We have to stop thinking about news media as being the fourth estate and realize that it is a business. Their business is reliant on the status quo, in not rocking the boat. With advertisers like weapon manufacturers: Raytheon, Northrop Grumman: oil companies Exxon, etc and big pharma. They have a clear profit motive to not do journalism and to run whitewashing propaganda campaigns as their business model.
Some news orgs lie outright and others through omission. Either way they have a clear bias and an interest in guiding a narrative.
Its not about being cowardly or timid. Its about profit. The serve the same monied interests that buy our politician's.
My thought would be yes. Personality I don't trust games requiring internet that have no online functionality or when using non multiplayer modes.
Installing mods from nexus in the past I have ran into several PUA and one virus modding original skyrim years ago. These were rare though and I haven't run into one in a while. I'm an avid modder running 400+ mods in skyrimAE and fo4. Most mod makers just want to make the game better but there is potential for those who have other thing on their minds.
I have also seen on r/piracy that rock star was supposedly selling cracked copies on steam. While I don't believe all cracked copies contain malicious scripts, viruses, rootkits etc the potential is there and sometimes what you might think are trusted sources might not be so trustworthy.
On Linux I run steam in a sandbox often disallowing internet. Whatever data collection is limited to playtime and in game choices.
It all boil's down to trust and there bring money and motive in the breach thereof. Multimillion dollar companies have shown their greed and I have removed my trust.
You might want to check out this github link privacy.sexy. It has a bunch if scripts to do all sorts of things. It also has a GUI to customize your script the way you want. Disable telemetry, uninstall default programs like edge and skype. You can setup a task to run on interval's of your choosing.
I run Linux on all my computers but one tablet/computer and have used privacy.sexy since I bought it. It seems to work well and you can roll back your changes you make if you like or if their script brakes something you need.
I'm in the process of deleting my posts in a few accounts in preparation to delete them.
Reddit isn't the same place it was when I first signed up. On so many levels it proceeded to get worse year after year. Shitty mods, paid political bot brigading to drown out discussion, general discourse devolution, innovation decline of generally loved features are some of my biggest complaints of that platform.
Don't get me wrong reddit was always a bit of anarchy, but the best comments somehow managed to rise up. Not so much anymore. Maybe I'm just getting old and some of the comment contents don't interest me in the same way it used to.
I don't mind being part of this community even though some of the sub's have less activity. The activity seems to be of a better quality for the most part imho.
I don't believe signal let's you import any of your old messages to new device's for security. When setting up a new device last time I saw a warning about this. It let's you use the same account but without the older messages.
You could try to copy your ~/.config/Signal folder to the same location on your new device but that might not work. Don't know because I've never tried.
Just to piggyback back off this, when windows is installed on the same HD as your grub is installed windows can and in my experience eventually will over write your grub preventing you from booting into your Linux partition.
This forces you to boot from live USB like bootrepair or chroot and reinstall grub. This can be a slightly complicated process if you have encrypted your Linux partition with luks.
Best practice is to install each OS on their own HD and not to install grub on your windows HD. At least that's my experience over the last 15 years.
A great alternative to dual booting is installing windows to a KVM/qemu virtual machine. You can do this from virtmanager's GUI. See your distro help pages for instructions for setting it up.
From around the same eara Chuck and Eureka are pretty fun and lighthearted as well.