This is awesome!

Some people think the big tech companies literally sell your data though, so IMO it’s important to clarify.

There are companies that do that though, like Acxiom, LiveRamp, CoreLogic, etc. With Acxiom at least, you can buy lists like “high net worth individuals who are likely to buy a new car in the next 6 months” and get a list of names, phone numbers, and email addresses, based on data they’ve collected from both public and private sources.

Those data broker companies collect data from things like supermarket loyalty programs (to determine consumer spending patterns) and other companies who are willing to sell data about you, and compile them into profiles.

Advertisers don’t see any of the data though. What the companies are really selling is your attention.

For what it’s worth, Q4 always has higher ad revenue because of Black Friday and Christmas.

I think the cost per ad went up too (that’s also in the presentation). Google and Facebook both mostly use an auction system for ads, so the price is based on the market. Out of all the possible ads a user can see (active ads targeting their demographic), the one with the highest bid will be shown.

Take the superbowl for example. It’s usually the most viewed event every year in the US

Interesting that you mention the superbowl, since one of the techniques that sales reps at large digital ad networks (like Google and Facebook) use to sell ads to large advertisers is comparing it to the superbowl.

This year’s superbowl had a viewership of around 127 million people. In comparison, 194 million Americans use Facebook at least once per day and 267 million use Google, so your ads on those platforms will have a wider potential audience than the superbowl, while being much more cost effective since you can run the ad just to a more specific audience rather than having to run the ad to every single person watching TV at that time.

Around 97% of Meta’s revenue is from ads. 2.2% is from Reality Labs - things like Meta Quest headsets and Meta Ray Ban smart glasses. The remaining <0.7% is small things like fees from Facebook Marketplace (for orders that are shipped), a cut of credits for Facebook games (apparently that’s still a thing?), etc.

Meta is a public company so all this data is public. See slide #4 in the most recent earnings presentation slides here: https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-events/event-details/2025/Q4-2024-Earnings-Call/default.aspx

Around 97% of Meta’s revenue is from ads. The rest of the revenue is mainly from things like Meta Quest headsets, fees from Facebook Marketplace (for orders that are shipped), etc.

Meta is a public company so all this data is public. See slide #4 in the earnings presentation here: https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-events/event-details/2025/Q4-2024-Earnings-Call/default.aspx

selling your personal data

The major tech companies like Google, Facebook, etc don’t sell user data. That’s a common misconception. The data is what makes the company valuable - nobody else has it. It wouldn’t make sense for them to sell it, because they’d lose their competitive advantage over other companies.

Advertisers can target ads based on the data, but the advertiser never actually sees user data.

I assume you mean the date and time settings page. This is KDE’s one:

I’m working on making it easier to install on Debian systems by creating a Debian package (and eventually a repo): https://github.com/henrygd/beszel/pull/497

Good points. I was using KDE with both and didn’t have any issues (even though Debian’s version of KDE was older) but that might not work in all scenarios.

I don’t have compiled things in the home folder - they go in either /usr/local/bin or /opt.

Install a few and see which one you like the most. You can install several distros at the same time and they’ll all appear in the boot menu. When I was deciding which distro to use on my laptop, I was dual booting Debian and Fedora, with one /home partition shared between both of them.

Mint and Fedora are good choices IMO. Everyone is different though :)

Fedora tends to “just work” too. Some manufacturers that support Ubuntu also support Fedora for customers that need a “RedHat-ish” distro instead of a “Debian-ish” one.

I also only play games offline, and these days it’s usually on my Xbox rather than on PC, but I’ve been following this since I’m a software engineer and it’s interesting from a development perspective. Kernel-mode anti-cheat has a lot of similarities with malware/rootkits.

Anti-cheat systems already have to make changes, since Microsoft have plans to significantly restrict kernel mode access after the major Crowdstrike issues earlier in the year. Kernel mode code is very invasive, difficult to get correct, and can result in major security holes or stability issues if not written correctly.

A bug in userland code may crash that one app. A bug in kernel mode code can (and often does) cause bluescreens, that people blame Microsoft for. I’m sure they’re tired of being blamed for buggy code written by other companies.

Running the anti cheat code in userland will (in theory) make it easier to run on other OSes too.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-paves-the-way-for-Linux-gaming-success-with-plan-that-would-kill-kernel-level-anti-cheat.888345.0.html

My personal prod systems never have many upgrades… But they’re running Debian stable and I have unattended-upgrades installed and configured.

My wife and dog (a little tiny Chihuahua). Regardless of what happens in the world, they’ll be there for me, so I can take comfort in that at least. Married six years this year and adopted the dog four years ago.

As someone else said, I’d go with an MDM vendor instead of trying to build something yourself.

The most secure thing would be to have the person connect to a remote server and do all their work on the remote server, essentially just using the laptop like a thin client.

A lot of employers (at least the larger ones) block USB drives and have software to monitor for data exfiltration - monitoring where files are copied to, usage of copy/paste in browsers, etc.

You should always assume that your work devices are being monitored.

I had weird issues with the Flatpak (can’t remember what they were) but the native RPM worked fine. Previously you had to download and install/update the RPM manually but I’ve heard they’re working on proper RPM and deb repos.