N.E.P.T.R

Fingerprinting is a complex beast and nearly impossible protect against. RFP (created and upstreamed by Tor Browser) protects and normalizes most fingerprintable metrics (timezone, display viewport dimensions, user agent, audio devices, installed system languages/fonts, etc) to a stable value for each Firefox version. Canvas is the only metric which is randomized. The purpose of this is to create a shared stable browser fingerprint for all RFP users, creating a crowd for people to blend in with each other.

While RFP is strong, its anti-fingerprinting strategy was created for Tor Browser, which users are not supposed to customize. The same can not be expected of all other Firefox users, resulting in most users being much easier to distinguish from each other. RFP also can cause some site breakage and doesnt offer a granular way to toggle specific features per website (eg. Canvas protections breaks your webcam in conference calls).

There is no good solution. Best options are use Firefox (or a fork like Librewolf) for casual use, and Mullvad/Tor Browser for more critical situations. Always use uBlock Origin (except with Tor).

On the Chromium-side, Cromite and Brave randomize some fingerprintable metrics, but they aren’t as exhaustive and aren’t upstreamed to Chromium (for obvious reasons).

Online tests of uniqueness are skewed by the population who uses them, aka privacy-conscious aren’t the typical user even if a dataset overrepresents.

My point was introducing Canvas noise isnt going to make you less fingerprintable, actually quite the opposite. Firefox’s RFP is much better at normalizing fingerprintable metrics and is native. Canvas is one of many many other fingerprinting vectors.

If you go the route of trying to protect against fingerprinting through randomization, use the extension JShelter which seems to do much more noise than Canvas blocker does. I am still very skeptical of it (and other anti-fingerprinting extensions) because of how complex fingerprinting is.

Not an exhaustive solution which results in easier unique fingerprinting. Plus Firefox already randomizes Canvas noise with both FPP or RFP modes (FPP is default).

Linux Mint is built on top of Ubuntu, which itself was a fork of Debian. Ubuntu is not something I would call a “clean base”. It is clunky, slow to adopt new technologies, and very (Canonical) opinionated. Linux Mint actively works against its Ubuntu base by removing Snap and other Canonical weirdness.

Tumbleweed and Leap offer the option to add or remove ANY package from your system before you even install it through their GUI installer, actually 2 GUI package choosers for either simple or advanced users. I don’t think it is accurate to suggest that Linux Mint is minimalist with its packages, especially when comparing to openSUSE distros.

I will not argue against Linux Mint being user friendly, it is pretty good. But “not bloated”, especially when comparing against openSUSE, is inaccurate.

How is Linux Mint less bloated? Linux Mint also suffers from poor Wayland support and isnt a (semi-)rolling release distro like Fedora or Tumbleweed. I wouldn’t recommend to anyone other than people who are tech iliterate. Even then, I would still suggest VanillaOS or Fedora Workstation. I used Mint as my daily driver for a year and it was fine, nothing amazing.

Bazzite is a good distro, I convinced a friend to move to Linux from Windows 10 and Bazzite was the only one that worked well with their nvidia hardware.

Since SteamOS isnt available on desktop, check out these distros instead:

Bazzite (the best option)

Nobara (another good option)