I’m me, and happen to be just about everywhere
Thank you for sharing your journey! It’s very interesting and informative to see how others have brought more privacy into their lives. I noticed that you were using something from Simple Mobile Tools. I know you said you were going to replace it eventually, but you should soon, especially if you got it from the Playstore, rather than from F-Droid, because they were acquired.
Thanks. I don’t know why I didn’t mention the exact small sample size
This was in a VM, but I was running Ubuntu LTS to mess around with Nextcloud, maybe even save some data to it. I also installed Pihole and ran into an issue, so I uninstalled it. Apparently, when you uninstall Pihole, it also gives you the option to uninstall important system packages like ipconfig. Borked my install. I was freaking pissed.
This won’t fix your app roulette problem, but you should be able to disable searching the web with the search bar in group policy
It wasn’t that hard for me to flash a Chromebook with Linux using this guide