Yeah I very much like dislike the culture of Gnome… maybe I’ll try something else someday. KDE isn’t for me but Cosmic maybe.

Ehhhh… sorta maybe. Ultimately they can’t, but they can make development more difficult.

Also Google has nothing to do with whether or not you’re bootloader is unlockable. Get a phone that is.

If you rally want to go down the whole FOSS path it does ultimately become a bit of a lifestyle.

Just use a custom ROM. This sadly will affect app developers. But if you are on a custom ROM without GMS it will continue to work just fine.

Yeah but the majority of bots out there are going after easy prey. Honestly, if you use public key authentication with ssh you should be fine, even if it is on port 22. But it does of course clog up access logs.