I daily drive Fedora because RHEL is what my industry uses and it’s good to stay on top of the technology.

I use all three. I have Windows on one of my machines that I use occasionally for gaming. I use Macs for work since that’s what all my corporate machines comes with and I daily drive Linux and use it for all my home servers.

Another main reason why I took off my hat back then was because I was a broke college kid with garbage internet speed and my only computer was a laptop. Torrenting shows sometimes means I need to have my laptop on for days. Now I have an entire homelab setup with a dedicated VM on one of my servers for torrenting and I can afford fast internet. I was pleasantly surprised how efficiently I can torrent when I got back sailing recently.

For me it’s just more power efficient to run a VM on my TrueNAS for this purpose if I need to download very large files over night. It also speeds up file transfer / storage.

Not trying to dismiss your sufferings but I still think our generation had it way better than our grandparents, and probably better than 90% of the people in the world if you live in an advanced economy. For instance my grandfather went through the bloodiest war in human history, a bloody civil war, and a famine that killed millions of people. The problem right now is getting all the negative information that you have no control over from the internet, that’s why I stay away from tuning into any news these days.

Then you need both anonymity and privacy. Sometimes you do need both but they’re not the same concept.

Privacy without anonymity is you using the bathroom with everyone seeing you walking in. They know you used the bathroom but have no idea what you did inside.

Anonymity without privacy is like you pissing on the street with a ski mask on. Everyone saw what you did but no one knows who you are.

Having both is walking into the bathroom with a ski mask on. No one knows who you are nor what you did inside.