Re: Please excuse my ignorance - a question
Current Devuan is fine now. I've been running it since Poettering decided to screw everyone with systemd. Early versions were a little glitchy, but current stable and oldstable are rock solid. But it does still need shims for some stuff, but if you avoid the bloatware like Gnome and KDE, you can avoid a lot of the need.
Aside from that Slackware is a reasonably good choice, minus the fact you have to handle upgrades manually and doing things even slightly wrong can break your install. Don't know if they changed the package management in the last four years to something that rivals apt and does dependencies for you, but back then it didn't.
As to Firefox vs Chromium, I use both. But Chromium has to be used for certain sites as Firefox won't render correctly on them or scripts don't run properly. Mostly banking and financial sites seem to hate Firefox. Also there is still a memory leak on FF if you run Youtube and have a few tabs open, where it just starts eating memory. Not so much an issue on a 32GB system, but I watched it eat up 8GB over 30 mins with 5 YT tabs open, with the memory not returned until the browser was closed.
I'd say a VPN and some sort of filtering will work fairly well against ads or at least that's what I do, or you can fiddle with Privoxy and use an adblock rule converter to generate the equivalent ruleset for Privoxy. But for now uBlock Origin and NoScript, still work on Chromium for me. I can live without uBlock as I use Chromium for exactly three sites and none of them have ads. I would probably add Privacy Badger though to deal with the trackers.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
