Yeah the relevance of that point is relative to where your country falls in the 5/9/14 eyes.

Not remotely possible given google’s close ties with the US military and surveillance systems, as well as vertical integration.

But let’s pretend they’re identical, as a thought experiment:

I would rather have two Googles forced to compete with each other than one monopoly

And as a US consumer I’m much safer having my personal data harvested by a Chinese Google than a US Google. The latter is fully integrated with advertizers and surveillance that have actual legal and economic power over me.

T4x0 series have never disappointed me

Oh damn that’s really cool. I haven’t looked at Linux mobile for like 5 years but your comment might make me check it out again

This is nonsense

I regularly set up Firefox because I distro hop and like to buy cheap thinkpads. It takes like 30 seconds to do some quick toggles in the settings. Half of them are regular shit like tab behavior because I don’t like the defaults, and that’s okay. 15 seconds to install ublock. Couple minutes in about:config

Would it be kinda nice if all the defaults just happened to align with my specific wants and needs? Sure, I guess. But I’m an adult with agency and am happy to click some toggles.

If maintaining and updating a codebase didn’t take so much labor then it’d be cool to use obscure single-maintainer forks. But up-to-date security and non-google alternatives are orders of magnitude more important to me than having to click a few toggles once.