By the way, the US prison population today is higher than the Gulag population of the entire Soviet Union at its peak.

Well being worked to death and/or being strait up shot tends to keep those numbers down. And how many of those “hoarders” were quite literally starving but they had a tiny bit on hand? And how many more were in there for “anti-soviet behavior” instead of anything related to hoarding or destroying food.

“Gulags” is not a gotcha

Gulags, concentration camps and the like are definitely a “gotcha” as much as a “gatcha” can exist.

“Or some other other solution to be determined by the state in question”

Gulags, generally speaking

My 2c would be yes only if you’re specifically seeking out the bleeding edge and don’t mind or enjoy doing the neccesary tinkering.

Alsp you have time in between now and a re-install I’d highly recommended trying to do you’re day to day stuff in an Arch VM for a bit and see if it works for you.

The various European countries and the EU in general appears to be against encryption, looking to implemented some pretty heavy censorship, and getting pretty heavy handed in enforcing said laws (e.g. getting raided because you said the politician who broke the law was a dick).

As an American if EU laws can result in replaceable batteries and an unlockable bootloader that’s great, but the EU is definitely not friends of a free and open web.

Virustotal is great to scan anything you download that does not contain sensitive information, and ClamAV + TK will work locally to scan anything that contains sensitive information (e.g. documents sent by others) or things too big for Virustotal.

Like others are saying, there’s less of a need for antivirus on Linux since there’s less easy entry points (e.g package manager over downloading an installer) and less (but far from 0) malware made for Linux. But we all probably download app images or get documents related to job searches at some point and I personally prefer to scan almost file that I get from a remote computer.

I believe IOS was being forced to allow different browser engines by the EU so there may be more options soon

I doubt they’re doing anything to secerative in the background. Not a fan of Bat or their affiliate link scamdle, but also not a fan of Firefox’s ads, telemetry, trademark claims against Firefox forks, and accepting Google money for bad defaults - as I’m not a fan of Vivaldi being closed source and their adblock that doesn’t block all ads.

Brave is great for somebody who doesn’t know/want to configure defaults beyond optionally disabling Bat. If you can then Firefox & derivatives might give a better experience.

Brave is also Chromium based, but being a heavy fork it doesn’t hold onto the worst parts, making it more alright.