I think F-droid is woefully misunderstood especially in privacy circles.

The main benefit of F-Droid is that it works (as best it can) to guarantee software freedom. This means, for each app, you can be assured it is under a free software license, built from corresponding source code, and contains no proprietary components. F-droid has an inclusion policy that forbids proprietary blobs and they have to build everything from source in order to ensure that - however, if the app is reproducible, F-droid can actually verify that the already built app from the developer satisfies the inclusion policy without needing to sign its own builds, which is ideal. It's important to note that without building from source, there is no way to guarantee that the source corresponds to the binary, which is important for exercising the four freedoms.

I don't agree with everything F-droid does and I don't think F-droid is perfect. The security folks have a few valid points, I think, but they fail to offer a solution that solves the same problem that F-droid does, either because they misunderstand what problem that is, or simply do not care about it. F-droid is not an app store, it's a community-maintained distribution like a GNU/Linux distribution. App stores are not alternatives to F-droid and serve different problems. There is, as far as I know, no other project that attempts to serve the same purpose as F-droid.

But they told me I can just not connect it to the internet and it'll be just like any dumb device.

Eventually these things will come with modems built in so you can't even do that.

I'll be "that guy":

F-Droid is a software repository, not an app store. The distinction is subtle but important. A software repository offers a community-curated collection of software packages whereas an app store is just a marketplace for software developers to offer products to end-users. A software repository serves the interests of its community first, whereas an app store is merely a means for developers to sell products to end-users.

On the one hand, anything that acknowledges Android as being a Linux system is welcome.

On the other hand... ugh, user-agent strings.

It started 40 years ago, when a man was not allowed to fix his printer. We didn't have the word enshittification at the time but even then it was understood what happens when technology abuses its users in order to enrich its creators.

Unfortunately a lot of this seems in reponse to Midori, a seemingly hostile fork with a pretty suspcious website.

To some people all forks are hostile. This appears to be such a case. He just seems to be sour over people exercising the same freedoms he got from Mozilla upstream. Rules for thee but not for me. The free software community doesn't need his obscure fork.

Not an endorsement of ExpressVPN, I've learned to avoid companies that sponsor on youtube. However, I believe you don't need the proprietary app to use the service, you could use a free software OpenVPN client such as this one.

They do offer support for OpenVPN although, unsurprisingly, they heavily push their proprietary client as the preferred way to use the service. This alone would be enough to discourage me from using it or recommending it.

Google is also one of the most prolific contributors to Linux, and was the #3 corporate contributor in 2022. If you're avoiding everything Google had a hand in you literally can't use any GNU/Linux.

I think you'll find it is no longer "My Computer" but now "This PC"

I'd just like to interject for moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, Steam/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Steam plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another component of a fully functioning Steam system made useful by Steam Proton, DXVK, and vital Wine components comprising a full OS as defined by Valve.

The notion of there being underrated or overrated distros is, itself, overrated. No, there should not (and cannot) be "one distro to rule them all" because different people have different needs.

Remember that in the free software community we have the freedom to modify and share everything. Those "overrated" distros exist because someone saw a need for them, and they are widely used because other people agree. If Debian was good enough for every use case why do these other distros exist? Why doesn't everyone just use Debian?

Translation: "no"