In my experience no, apart from blender integration kdenlive does everything it does and more and kdenlive gets more new features. I just wish there weren’t 10 different Foss video editors that don’t come close to the proprietary ones instead of focusing on 2-3 projects, but that’s for the devs to decide
Services like this could be useful if you already have a connection through something encrypted (encrypted mail, matrix, …) but the files are too large for sending without this.
You don’t have to use all the services, most of them have an excellent free tier. My setup is paying for VPN, using the free tier of pass and self hosting my email and cloud storage.
Legally they (and every other company) are required to hand over data to the police, however they can try to have as little data as possible. While Proton doesn’t take as extreme measures to protect your privacy as for example mullvad, they have no log policy and such. I believe the case where they had to collect data (IP address, which they normally don’t collect) they received a legally binding order from the Swiss government which normally is used for serious crimes. Every company has to follow these orders, so this isn’t a proton thing but rather a Swiss law thing.
My bad, I realized my comment reads a lot differently than what I was trying to say. Linux mints release schedule is not bound to Ubuntu. Linux mint gets a new major version every two years (although this is not strictly set) while LMDE usually gets a new major update with the new Debian version, but because Debian has been around for a lot longer than LMDE the number is higher.
LMDE does not provide a XFCE version, you can however install XFCE after installing LMDE. Cinnamon required in my experience twice as much recourses as XFCE. LMDE is based on Debian while regular Mint is based on Ubuntu. The releases are linked to those of the bases, but LMDE gets the Mint specific updates slightly later. The numbers are different because Ubuntu’s latest version is 24.4 while Debian is at version 12, so it wouldn’t make sense to have the same numbering for the corresponding Linux mint version.
Canonical and the others don’t make money from individual users. They get money from companies so there isn’t really any incentive to make tv ads. What would be more likely would be hardware manufacturers like tuxedo to do this. I know tuxedo does magazine ads but not sure if they have the budget for tv.
I would recommend looking at this site. My personal recommendation would be simplex chat. It’s decentralized, doesn’t require a phone number and supports forward secrecy.
Snap does theoretically support other stores, but the code for the canonical store is proprietary so you’d have to reverse engineer a snap store and hope that canonical doesn’t break it with an update. Also apart from Ubuntu nobody uses snaps so why would anyone make a snap store? Btw they have improved snaps with faster start times and such, so they aren’t that much slower than packages or flatpak.
I have used a lot of different distros and I never had dependency problems whether on Linux mint, Debian, open suse or fedora. And yes, this can be a problem, especially on distros like Manjaro, but you still can use flatpaks/appimages/snaps and don’t deal with dependencies at all. NixOS and all rolling release distros can be great but they are not meant for people who are not ready to troubleshoot their system at any time. If you stick with a more stable distro like Debian you will most likely get a more reliable system then with windows.