Of course there are alternatives. That’s the cherry on top of this crap pile: only regular non tech folks are affected. Nerds and actual criminals will just run an xmpp or simplex server and not care about the legislation.

Sounds like you’re over saturated and need a break from gaming. Happens to a lot of us.Try not gaming at all for like 2-3 months. It’ll feel fresher afterwards

I think the nobara updater works with yum. You should be able to access to the yum update history and find out what audio related packages got installed in the update and downgrade those. Anything with pipewire or alsa in the package name for example

Kernel 6.11 has been super buggy for me. About 3 weeks ago Nobara rolled out that kernel if I’m not mistaken. Do you still have a 6.10 grub option to try out? Since the live usb works that could be the issue.

If all your boot entries are 6.11, boot into the oldest and downgrade that

Simplex is pretty nice, but to me XMPP already does all that you described, and metadata isn’t that important to me. Plus XMPP has better clients for mobile and desktop

Indies is where it’s at

How do you dl them? yt-dlp is asking to pass credentials as well.

I find this site useful to compare messengers. I would trust Wire a tad more because it’s hosted in a country with stronger GDPR regulation, vs Signal being hosted in the US.

For my needs, XMPP with Omemo has been unbeatable for a long time

The level of comfort, or rather lack thereof, you’re fine with dictates how you’ll use your devices. Privacy is mandatory to me, so every app that refuses to work with my setup gets the boot. Banking is done in the browser with a separate PIN device. The moment the device gets discontinued I’ll go back to paper or phone like an old person. FOSS apps are FOSS and will break because they don’t have millions of ad money to fund development. I know that and learned to accept that fixing setups is part of my digital life. That’s just one end of the spectrum though. Everyone needs to find their balance with privacy to avoid getting fed up by it.

You could use ProjectLibre although it might be overkill

How would BangleJs be worse in terms of privacy? You can run both with gadgetbridge, so no cloud data necessary.

OP is obviously Dr. Noonien Soong