Tzeentch

This is probably the best resource for keeping track of which search engine options exist and what their quality is like: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes

For a "fire and forget" option that doesnt require any configuration you cant go wrong with good ol DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/

If you're okay with dealing with more configuration and breakage then Searx can be pretty powerful as its a metasearch engine that can search with every search engine you tell it at once and agregate the results(while proxying things to maintain privacy): https://searx.space/ (had decent luck with the https://search.sapti.me/ instance if you just wanna try it out without searching through a list of options)

Also all search engines are kinda bad due to SEO spam and "AI" generated images and articles polluting the results, consider using uBlacklist to help you filter out the trash from search results(think of it like ublock origin for search engine results), can use it for basically any search engine so no reason to not set it up: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist

Ish, it hasnt seen much development in recent times but seems there's still dev interest to continue development https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/13166332

Eternity has a data saver mode

No, that's a different protocol, the tearing patches, already merged, but i believe we're still waiting on some patches to the kernel to get them fully working(i think it was kernel 6.8 that had them), Nvidia's drivers also need to add support for it, they've given no timeline for that so far however

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/65

That blogpost is considered to be somewhat flawed with its information, as explained here: https://tesk.page/2021/02/11/response-to-flatkill-org/

You can, infact there's outright a mesa git runtime one can add, i don't imagine too many systems roll so fast as to outpace it https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/available-runtimes.html

Your best bet is to find a car where its easiest to disable the antenna/cellular modem for, so look for a car that has a fuse for the DCM(digital communications module) you can pull, as having it be a fuse means you can readily reconnect it should you need to, try to find its schematic online, or find the repair manual for the car or use a car maintenance program,

Apparently its also possible to call the car company and ask for an opt out when serviced,

I vaguely remember some people experimenting with replacing the head unit with aftermarket ones, but no idea how well that would actually go in practice

mokutil --disable-validation

Though this sounds more like a case of needing to disable secure boot in your bios ? As far as i know Mint has no secure boot support, and the mokutil keys of a previous installation wouldn't affect a fresh one

Two utilities that may be handy for you here:

Pakrat: Automates and simplifies the process of creating alliases for flatpaks, good if you just need to make a few programs be simplified

Fuzzpak: Lets you do fuzzy searches for flatpaks(as in you just write fuzzpak inkscape and it auto looks for something with inkscape in the flatpak folder and launches it), good for when you want to simplify launching flatpaks in general without doing the process of configuring stuff manually

Are you using Firefox within a flatpak perchance ?

There seems to be a bug to it relating to use of bitmap fonts, you can fix the issue by disabling them via a config file in firefox's fonts: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621915

PDF4QT, bit of a newcomer, but its a free and foss pdf editor with the capabilities of propriatery equivalents: https://jakubmelka.github.io/