Only remaining windows devices in my house are my wife’s gaming rig, my gaming rig, and my work laptop.

Gaming rigs are using heavily debloated windows 11 installations, and if I ever figure it out enough they will act a lot more like game consoles than PCs eventually. The moment Linux can reliably play all the games I frequent, Windows will be purged.

Work laptop is non-negotiable sadly. My work uses Windows 10 and an absurd amount of permission controls over it. I am a web developer and every time I need admin permissions for UAC, I have to send a ticket to IT and wait for them to remote into my laptop just to enter a password. Dumbest shit I’ve seen, but this company is the masters of time wasted. But at least it isn’t Windows 11 I guess.

Other devices are mostly linux. Wife’s work laptop is MacOS.

Oh so youre saying that AI companies can control what the AI says?

So meta letting their AI sext with children was intentional then…

Realistically, i think this idea might work well in tandem with a sort of PDA built off a Pi. I use my phone as a computer, because its a computer. The parts of my phone that i need to be a phone are calls and text, as i dont take photos almost ever. Data is nice, but im fairly certain i had seen recently a sim module for Pi devices, so i can just bake it into that instead so i still have a mobile computer.

Someone will eventually make a better phone OS, but in the short term it seems smart to move to a dumb phone and offset everything else to a device tou can actually control.

Realistically, change your approach to how you use your phone.

A majority of apps are not actually apps. They are a web app packaged in an apk so they can get elevated permissions and more data. Dont download apps, instead just install them from your browser as the web app they are. This is far more secure and far less invasive as generally a web app is containerized, at least thats my understanding in regards to firefox.

Instead of google maps, explore the world of open source navigation apps. Osmand has worked great for me, and tends to provide better info so im not panic merging at the last second. Theres a lot of them out there, and google maps has stagnated for so long that many of them are caught up in features. While its not open source, ive sesn a lot of people praise Magic Earth as well.

Buy phones on the premise of being allowed to use a custom rom. As much as i dont want a pixel because it is google, graphene os is battle tested and much more secure than stock android. But theres also lineage OS, eOS, and a few others out there.

If you need google play services, containerize it. I keep all apps i dont want having special permissions on a work profile. Funnily, i also keep my work apps on that profile, so if google wants my works data then they can handle the lawsuit if something bad happens lol.

I think a lot of people have forgotten that phones are tiny computers. The only real difference is the cell network, but we already have devices that can use those networks that arent phones, so it isnt an exclusive feature to phones. Android can be forked, but also we can emulate android on linux and there are already linux phones out there. If we grow the linux space for phones, then we effectively lose nothing of value while gaining increased freedom. For now, change how you use your phone, and only download apps if you have no other choice.