A big part of it comes from the security model and Linux historically being a multi-user environment. root owns the root directly / which is where all of the system files live. A normal user just has access to their own home directory /home/username and read-only access to things the normal user needs like the /bin where programs are stored (hence /bin/bash in lots of bash scripts, it tells the script what program to run the script from)

Because of this model, a normal user can only mess up their own files, while root can mess up everyone’s files and of course make the system non-bootablem. But also you can have user Bob signed in and doing stuff but unable to access user Alice’s files, and user Alice can be doing stuff and even running the same programs that user Bob is running (since it’s read only there’s no conflict) and then the administrator can log in as root to install something because they got a ticket to install suchandsuch for soandso.

Back to your point with sudo, sudo is Super User Do, so you are running a single command as root. By running it as root you can potentially be messing up with Alice and Bob might be doing, and most importantly whatever you are running with sudo can potentially affect any file on the computer. So if you run the classic rm -rf / it will delete every file that the user has write access to, so if bob runs it it’ll delete all of /home/bob/ but Alice will be unaffected, and the admin can still log in as root to do stuff. But if you run it as root you’ll quickly find the server unable to boot and both Alice and Bob will be very upset that they can’t access the server or their files

If you host a website you’ll generally take advantage of this by giving the www folder read-only access so that web users can only see webpages and can’t start reading random system files, or for server software you can create a dedicated user to run that server software as, so if someone were to somehow exploit a vulnerability and gain access to that server user they can only mess up the software and no system files

I feel like a browser API that just gives info to the site when request of either “is under age, is of age to create an account, is adult” might be an easy way to establish something like this too

This way the site can voluntarily check if they’re illegally collecting data on minors, if they’re showing adult content to adults, and automatically display age appropriate content of applicable

Maybe an NSFW flag as well that sites can check to automatically show/hide NSFW content, for example on work machines or shared computers, but that’s probably getting a little too finegrained

The real question is how is the age flag determined? Is it determined by the browser? The OS? Browser seems the safest bet, since Google can base it off of the Google Account, Microsoft can base it off the Microsoft account and Mozilla can shove it in the settings and potentially base it on the Mozilla account

In regards to the DNS advice should I use that for both my PC and android ? And when would I use a vpn?

You should setup your preferred DNS server everything really. On your phone, on your computer and on your router if you can. DNS is the absolute easiest way to track and block/hijack browsing habits, so hardcoding your devices to use a standard one like NextDNS, Quad9 or Cloud flare will put you very far ahead

Regarding VPNs, commercial VPNs are really overhyped, and thats because they’re a cash cow for operators. See Tom Scott’s video on the subject if you prefer this britishplained to you. All a VPN is is a tunnel from your device to the VPN server wherever that is, so you’ll look like your traffic is originating from that VPN server, plus all of your traffic is going to that VPN server so you have to trust that that server isn’t compromised nor slurping up all of the data to sell/provide security agencies. Clear text browsing traffic will also be secured between your device and the VPN server, but that’s super uncommon nowadays. Realistically a commercial VPN is best for if you’re doing illegal activities such as piracy because it will add layers of abstraction should a private company or public agency wish to investigate your activities and try to identify you. I do use Tailscale with an exit node on my home network when connecting to public wifi just in case the network is misconfigured, but it’s really just another layer of Swiss cheese security.

I tried Graphene OS but my banking failed so back to stock Android

Any features in the mobile app that don’t exist on the website? I’ve had good luck checking my bank balance and all sorts of other things through Firefox on Android - pre-edit: I missed that it was app only. That sucks.

For browsing on Android I use Mull and on my android Proton VPN is always on. I visit twitter and twitter ocasionly but always through mull browser.

The VPN really doesn’t do much at all for privacy. It just moves the point of trust from the service provider for the current network to the VPN provider, plus now you have extra hurdles as you’ll show up as a VPN IP rather than a “normal” residential or cellular IP. Realistically set your DNS to be something like Quad9 or Cloudflare and you’ll already be several steps ahead on browsing privacy

For spending habniys I try to use Google pay as little as possible and use my master card.

Realistically any card is going to be selling your spending habits. Cash and crypto are about the only ways to have private purchases, and plenty of places won’t accept either

Personally I had a long hard think about my privacy practices and how they only isolated me and made me unhappy, and realized that if I’m already blocking all ads so I never get to see the results of the incredibly dystopian advertising hellscape, does it really matter that much if Google knows I spent $200 on random model train shit last month when they already know I watch a few hours of train-related content on Youtube? So I take smaller steps to not fully given in, but I don’t take steps that create extra hassle in participating in modern society and living my life to its fullest.

How are you spending so much? I spend half that on gas per week (rural area so I easily put 200-400 miles a week on the car) and your weekly grocery budget is about my monthly budget for a family of 4

As someone with 2 preschool aged kids I absolutely agree

I got one for work. It literally just pastes into ChatGPT

There’s actually a real world example of this. Some cats that are disected in schools are euthanized cats from shelters, because the alternative is cat farms that breed cats just to be killed and disected

Contextual ads can be simple images/html without 20 thousand scripts buried in

I know a dude who’s a retired doctor specializing in sports medicine (he was the team doctor for a Big 10 college football team), and he smokes like a chimney. He likes to joke that he’s the 1/10 doctors that they don’t quote on TV ads

The thing I don’t like about laptops are 1. Noise and 2. The bursty CPUs just don’t mesh well if I want to run a swarm of VMs or need to just run a big compress/decompress process. I watched one laptop slowly throttle itself all the way down to 700mhz while I was messing with a bunch of VMs and it really made me miss having a desktop where it can just chill at 5x the speed at 100% utilization and chew through whatever is being thrown at it

I did not know that! I checked out about 2 seasons into Capaldi after watching the new series religiously and haven’t returned primarily due to difficulties finding places to watch it, although now more due to young kids who i have to schedule around

It’s from the second? episode of the new Dr Who series

I tossed mint on a PC after about 8 years of not using mint at all and I’ve been extremely impressed at how stable and friendly it is. It works exactly how you expect it to and Cinnamon has the best default workspace implementation of any DE I’ve used

get hyped for COSMIC

Honestly I’m just excited for a non-gnome DE with an actual company backing it. I can’t wrap my head around gnome’s expectations for how you use it, so the fact that it’s the default on every enterprise-backed Linux project is annoying as heck

I have two different ISPs serving the entire town I live in, both offering symmetric gigabit fiber to the home to the entire town, but can I get a lick of IPv6? Of course not!

Like 80% of police cars I see nowadays are SUV’s.

And the other 20% or so is Dodge Chargers.

Actually I kinda want to get one of the ex-police Chargers at auction because I’d never spend that much on a sporty car, but I feel like that would be fun, even if it only lasts a couple of years. For less than 6-8k you can certainly do worse!

That part was interesting, since I live in a rural area surrounded by farms (primarily feed corn and livestock but across the many family farms around where I live pretty much everything gets farmed), and while I saw egg prices rise, milk prices largely remained the same with just noticable shortages

I swear I’ve seen inflation hit processed foods far harder than it has less processed foods. That and the delta between off-brand and name brand has become massive. At least $5 for a large bag of FritoLay chips, but most off brands are still less than $2 for roughly equivalent product

Bro it’s not Beetlejuice. Google isn’t going to magically appear and ruin your day if you utter it’s product name 3 times