Proton serves privacy, not anonymity. They will not collect, harvest, analyse or sell your data. If you however use their services for illegal things they will forward whatever - usually little - unencrypted information they have about you.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/

I am in no way antivax or anti-science, but it makes you wonder what other propaganda the US is pushing.

In other words, if you don’t want to pay more for fast food, then you don’t actually want to see fast food workers earn a better wage.

If a business relies on exploitation, it shouldn’t exist. If paying the workers a living wage means raising the prices beyond a sustainable level for the business, this business shouldn’t exist. If a business pays out millions in bonuses to it’s executives while the workers are relying on government subsidies, the business shouldn’t exist.

In Europe GDPR gives you the right to have all your data deleted. All you do is send in a request and SO has to remove everything of yours, not just anonymize it. There are some exceptions for legal reasons, eg where financial transactions are involved, but comments should not be exempt.

I don’t like Canonical either, hence my recommendations for Mint or Pop being listed first. But let’s be real, if someone wants to just get away from windows and wants something that works without having to learn much new, this is good enough.

Unironically, switch to Linux. Mainstream distros like Mint, PopOS or Ubuntu are very friendly for casual users, have GUIs for everything and if something does go wrong, the error messages actually have proper meaning and you’ll find tons of resources online as well as people willing to help.

Most stuff nowadays runs in a browser anyway, so here there’s no compatibility issues, office is available in Linux through libre office and gaming has come far with steam and proton.

You can always compile from scratch, compare the checksums or use the version you compiled. In projects this large people usually do this, and there’s a certain level of trust that these checks have been performed.