A bit late, but you might find useful information in this book: http://blog.nowherejezfoltodf4jiyl6r56jnzintap5vyjlia7fkirfsnfizflqd.onion/opsec. Not all of it might be relevant to you, i.e. you are probably not doing anything that would require plausible deniability, and probably some other things. But it has some really good info, in my opinion.
You can't. Some might say that the less adversaries monitor you the better. But you will never be private unless you ditch all the proprietary software and practice good opsec on the internet and in real life. Hate to break it to you, but privacy is fundamentally a binary thing: you are either spied upon or you are not, regardless if it's one hundred companies or just one.
Few people can be sure of that, because it would require digging in their assembly code which can take a lot of time, but they have a financial incentive to do that and they love money, so all sane people assume that they very much do. And they also get caught sometimes (multiple times!), so thinking they would just stop would be foolish.
So, you're basically saying that doing things the way you think works the best and not being afraid of new things, instead of simply choosing the path of least resistance gets you on the autism spectrum? If that's the case, then I think "normal" might be the biggest lie I've ever been told.
Don't like it for one simple reason: no integration with the distribution. Flatpak is this sort universal solution that works, but doesn't necessarily work hand-in-hand with the distro, unlike package managers.
And less stable than Arch, and more bloated than Ubuntu... If that is something you want for whatever reason! It is the most versatile distro in existance because it's literally anything you want it to be - clean and nice, or total chaos. What is there not to love?
That's the point of the game - it doesn't tell you where to go and what to do because you're meant to explore the environment yourself. And the debris you scan, the screenshots you take, and the thrills that you get - are the real reward here, and not some goal that game artificially imposes on you. So I think you were just playing it wrong.
If you want features, I suggest you try Kitty. It is probably the terminal with the most features. I personally prefer Alacritty because it is quite bare and doesn't have all that fancy stuff that I don't need (and that takes up cpu cycles).
You know, except for Monero. Really sucks that real private anonymous internet money is getting pushed out of all places possible, while crap like Bitcoin freely exists.
A bit late, but you might find useful information in this book: http://blog.nowherejezfoltodf4jiyl6r56jnzintap5vyjlia7fkirfsnfizflqd.onion/opsec. Not all of it might be relevant to you, i.e. you are probably not doing anything that would require plausible deniability, and probably some other things. But it has some really good info, in my opinion.