Yes, Chromium, from which Chrome places proprietary parts on top of, is an open source project, so anyone can fork it and remove telemetry and tracking. Most browsers are in fact forks of Chromium - e.g. Edge (which replaces Google’s trackers with Microsoft’s own), Opera (which puts in trackers going back to a Chinese corporation), Vivaldi (which doesn’t seem to do tracking but has proprietary parts so is not verifiable) - or, on the privacy respecting side Brave (which is all open source and doesn’t track you once you click opting out on its reporting back to Brave and crypto rewards stuff), Ungoogled Chromium (which tends not to be updated all that quickly) and a few others.

The Librewolf project is up to date Firefox core with some hardening and the telemetry going back to Mozilla removed - good stuff.

Other options are Fairphone, Volla, Murena - or flashing “vanilla” custom ROM’s on phones other than Pixels - or using Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, Mobian, Droidian or Sailfish OS.

2025 will likely be way more the year of massive e-waste than the “Year of the Linux Desktop ™” - but I still think it is in the realm of possible that Linux market share close to doubles into the 5 to 8 percent range.

While I already regularly use Ubuntu and Ubuntu Touch for my “infotainment” desktops, laptops and tablets - I have 3 desktops in my studio that run Windows 10 that work great for my pro audio work needs, none of which qualify for Windows 11 according to MS’s “PC Health Check” app. So I’ve been investigating running Ubuntu Studio dual booting on one of my machines as a possible way of keeping these boxes going after Win 10 stops getting security updates. Some things look promising, but given I was not able to get the available kernel module device driver to build for my Merging Anubis (which is my main audio interface for my mastering studio) I will likely still need to get a Win 11 box in order to be able to continue my current work flow.