I completely agree with you, and what i wrote was in haste, essentially, what i wanted to say, was that an individual running searxng does not provide the anonymity benefits you would get by using some public instance, but it it still better because you are not directly using google or whatever website, and now searxng kinda acts like a browser between you and them, which does limited conversation - there aren’t any js based fingerprinting. I also use searxng locally, i cant stand the constant rate limiting of public servers, or sometimes only a few engines are blocked, and variation in result quality is unacceptable to me. I just wanted to add that bit for transparency,

If you are on a desktop, you can run it locally, you are much less likely to be rate limited, but this comes at cost of your ip being still visible to google or whatever search engine you choose to scrape from

For those who are want something similar to invidious, you can try youtube-local (not my project, I am just a user). It is a minimal python youtube client, and functions similar to other frontends, but runs locally. You lose some amount of privacy (youtube still has a general idea of who is watching with IPs), but it is not very exact, and there is an option to use tor to get the content. You can also enable sponsorblock, or hide yt-shorts.

I have a question, what are you exactly seeking to repair?, like if you have a good working laptop, and if it gives good performance, then there may not be much need of repairing. One of the reasons for getting repairable hardware is that they last long, like I have laptops which are 13 and 7 years old, and they both “work”, batteries are dead, and replacements are not good, but other than that fine machines. If your laptop is not very flimsy, you may not even need an upgrade for a long time.

well even a raspberry pi would be enough, except for ML

depending on what exactly in ML, and what our the sizes of datasets involved?, like i did some work, but for me 8 GiB RAM was enough, but if you want to do larger databases, you would need somewhat good GPU (essentially large matrix multipliers) with plenty of VRAM

you may not even have to change to another browser or fork, please have a look at some designs in https://trickypr.github.io/FirefoxCSS-Store.github.io/ select a design and follow the page, and you shall find the instructions (usually just downloading/pasting userChrome/Content.css)

and for scrolling tabs, if your problem is very small tab size, then try changing browser.tabs.tabMinWidth in about:config

chad winnie the poo - tap water*

*(cleaned if required)