It turns out it went multi-engine, probably to prevent getting cut off of Google’s Results. It probably mixes results from multiple engines like the old multi engine search engines in the old days of the internet.

When they were purchased it was with the understanding that they would get no user data and that Startpage does not collect it, and it has the same CEO who started the company so I believe him.

Yeah, I should have said “by default” because that is how most people will use it, but the power users will use other engines.

AFAIK Startpage gives you google results with your privacy intact and less ads.

Uses Bing results.

On Vivaldi and yeah it was paywalled so I went straight to my collection of workarounds and no built in solutions. Overall faster that way.

For those who are paywalled https://web.archive.org/web/20240927171841/https://theintercept.com/2024/09/27/google-israel-defense-tech-conference/

If you don’t want to use Steam you can use the Heroic Launcher that does Epic and other games, especially itch.io games.

I find that people who come from the old days of linux will often respond “you have to use terminal”, or “learn the operating system”, or even balk at people saying you can just use the GUI Interface/Desktop Environments. And then when you get help from expirienced users you get allot of terminal commands, which makes people think “I can’t use Linux without learning the terminal first”. In actuality it is just easier to show a person a command and ask for the results than it is to walk a person through getting the same info otherwise.

“OK, which Desktop Environment are you using?”.

“Desktop what?”.

“Which version of OS did you download and install?”.

“Cinnamon.”.

“X or Wayland?”.

“What’s a Wayland?”.

“OK, X. Is your system up to date and which kernel are you running?”.

…and so on. It is faster to just help working in the terminal. The Desktop Environments are fairly far along and most that I have worked with you could get by completely in the Desktop and not touch the terminal.

I would suggest Linux Mint, but for now I would stick to the non latest version of 21.3 as they bit off ALLOT in 22 and while it works for allot of people there are driver bugs they inherited from Ubuntu and have not implemented the fix for yet and allot of other pains in the toukus so if you want a version with the minimum of troubleshooting and stable Desktop Environments I would stick to 21.3 (If I had any sense I would be switching back to it from 22 myself).

If you want another option it would be Ubuntu and its Different Desktop ‘Spins’ to see which you like the most. Some people prefer to start off on Fedora and I am told it has a good DE, or some people recommend PopOS which had its own spin on a DE but they have let development lag on it as they developed their Cosmic Desktop for the Wayland project (the project that is superseding the X.org project for making windows).

Which ever you choose, good luck. I am in the same boat and I am trying to learn what I can before it is too late.