MalReynolds

Didn't take as long as I expected, but I expected it (which is why I didn't bother to read, even if it's not all the way there, it's coming).

Seriously, advertising (or propaganda to use the older name favoured by Goebbels) really needs to be seen as a much more serious enemy than most do. Propaganda for capitalists is super effective at sucking up peoples mental bandwidth, they've been selecting for it going on a century now and they're depressingly good at it, if you don't actively counter it, straight to the subconscious, along with all the background crap in it. /rant, but seriously...

yup, the syntax is (from within the distrobox)

distrobox-export --app appname

Run Arch in a distrobox, done (in atomic you lean hard on distrobox and flatpak).

Yup, OP has done his time in Arch meaning now competent, probably, time to go to Fedora and relax, close enough to the edge but not bleeding, good QA, For extra chill go atomic, check out uBlue...

Is a VPN needed to keep your ip from being exposed ?

No more so than using any search engine directly, it's a nice to have. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

Is just using an existing searxng instance just less secure then?

By the time you've investigated it, you could have stood up your own instance...

Sounds like a them problem then.

podman exists and doesn't force root...

It's yours, no issues trusting a public instance with your searches. Pages full of settings to tweak as you like. Less problems with an algorithm 'helping' you. It averages searches over multiple search engines that you choose, you can set up your own (or a curated) block list of crappy AI slop sites, don't like fandom.com or something, gone. Manage your own bangs, e.g. !aa for annas-archive. Pipe it through a VPN with gluetun for better isolation. If you have your head around docker already it's more like half an hour to set up, so why not?

Can hook it up to perplexica and a local LLM for a fully local AI search that you define, use it as a MCP server, do deep research with it...

Surprised no-one pitched Elite:Dangerous. Certainly a labour of love to begin with, incredibly talented sound design, first space sim to VR, truly devoted to the original material... Still going pretty strong (had a few weak years) with updates (only 2 DLC-ish major updates of which were paid) a decade later...

Privately owned (no shareholders), small team that seems to love what they're doing, they can likely go on forever. Strange how a lack of shareholders correlates with good games (/platforms, Valve!) isn't it ?

I do it with a gluetun container (more versatile) zero issues, but you can just mainline wireguard as an interface if you prefer, also works fine, on bazzite.

know truth from fiction.

You jest, but...