It did, actually

And on CachyOS I often do “upgrade my system at least twice a day, I’m strictly plug and play”

Who are you concerned about the data going to? Intercepting a Bluetooth signal is not really a thing anymore. Your phone OS has plenty of ways to know what you’re listening to without Bluetooth itself being thr vector. If you use GrapheneOS and Linux, you’re good there. The headphones themselves aren’t going to have a Sim card that is phoning home.

So then you’re left with third party software being the attack vector. For this reason, I would not install headphone apps, and ESPECIALLY not earbuds that require connecting/registering to a third party account like Amazon Echo buds.

This unfortunately means no custom EQ. For my open ear headphones, I tried out my top 4 choices without downloading the app, and picked the best sounding & most comfortable pair. That happened to be the Nothing Ear Open. My over ear Sony XM4 headphones that I already own are amazing but needed EQ badly, so I installed the app on an old Android, tweaked the EQ, and it saved the EQ information to the headphones themselves. Not all headphones can do this, however.

Fedora on the same tier as Manjaro (and below Ubuntu) is probably the most offensive ranking I’ve seen. Even if this is solely referring to complexity.

Nobody is forcing you to use it instead of command line, or preventing you from uninstalling it.

Good question, let me check real quick…

Oh. I can’t. They forgot to renew their website’s SSL certificate for the 9th time.

Yeah this is the real reason I prefer it. A sane installer, auto installing Nvidia drivers, auto setting up Snapper, a good GUI package manager that actually manages everything.

The customized kernel, and performance boosts that may or may not actually exist are just a bonus.

I have been deep diving into internet privacy and cyber security for a while now. I’ve noticed that any popular privacy related product will get haters for some reason. Obviously I am not going to support a privacy related product “no matter what controversy surrounds it”, in fact I have VERY specific requirements for that. And I get people being paranoid in that specific community, and that maybe people will be on the lookout for controversy. But people will be like “you use PROTON products? What a basic entry level choice” and it’s like do you not know WHY they are so popular in this space? Because they hit all the check boxes and are easy to use. One time I mentioned Signal and someone was like “isn’t that a CIA honeypot?” No. No it is not. There is no evidence whatsoever. And the code is right there, you can just read it. Just because some “normies” like a product doesn’t mean it’s a trick.

And people don’t seem to understand that it is sometimes not wise to completely avoid controversy. Who do you trust more, a group of devs (or even gasp a company) who has been around for 15 years, had a security flaw 3 years ago and patched it after someone noticed and passed independent 3rd party audits since then, or a brand new 1 man project that has no controversy (yet)?

So while I absolutely disagree with blind loyalty to anything, people are sometimes too quick to jump ship and end up being like the “yet you participate in society. Interesting!” meme.