While editing my comment I deleted it by mistake lol. Here is what I was trying to post:

Don’t buy a Tesla or BMW. Done.

Edit: im joking, but you can just not connect your car to any internet. Most casual brands have literally zero outgoing connections if you don’t add or connect them to a network. Androd Auto and Apple Carplay are just displaying what your phone sends to the screen, the car itself doesn’t access the internet through those. Think of android auto and carplay like “HDMI monitors for your phone that have touch too”. Your phone does everything the car just displays it.

Connecting via bluetooth should also not be any problem since bluetooth doesn’t include internet access (unless you activate that ok your phone but Im sure the car will not use it). Bluetooth only sends and receives small bits of data that your phone chooses to send, not what the car chooses. Contacts names, phone numbers, audio and microphone are the only few data that gets sent to your car and only during phone calls or audio listening.

In the end, just avoid cars that have always connected systems like Teslas or modern BMWs or similar cars. Most Volkswagen, Audi, etc etc are 100% offline cars when you don’t connect them to a network. Most now can do it, but most its a subscription service that you can just not buy, and some even need SIM cards to work, that you just not use. Unless its a Tesla, those are connected even if you don’t pay the subscription.

Test drive the car. Disconnect it from all networks or don’t turn them on. Try to use all features. If the car constantly complains that it has no internet access for all of them, thats good.

Note that GPS access is always on and doesn’t require any subscription, so maps and navigation will still work. However that is not really a privacy violation by itself because GPS on cars and phones only receives signal, doesn’t transmit anything. You wont have traffic information or weather or anything tho. If you have traffic info, the car is connecting to some network, find how to deactivate that.

Many modern cars are too connected, thats true, but with the exception of a few brands, most cars go 100% offline the moment you disconnect them from their data services or don’t pay for that upgrade/subscription. So you will be fine even with a modern car.

deleted by creator

So you were the “horse armor DLC” of car insurance companies. Congratulations

has a tendency to crap the bed a few minutes after startup

Tell me you are an nvidia user without telling me. Either that is hard to believe. I use KDE daily for more than 8-9 hours a day, sometimes my pc goes for a full week without geting turned off, multiple apps tabs and servers on, themes installed, widgets on the desktop, I am such an extremely heavy KDE user you have no idea. Still, zero crashes. Sometimes something goes a bit “wut” like moving a window around gliches a liiiiiiitle bit, but it instantly corrects itself and goes back to being stable. And I am on Plasma 6.0.3, funny enough has been more stable than Plasma 5.

Update your KDE or use a distro that has better KDE support. Some distros fck up KDE packages and get it unstable. Fedora KDE is rock solid for example. Nobara has been great too and its now KDE by default.

Slowly more and more distros are looking over to a KDE future. GNOME devs being so incredibly hard to work with and this feeling of a huge community that is KDE and with how polished Plasma 6 is becoming, many distros are finally looking to at least give Plasma a try as a default. GNOME is well polished but there are so many extremely important and urgently needed features that KDE already implemented that are not even being discussed for GNOME. Many distros are getting fed up with how slow GNOME is into advancing their desktop. They take 2 years to change a few buttons around. And now that Plasma 6 has a 6-month fixed release schedule, it finally aligns with what distros want.

First Valve shocked the corporate distro world by choosing the seemengly less stable KDE as their default for the Steam Deck, which proved to be an amazing choice after all. Then recently, Nobara Linux, one of the most used Fedora distros, also switched to KDE as the default. And now Fedora is discussing into switching the main distro too. Qt6 is also a really flexible and promising framework and developers seem to have more fun working with it than with GTK4.

Recent switchers from Windows also largely prefer KDE instead of the minimalist approach, macOS-like GNOME. And linux has been gaining a lot of popularity and market share recently, and I could bet that a lot of these new users are not on GNOME, at least not on vania GNOME.

A great example is KDE having hit a HUGE record of bug reporting and feedback submissions, which means that more people than ever are using KDE actively and actually trying to help the project somehow. KDE has also been having a huge presence in social networks like YouTube and TikTok (especially because of its fun and interesting features that make GNOME look plain and a bit boring, needless to say GNOME vanilla wont convince a Windows user to switch…) which might speed up its adoption too.

Its a huge deal. If X desktop is the default, it shows that the distro developers and maintainers usually test and optimize more and better for that specific DE so your experience with the default DE will always be more stable and polished than non-official ones. Extra GUI tools that the distro makes usually are also better tailored to the default distro. Like Manjaro and all of their locale, kernel and other packages that are integrated inside the KDE settings. Or popOS and all of their utilities being integrated into Cosmic. Etc etc. More money and dev time is invested into the default DE.

Meanwhile I CANNOT be productive in GNOME. There are hundreds of maybe thousands of KDE features that make IT and dev work so extremely easy. I could make a 50 page comment just listing them. I can start with how horrendously basic and generic the default gnome terminal is.

But then KDE also is in fact good for average ex-Windows users because it has stuff where people expect it to, has features that people expect too (cough minimize/maximize buttons cough) and well yea KDE is better for average users.

So KDE is better for IT users and developers, and is also better for average users. And since it supports vsync off, VRR and HDR it is also better for gaming.

So wait is KDE better for literally EVERYONE? 🤔

Streisand effect is currently very active on this one. Thousands of news outlets, many extremely casual and geared towards average joes who never new emulation existed, are now all being told that “this thing called yuzu can play switch games for free”. Nintendo is shooting themselves in the foot. Even if Yuzu dies, it will get forked and people who never knew emulation existed, now do, and look for alternatives.

Because privacy and convenience are two extreme opposites and you can only go so far in the privacy direction before you start losing everything. Discord just works a million times better as a public forum/community than Matrix and is much more easily accessible to everyone.

There is a limit. I am privacy conscious but I still use all Google Services for example, because they actually provide me with a better web, work, mobile and entertainment experiences. Similarly, I prefer Discord for big communities with channels, server bots and topics, over Matrix.

Edit: all those people saying we can’t be privacy conscious and use Google Services at the same time: yes you can. Their services literally make my life better so I will keep using them, but I keep what I share with them to the absolute minimum. I go into their settings and disable everything I can about tracking and ads personalization (even if they still track me, I do my best not to be). You can surely still be privacy conscious using non-private products. Being extremist is not how you convince average joes to think about privacy, nor by telling them to give up all they use for unknown (for them) alternatives.