Man I needed to hear this. Thank you! I feel you’re right but there is so much doom and gloom reprting floating around in the headlines, YouTube and the internet. Trying not to get disheartened looking for my first employment as a dev.

You are correct, I don’t care about cookies was acquired by avast. It is still GPL3 licensed and, according to the privacy policy, does not capture user data. But for those who don’t trust avast (which includes me), there is an independent fork called I still don’t care about cookies. The builtin Firefox cookie deletion settings are not granular enough for my usecase (with container tabs) and a hassle to configure for imo, which is why I still recommend the forked extension if it suits your usecase.

can’t we all just enjoy the frog without associating it with any politics

And how does that work? How do you unmount the root directory of a live system and invoke a script?

A VPN will not save you, they are easily worse for privacy in terms of user tracking. It centralises your entire web traffic in a single place for the VPN provider to track (and potentially sell).

Maybe you’ve been sold a bit of a lie.

Linux is not like Windows. Linux will never be like Windows. It is first and foremost a general operating system, not necessarily a Desktop operating system.

IMO, that means you will never truly be able to completely avoid using the terminal here or there.

Telling people that it’s easy to switch from Windows to Linux is just not true. Linux just works differently and going in with the expectation that things will work the same way only serves to disappoint those brave enough to attempt the switch.

If you try again, go in with the mindset that you’ve never used a computer before, and without needing to depend on Linux for your day to day computer work. See it as a tinkering side project, and maybe it will stoke your curiosity enough that you’ll want to use it day to day.

Mobile Version

In Firefox, you can use the cookie autodelete extension (it’s open source) which deletes all cookies for sites you haven’t explicitly whitelisted. Same thing, integrates well with other privacy features on Firefox (like container tabs and I still don’t care about cookies, and is probably better maintained than the feature in DDG.

IMO starting with a more minimalistic base, and adding whatever features you need is a better approach that suits more use cases. Just reduce your extensions to what you really need, and deactivate or uninstall those you don’t need. Make sure what you are installing is open source, well-maintained and trustworthy (look at the github page: when was the most recent commit or release? how many contributors and stars are there? It’s not foolproof, but a good start and definitely beats closed source extensions). Having access to more extensions is not a bad thing.

EDIT: don’t use I don’t care about cookies as it was acquired by some shady companies. Use the independent fork called I still don’t care about cookies instead.

Of course it can be done, check your web server logs.

If you are using GET requests to send search queries to searxng, what you searched for will show up in the logs as

2024-10-31 123.321.0.100 /?query=kinky+furry+pictures

If you use POST requests the server admin can also easily enable logging those.

People hosting searxng can absolutely see what you searched for, along with your IP address, user agent string etc.

Except when a bug pops up somewhere. Ownership/Responsibility changes in sub-Planck-second time when assigning blame.