Lol, yep.

I feel like a lot of it is from new-ish users excited to talk about it and in the process of forming often prematurely strong opinions on this versus that within Linux. After 15 years of daily driving Linux desktop environments i settled on the one that gave me the least fuss and havent given it a second thought since. I suspect there are many with a similar story, but it's a boring conversation start if people are looking to debate it.

No. The world is slipping into authoritarianism of various flavors. I'd rather not filter out the shit on my end, but i will if i must.

Piling on to the google alternatives heap: https://searx.space/

You can pick a public instance of searxng and choose which engines it queries by going to the setting cog, then Engines. A few of these public instances I've checked out have only google enabled, though, so you really do need to check the settings.

If you want to add a searxng instance as your default engine and your browser doesn't automatically do it, the URL for that is: https://searxng_url>/search?q=%s

I have to add this manually for things like ironfox/firefox mobile.

I've been using backblaze b2 (via s3fs-fuse container + bidirectional mount propagation to a host path) and a little bit of google drive (via rclone mount + the same mounting business) within kubernetes. I only use this for tubearchivist which I consider to be disposable. No way I'm using these "devices" for anything I really care about. I haven't tried gauging the performance of either of these, but I can say, anecdotally, that both are fine for tubearchivist to write to in a reasonable amount of time (the bottleneck is yt-dlp ingesting from youtube) and playback seems to be on par with local storage with the embedded tubearchivist player and jellyfin. I've had no issues with this, been using it about a year now, and overall I feel it's a decent solution if you need a lot of cheap-ish storage that you are okay with not trusting.

Devil's advocate: if you do things the legit way, absorb the ads or go for the pay tiers, do you think there's ever a point the advertisers and platforms say "this is the right amount of ads." ? Seems like it's an infinite process of cramming in more garbage. Personally I'm happy to engage in the arms race because it's not bothersome to me personally, and I'm fine with some "theft" as long as I'm paying back into the creators by whatever their preferred support structure is.

Lemmy.zip and dbzer0 get recommended often for having similar federation stances.