TL;DR: Don’t lay this one on me, buddy. You walked in here looking for a fight.

I didn’t much care for the direction you started in. If you wanted an actual discussion, then opening with hostility and claims that could be refuted if you’d bothered with less than a minute of research is the wrong way to go.

If you want a civilized discussion, you have to start with a civilized post. My responses have been no more hostile than your opening salvo.

As it happens, Google’s influence over Mozilla is of massive concern to me. And I agree that the change was not needed. But it’s not obscure, it’s not hard to find out how to do what you wanted to do, and your hostility to responses suggesting DuckDuckGo only confirmed my suspicion that you didn’t want an answer, you wanted a fight.

So I gave you one.

Here’s the deal. If you walk into a place with guns blazing, you don’t get to act all surprised and indignant when someone fires back.

Maybe. But even if that was the case, the way it is now isn’t obfuscated. It’s not difficult. It’s not hard to find out how to do it. You made a big long post to complain about an “obfuscated” feature that I found in under a minute.

Next time, either do a search or ask for help, instead of whinging like a n00b. Or worse, some kind of Google FUD-spreading parasite.

FFS, Jesus Wept. I finally understand those blokes over at FreeBSD telling me to RTFM twenty years ago.

Edit: Apparently, the synonym for complain I used before was offensive. It was not the “B” word, which I only use in reference to female dogs. Just wanted that to be clear.

What are you talking about?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-engine-firefox#w_add-a-search-engine-from-the-address-bar

That took me like two second to find. You can also use addons, like this one for Qwant:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/qwantcom-for-firefox/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search

Which I like. But none of this is hard or “obfuscated”, and it’s literally identical to changing or adding a new search engine on Waterfox.

I have a lot of issues with Mozilla, not least of which is their reliance on Google for income. It’s like hiring a dingo as a babysitter. But c’mon, man.

Honestly, this is kind of a weird question. It’s Google. They collect all of it. Every picture, every note, every keystroke. All of it.

The answer to "what information does GOOGLE SERVICE collect is always all of it.

Alright, then I can be “I can afford experimental treatment to regrow my teeth-man!”

Having recently undergone a full extraction of my remaining teeth and gotten dentures, I’ll take “has a healthy set of teeth”- or “can afford dental implants”-man

I have three possible solutions for you:

1. Switch to Fedora Workstation
2. Install Gnome on Mint
3. Use Pop! OS

Option 1 is probably the best one. Fedora is as easy to use as Ubuntu but without Snaps or the rest of Canonical stuff. The downside is that it’s RPM based instead of DEB, but that’s not as big an issue as you might think, since Flatpaks cover a lot of ground, and between the Fedora and RPM Fusion repositories, most software is still available.

Option 2 is another way to go. It gives you exactly what you’re looking for in a way. Unfortunately, you’re going to end up with some Cinnamon remnants in your Gnome set up. That’s not too big of a deal, though, just some extra cleanup work removing the Cinnamon desktop stuff.

Option 3 is my least favorite. Pop! OS is great, and almost what you’re after once you disable some extensions. The only issue I have here is that Pop! will probably be shifting to their in house desktop environment COSMIC soon. Well, fairly soon anyway. I’m sure they’ll keep the Gnome version going, but it’s very clearly not going to be their focus. Still, Pop! OS might be exactly what you’re looking for!

As a complete Linux noob coming from Windows, I’d say Mint is the way to go. If you’re worried about Cinnamon being too heavy, Mate is much lighter and a lot of fun. I’m especially fond of their file browser Caja.

Your second choice, Fedora, is my go to system, and I’ll cheerfully sing it’s praises. If you want to go that way, check out the KDE, Cinnamon, XFCE, or LXDE spins, but I will say it’s a bit less beginner friendly. Make sure you enable the non-free repositories when you log in for the first time!

I recently got into a long, really dumb argument. I used the phrase “lesser of two evils” and what seemed like fifty people (actually two or three) seemed to think that meant I approved of, strenuously endorsed, and would defend the actions of the “lesser evil.”

To me, this seemed like a basic misunderstanding of what the phrase meant, so I defined it. Their response to my definition was to say the same sort of thing they’d already said while claiming to totally know what “lesser of two evils” meant.

I lost my cool, and explained what the phrase meant again. One of the folks explained themselves calmly while the others seemed to think I was a congenital idiot because I kept repeating myself.

I don’t want this to get any longer, so I’ll just say that we were talking past each other. Nobody (well, except fr the one guy who stopped to explain what he meant) was really comprehending what the other person said. So everyone was a dumbass, basically. Story of my life, really.

At least, I think that’s what happened. Watch the asshole who called me a liar and an idiot show up here to not explain how I’m a liar and an idiot again.

Oh that is fantastic. I need to use that one.

That is elaborate, vulgar, and 100% delightful. I love hearing stuff like this. Cursing in American English is so boring lol

What’s stopping you? Just out of curiosity.

And the Platinum Award for Least Surprising News Headline goes to…