Oh yeah, I remember debian's Firefox used to be called something else for trademark reasons some years ago. I wonder how much linux market share firefox lost as a result. Not sure what changed, I guess in that case Mozilla must've come to their senses. I was mostly an ubuntu user in those days.
Telemetry can be turned off without modifying the code. I don't know about the legality of it, maybe in the case of Firefox the other things they do are also at most build options rather than code changes. But generally distros are allowed to make changes to the packages they distribute, that is how free software works.
Reading in general is of course quite easy compared to reading the Washington Times (my fingers automatically typed "Washington Post" there, a publication slightly more like a real newspaper) which most people would understandably prefer to avoid. In this case there's no need, the illustration alone conveys the message well enough.
The symbol in the image, which appears conspicuously above the Washington Times article that was linked to, is no more offensive than the text of the article beneath it.
Pointing people to reddit, as if that's an alternative. When a VPN provider makes such bad choices it's tempting to imagine that the decision was influenced by somebody who wants to secretly get the message out that the company is no longer to be trusted, because it's hard to see any other logic in it.
The centralized social media have demonstrated again and again that content moderation at scale can never work well the way they do it. They are a menace to society. The problem isn't that Elon Musk is the wrong person to decide how a billion people should be allowed to talk to each other and which of their voices should be amplified, it's that nobody should ever have that power.
A diverse network of smaller instances where each is free to take its own approach is the future of social media, if it has a future.
I assume you mean things that you'd never guess were linux or unix-like just by looking at the UI as it's visible to normal users. Car infotainment systems and "smart" TVs (e.g. Roku) come to mind.
I don't think that's just "collateral damage." Destroying the universities along with the rest of the education system in order to stop people from becoming too well educated seems to be part of the plan.
Good luck GNOME users! If Xfce ever added a donation button I would not be donating again.