What are you even talking about not having a choice? I agree Google is awful, but even on pixel phones you can change most aspects of it - definitely including your browser/search app and engine. Just switch to Firefox and/or use duckduckgo, or any of the other browsers and search engines that are readily available. I haven’t used chrome in years, but if you’re a chromebro I’m pretty sure it supports changing the search engine too.
If your launcher doesn’t support changing your search engine/app in a built-in search bar, throw a different browser widget up on your home screen or get a new launcher with a better app/web search widget, unless you got your phone from work or something with restrictions in place you can easily swap out your launcher for a 3rd party one. I personally use Niagara launcher and like it a lot, if you want a more traditional launcher there’s KISS (It’s also foss), and launchair

Comrade Howard*

On an extra note, I actually switched to slskd (since writing that comment earlier today)because the nicotine app bugs me sometimes (it’s just the app ran in a VM), so far I like it

Protonvpn lets you port forward. I use docker and have a gluetun container that connects to protonvpn, all of my other docker containers for sailing the high seas (arr suite, qbittorrent, sabnzbd, soulseek client, etc) are routed through it and I have port forwarding setup to the ones that need it. For soulseek I use nicotine-plus-docker, all traffic is routed through the gluetun container, the port is forwarded, and a bit shy of 700 gb uploaded since March so I can confirm it works well.

I don’t think the protonvpn Linux client supports port forwarding yet so only docker things can do it right now afaik, but anything I want permanently through VPN runs in docker anyway

They’ll still claim interference because he has ongoing court cases, maga cult followers may not be good or smart people, but they are skilled at mental gymnastics around why them losing was unfair or justifying Trump’s actions

Only if you’re commenting as much as a bot, probably wouldn’t be any more power usage than opening up a poorly optimized website tbh

I occasionally have issues with posting comments on proton VPN, but it’s inconsistent

Donations and fundraisers are tax deductible, it doesn’t actually cost the rich anything to donate to them

I use librewolf (and have for a while) the extra privacy really isn’t intrusive, there are some sites that don’t work correctly, on it, but I just open up regular Firefox and throw the URL there if that’s the case.

The only thing I don’t like is how long it takes to build whenever there’s an update. I only update it 1-2 times a month but it’s still a 20-30 minute process each time