem), or once they are rejected at or before job interviews because of leaked health data or just some (maybe wrong) AI-created prognosis of your health. So I think there will be a point when the common user will start caring, we just haven’t reached that point yet because while current data collection and profile building is problematic because it’s the stepping stone to more dystopian follow-ups, it alone is still too abstract of an issue for most people to care about it. Media is also partly to blame here when they do reviews or news about new devices and then just go like “great camera and display, MUST BUY” and never mention the absurd amount of telemetry data the device sends home. MS is also partnering with Palantir and OpenAI which will probably give them even more opportunities to automatically surveil every single one of their business and private sector users. I think M365 also already gives good analytics tools to business owners to monitor what their employees are doing, how much time they spend in each application, how “efficient” they are, things like that. Plus they have this whole person and object recognition stuff going on using “smart” cameras and some Azure service which analyzes the video material constantly. Where the employees (mostly workers in that case) are constantly surveilled and if anything abnormal happens then an automatic alert is sent, and things like that. Probably a lot of businesses will love that, and no one cares enough about the common worker’s rights. It can be sold as a security plus so it will be sold. So I think MS is heavily going into the direction of employee surveillance, since they are well-integrated into the business world anyway (especially small and medium businesses) and with Windows in particular I think they will move everything sloooowly into the cloud, maybe in 10-15 years you won’t have a “personal” computer anymore, you’re using Microsoft’s hardware and software directly from Microsoft’s servers and they will gain full, unlimited, 100% surveillance and control of every little detail you’re doing on your computer, because once you hand away that control, they can do literally anything behind your back and also never tell you about it. Most of the surveillance stuff going on all the time already is heavily shrouded in secrecy and as long as that’s the case there will be no justice system in the world being able to save you from it, because they’d first need concrete evidence. Guess why the western law enforcement and secret services hunted Snowden and Assange so heavily? Because they shone some light into what is otherwise a massive, constant cover-up that is also probably highly illegal in most countries. So it needs to be kept a secret. So the MS (and Apple, …) route stands for total dependence and total loss of control. They just have to move slowly enough for the common user not to notice. Boil the frog slowly. Make sure businesses can adapt. Make sure commercial software vendors can adapt. Then slowly direct the train into cloud-only territory where MS rules over and can log everything you do on the computer.

Linux, on the other hand, stands for independence. It means you can pick and choose what components you want, run them whereever and however you want, build your own cloud, and so on. You can build your own distro or find one that fits your use case the most. You’re in a lot of control as the user or administrator and this will not change considering the nature of open source / free software. If the project turns to sh!t, you’re not forced to stick with it. You can fork it, develop an alternative. Or wait until someone else does. Or just write a patch that fixes the problematic behavior. This alone makes open source / free software inherently better than closed source where the users have no control over the project and always have to either use it as it is or stop using it altogether. There’s no middle ground, no fixes possible, no alternatives that can be made from the same code base because the code base is the developer’s secret. Also, open source software can be audited at will all the time. That alone makes it much more trustworthy. On the basis of trustworthiness and security alone, you should only use open source software. Linux on its own is “just” the kernel but it’s a very good kernel powering a ton of highly diverse array of systems out there, from embedded to supercomputer. I think the Linux kernel can’t be beaten and will become (or is already) the objective best operating system kernel there is out there. Now, as a desktop user, you don’t care that much about the kernel you just expect it to work in the background, and it does. What you care more is UI/UX, consistency and application/game compatibility. We can say the Linux desktop ecosystem is still lacking in that regard, always behind super polished and user-friendly coherent UIs coming from especially Apple in that regard (maybe also a little bit by Microsoft but coherent and beautiful UIs aren’t Microsoft’s strong point either, I think that crown goes to Apple). That said, Apple is very much alike Microsoft in that they have a fully locked-down ecosystem, so it’s similar to MS, maybe slightly less bad smelling still but it will probably also go in the same direction as MS does, just more slowly and with details being different. Apple’s products also appeal to a different kind of audience and businesses than MS’ products do. Apple is kind of smart in their marketing and general behavior that they always manage to kind of fly under the radar and dodge most of the shitstorms. Like they also violate the privacy of their users, but they do it slightly less than MS or Google do, so they’re less of a target and they even use that to claim they’re the privacy guys (in comparison), but they also aren’t. You still shouldn’t use Apple products/services. “Less bad than utterly terrible” doesn’t equal “good”. There’s a lot of room between that. Still, back to Linux. It’s also obviously a matter of quality code/projects and resources. Big projects like the Linux kernel itself or the major desktop environments or super important components like systemd or Mesa are well funded, have quality developers behind them and produce high quality output. Then you also have a lot of applications and components where just single community developers, not well funded at all, are hacking away in their free time, often delivering something usable but maybe less polished or less userfriendly or less good looking or maybe slightly more annoying to use but overall usable. Those applications/projects could use some help. Especially if they matter a lot on the desktop because there’s little to no alternative available. On the server side, Linux is well established, software for that scenario is plentiful and powerful. Compared to the desktop, it’s no wonder why it’s successful on servers. Yes, having corporations fund developers and in turn open source projects is important and the more that do it, the more successful those projects become. It’s no wonder that gaming for example took off so hugely after Valve poured resources and developers into every component related to it. Without that big push, it would have happened very slowly, if at all. So even the biggest corpo haters have to acknowledge that in capitalism, things can move very fast if enough money is being thrown at the problem, and very slowly if it isn’t. But the great thing about the Linux ecosystem is that almost everything is open source, so when you fund open source projects, you accelerate their growth and quality but these projects still can’t screw you over as a user, because once they do that, they can be forked and fixed. Proprietary closed-source software can always screw over the user, no one can prevent that, and it also has a tendency to do just that. In the open source software world, there are very few black sheep with anti-user features, invasive telemetry, things like that. In the corporate software world, it’s often the other way around.

So by using Linux and (mostly) open source products, you as the user/admin remain in control, and it’s rare that you get screwed over. If you use proprietary software from big tech (doesn’t even matter which country) you lose control over your computing, it’s highly likely that you get screwed over in various ways (with much more to come in the future) and you’re also trusting those companies by running their software and they’re not even showing the world what they put in their software.

code: camel or snake, depending on language

files/dirs: snake + kebab + dot mixture (trying to avoid caps and special chars here)

Considering that it’s the FDP, they’re probably primarily doing it to protect corporate interests, not the rights of the general population.

What kind of world do we want to live in? What would be the safest theoretical thing? They can’t assign one police officer per citizen, as they don’t have enough police officers. So that’s a big resource constraint. But they will soon have the tech to videotape and audiotape every single cititzen using small insect-like drones that are almost impossible to find. And before that happens, they want to know who everyone online is, what they’re doing and what they’ve done in the past, present and future. They want to know what sites you visited, who you’ve spoken to, what you’ve spoken about, and so on. And after they know this in the online world, they want to know it in the offline world too (using cameras with mics and person detection capabilities). How far will they go with their securtiy madness? It won’t be long until the average citizen has zero (not just a little, zero) privacy, neither online nor offline, probably not even on the toilet or in the bed. And like I said, if you want the ultimate security, you need to assign one small surveillance drone per citizen for a complete 100% surveillance everywhere and all of the time. If you don’t care about privacy and only care about security, that is your end goal. Is that really the world you want to live in?

Yes, but my post is for the people who DO care about privacy issues. I also don’t like the defeatist’s attitude. You can always start making things better. My post is for those who want to make a better informed decision, that’s all.

Reasons are the data transmissions happening by default and Mozilla’s questionable inclusion of add-on things like Pocket. See for example:

https://www.kuketz-blog.de/mozilla-firefox-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil20/

vs.

https://www.kuketz-blog.de/librewolf-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil8/ and https://www.kuketz-blog.de/mullvad-browser-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil22/

You might need to translate the site to English. If you compare that, you can see why it’s easy to recommend the forks over the original. That said, you CAN configure Firefox to also behave well, but that takes an extra effort. It is far from there by default.