I am new here. I want to say hi to everyone. My main OSes are Windows and OpenBSD. Former Gnu/Linux user - primarily Debian and other Debian-ish distributions. Primarily looking for privacy tips.
Welcome! If there's one tip I'd give anyone from the outset, it would be to get familiar with operation of virtual machines - have you investigated these much?
@deBoetie -- Good advice Also full-disk encryption. And Linux, perhaps starting with Debian or Manjaro. Or even Ubuntu, although it's quite resource-intensive, and wants to know perhaps too much about your system. Or one of the lighter variants, such as Lubuntu, Kubuntu or MATE.
Welcome. Not much in the way of privacy these days even Linux. Sorry just the way it is. NSA has a strangle-hold on us all.
I say blame the people. When only one in a million has the nerve to stick their neck out and of those that hear them only one in thousands backs them up while the response from the rest is just silence, then they are part of the problem.
Well, most of us know that Jefferson quote about liberty and blood. But less dramatically, we only have as much liberty/privacy/anonymity as we're willing to create for ourselves. So yes, there's virtually none, by default. But that doesn't mean that it's unattainable. See https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/online-privacy-through-opsec-and-compartmentalization-part-1
@reasonablePrivacy Hi and welcome. I'd say the more you can isolate your online activity the better off you will be. Isolation is a broad topic but every bit helps. Not true. I'm not going to submit to "just the way it is" mentality either.
I am not happy about direction Gnu/Linux crowd is heading (especially systemd), so I switched to OpenBSD. It is reasonably minimalistic Unix-like OS. OS encryption can be deployed using softraid(4) crypto discipline. It's more Unix-like than Gnu/Linux for sure. It has suprisingly productively community given it's a lot smaller than Gnu/Linux community.
I agree with you about Linux, and think their kernel team has been complacent about security (which in some ways, lags way behind best practices of things already in Windows - which of course is only duct tape over the holes). This is in part why VMs are a good idea, and at least allow the convenience of running Linux and Windows as necessary in VMs. Of course, there will be attacks on VM software and which break isolation, but those are likely to be of higher value so less frequently used in the wild. I've not browsed or done internet facing stuff on a "real" machine for many years now. Since OpenBSD is in your purview, you may find pfsense on freebsd congenial. It's valuable both as a normal perimeter gateway and as a rig for virtual machine chains.
