Not happy with Firefox ? For a more privacy friendly Firefox fork check LibreWolf : librewolf.net You don’t have to remove Firefox, you can run both at the same time.
Your phone is fine with the new certificates but Linux on the desktop is not. #showerthought Would it be possible that both Arch Linux and Linux Mint have software upgraded that is causing the connection failure ? Could it still work if you would use an older LTS Linux version as live USB stick ? Or would the new certificates actually require newer software, like OpenSSL (which is I think a build dependency for OpenVPN) on the desktop ? EDIT: I guess the latter is not the case since Arch Linux is a rolling distribution. But you could ask your IT persons at the university whether they upgraded something ?
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.
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.
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).
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.
www.haiku-os.org I’ve run it from USB stick on some older laptop.
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
bedrocklinux.org Bedrock Linux is a meta Linux distribution which allows users to mix-and-match components from other, typically incompatible distributions.
Tested here with LibreWolf installed with Flatpak system wide. Up to date Arch Linux, installed xfce4 and xfce4-goodies packages, logged in to the xfce-session, started LibreWolf from the menu, downloaded something to ~/Downloads. No issues.