Yea, people mostly equate email to an electronic letter, but it’s more like an electronic postcard. Anyone handling it can simply read it.
So you’ll want encryption, too. So either you get everyone to use PGP/GPG or get them to use a privacy-by-default provider.
Good luck with the first option and I’m not sure how interoperable the various providers are, so in the worst case you’d have to rally everyone to the same provider.

The storage requirements might be ever so slightly prohibitive.

It’s not about being helpful in the sense of just answering the question at hand. If OP just wanted the question answered they can just Google it. Instead I wanted to offer an alternative, low risk solution.
While Ubisoft, EA and consorts can easily stomach some piracy and still crank out “AAA” titles in a 6-months interval, it hurts small studios relatively more. Buying and returning, on the other hand, offers a way to give feedback to the studio via the return reason and costs just as little as piracy.

I’m not saying it was always the case. Back when ads were just images hosted on the same machine as the rest of the page they were only annoying.
But nowadays even so-called acceptable ads are delivered by third-party servers. So suddenly you have to trust not only the operator of the page you’re visiting but also any advertising partners they use. And since all modern advertising uses a gazillion of metrics that necessitates JavaScript you end up executing code that neither you nor the page operator have any actual need for nor influence on, hoping that the ad network has some sort of vetting process so they don’t end up unwittingly delivering malware.
That’s a tall order in my opinion.

ProtonDB says it’s decent, the game is Steamdeck verified plus you can return it with under two hours playtime, so I’d just buy it.
Any upgrade path with a pirated version should be completely irrelevant.

All ads are a cybersecurity risk, not just the targeted ones. The targeted ones just offer new and exciting vectors.

Yup. You can pay Netflix for 4K, but you can only get 4K with Edge on Windows and even then only if you have the right hardware. Like, what’s the point? On Linux you can only get 1080p by spoofing your just agent. Otherwise they only give you 720p.

Yea, that’s just plain stupid of them. I don’t know how they expected that to go over.

Oh yes, I bought that content, but sure, take it away. I totally understand that the licensing changed.

– No one, ever

Buy it. Larian is a small studio that put a lot of effort and love into that game. If you like what they do, support them. You can get it DRM free on GOG, so you get to actually own it.

To be fair, streaming was never buying. It was always paying entry to a library. If stuff gets removed from the library that’s the way it is.
That isn’t to say I don’t agree. Piracy is a service problem, as Gabe Newell so eloquently put it. Streaming started losing the moment it started splintering into cable networks.

Yes, but consider ownership.

What’s wrong with taxi services?
From a client perspective Uber and Lyft don’t solve any issue that taxi services don’t. They may be more convenient/accessible by providing an app, but that’s not an unsolvable issue.
But from a privacy perspective taxis clearly have a leg up since you’re an anonymous customer.

Maybe it’s time we give up on computers. We’re simply not good with them. Or maybe it’s just time to oxidise all the software.

Play store is a shitshow. It’s so hard to spot the few actual gems in the absolute avalanche of ad-ridden asset flip time wasters that have the only goal of harvesting your data or running a monero miner in the background. The chances are better with paid games, but even then it’s hit-or-miss.
I gave up on mobile gaming long ago.

pavucontrol probably the best option given your distro. Go with that.

Ain’t that the truth. But I love the workflow they offer. You don’t have to go looking for new windows. You can easily pin applications to virtual desktops and I prefer the multihead model they use over the one used by gnome or KDE.

So we have to piece information together from the manual and random blogs? Like cavemen? Or worse, like Windows users??

Obviously

Not to mention that they’re still considered experimental.

I don’t know what gave you the idea that a particular distro would be an especially good/bad choice for privacy, etc. They’re all GNU/Linux with only minor differences in compile-time options in the kernel and different defaults in user-space. But they’re just that, defaults. You can reconfigure them to your preference.

With that out of the way, the issue NixOS attempts to address is reproducibility. You get a central configuration infrastructure that defines everything, from partition layout, through user creation and package installation to software configuration. The central idea being that migrating to a new machine or setting up a new development environment should only take a few commands.
What you do with that is up to you. You can barricade the whole system if you like. The defaults are sane, but not overly focused on privacy, etc.
Also it’s quite a learning curve as the documentation/wiki is incomplete and/or outdated.