OpenRed perhaps? Don’t know if it requires an account to browse certain parts or Reddit.

This reminds me of the days of first mainstream touchscreen phones and how so many of my friends cried how terrible the touchscreen is to use in different scenarios, f.ex type an SMS without looking at the phone while driving. How superior the physical keys are. Did we get physical keys back, no, and neither we are going to get them back to cars at least in the extent they used to be.

The touchscreen is just so cheap way to implement stuff compared to actual buttons. You can dump most of the costly design and engineering work to the software guys, configure endlessly without any of it affecting the assembly line. Hopefully the backlash against touch controls still brings at least the very basic stuff back (indicators, heating, volume, drive…), and not in the worst-of-both-world form from hell that is the ”haptic buttons”.

Furthermore, I’ve found the answer to this being not just ”yes” but ”yes, most of them”. I think I’ll just give up.

All your points are a bit questionable:

1. Sure, you should click no to almost everything Microsofts asks anywhere, but that hardly helps. Use privacy tools like O&O Shut Up to actually disable spy stuff.
2. God no. Vivaldi is nice if you must have Chromium (this is made by the guys who used to build Opera, before it was sold to shady new owners), otherwise Firefox.
3. See point 1.
4. Just uninstall the damn thing, or some tools of point 1 might do this for you.
5. If you must, sure.

Using Enterprise version of Windows is the best option, it already has most of the malicious stuff left out.

Having cleaned a bunch of old folks phones in the past years this is far more common than we ”advanced” users think. It often starts with clicking an advert or some spam mail or message from (infected) friend, which to them, looks absolutely legit. Then the installed app spams the user with notifications to install more ”PDF readers”, ”phone cleanup apps” and whatnot. In best case these just flood the user with ads but just as easily can do more malicious stuff.

After some schooling (”never click anything that is offered to you” etc.) and putting up defencew like AdGuard (system level) the instances of ”my phone is slow”, ”what does this message mean” etc. have radically decreased. Apple devices have their own issues but this kind of troubles are next to non-existent there.

Exactly. Same with Opera GX whatever, which is just a weird chinese spying chrome, with nothing to do with Opera from the good old days when it was still Norwegian (Vivaldi is made by those guys still).