I am not sure if you would be able to compare the content of that file on your phone as well ? Maybe with adb and then check the content there (not sure if Android also uses /etc/resolv.conf) ? Or maybe test connecting on a Linux live USB stick and compare ?

That is true to some extend (Though search engines would afaik correct 404 pages and delete the old fetched data), but the automatic deletion does stop part of the audience of having a lot of data to create a fingerprint.

Not sure if this applies for your university VPN but with VPN providers an important part of making a successful VPN connection and use it browse the Internet, is that the DNS servers in /etc/resolv.conf are correct. You can check and see any difference of the content of that file, before and after starting the VPN connection.

I've read on several websites that Nokia comes with pretty much stock Android.

On Mastodon (and maybe also Akkoma/Pleroma/Misskey/firefish and so on) there is an option in the settings to auto delete your posts (formerly known as toots) with fine tune options if you for instance want to delete your posts but save your favorites and boosts. Several people have their toots older than one month automatically deleted. Before this was an option in Mastodon, people already did this with help of other software.

Lemmy is not very similar as StackExchange/SuperUser/Quora but in some threads Lemmy resembles a Q&A site so it makes sense to leave the conversations as is.

Regarding the most private social media question I'd think of Friendica, Hubzilla, and Pixelfed as best.

Is that the same one that brought down the Linux Mint forums ?

Well, people in the USA probably do know one German name related to NASA :

• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip (Link found yesterday in a comment somewhere else on Lemmy)

Yes, Waydroid uses lxc containers.

I like rdiff-backup (like someone already mentioned in a comment) for some things but if you want a GUI :

• https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.World.PikaBackup
• https://flathub.org/apps/com.borgbase.Vorta

Tested them both. First one can scheduled backups and iirc it will ask you to insert the USB disk you used when the time is there.

Yes. Haiku is quite light weight, small and snappy. One drawback is that it has not yet multi user implemented (everything still runs as root! But so do old DOS flavors :-) ) but imho it is fun to play with and check which software packages it has (it has several emulators packaged).

Glad to hear this. I get very sad about the increasing popularity of GitHub for new projects and the huge "importance" of GitHub stars :( It's like YouTube videos with "Hi! First : Don't forget to like and subscribe!" and now "Hi! We're on GitHub! Stars will motivate us to spend more time coding". Yeah right, how about a no nonsense approach ? And on the way there boycott big tech surveillance capitalism like Micros~t.sft [8.3]

You want to try something interesting but want to dual-boot. That last bit could be difficult or "impossible" but using a VM or running from USB stick are options.

• https://www.haiku-os.org I've run it from USB stick on some older laptop.
• https://chimera-linux.org FreeBSD user-land with a Linux kernel.
• https://nomadbsd.org FreeBSD which can be run from USB stick with persistent storage. Has a version with ZFS support.
• https://nixos.org Very interesting concept.
• https://www.gobolinux.org GoboLinux is an alternative Linux distribution which redefines the entire filesystem hierarchy. Doesn't seem up to date but quite interesting. If I remember well you can have different versions of software installed at the same time. Let's say (making this up) Bash 1.1, 3.1 and 5.2
• https://bedrocklinux.org Bedrock Linux is a meta Linux distribution which allows users to mix-and-match components from other, typically incompatible distributions.