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While I agree that at first all sides should be considered, often I find people view both sides with equal merit when it is easily worked out that one side holds more merit than the other. (Some examples of arguments holding less merit being ones that go against scientific evidence without evidence to back them up, arguments made in bad faith, arguments made with wilful ignorance of evidence)

I feel you on the growing up in a dogma infused environment, in my case rural England rife with homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and all that sort of general ignorance-based hatred and revulsion. Luckily I also had an internet connection from a relatively early age so I had exposure to outside perspectives or I would've likely had more years of repression and self loathing than I had and wouldn't have had anywhere near the opportunities I've had.

In my mind, journalism should focus less on giving all sides equal weight and staying neutral but more on finding all the evidence, giving you said evidence, and then discounting lies and manipulation of evidence. Or at least on giving you all the evidence for you to digest and come to your own conclusions rather than just a match of he-said, she-said type reporting. I find the issue I've described especially prevalent in some BBC news stories..

Edit: I forgot to add that I also strongly agree with you in the many news organisations and journalists overly sensationalizing and giving opinion as "news" and/or trying to incite emotions rather than broadened perspectives/informed opinions.

There's a wonderful initiative in Suffolk, East of England, run by somebody I knew many years ago. Basically it's an educational club and community interest charity run/founded by a Matthew Applegate to teach kids and young people across Suffolk (I think there were also talks of expanding it to Norfolk.) all sorts of tech things like robotics, programming, game design electronics, and probably more now.

I don't know what it is about his style of teaching but he completely changed my view of IT and the IT industry. Before then, my main tech knowledge was from the at the time terrible exposure you got in rural schools back in the 2000s and taking electronics apart to try and see how they worked. I thought programming was way beyond me as I didn't do well at all in school and had major self esteem issues as a kid. Matt is one of the key reasons I gained a serious interest in technology and has helped probably thousands more like me. He showed me all it takes to learn anything is time, effort, and a healthy dose of curiousity.

Maybe other educators could reach out to him and ask how he does things differently? I'd love to see things like this crop up nationwide, I feel it'd seriously change the knowledge base of tech issues for future generations.

Relevant Links https://twitter.com/CCCSuffolk https://twitter.com/CCCCFSuffolk https://twitter.com/Pixelh8 (Matt's Twitter.) creativecomputingclub.com (Website appears down for maintenance time of writing.) https://www.linkedin.com/organization-guest/company/creative...

You can install flatpaks on many distros, including Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Kubuntu, et cetera. I have some flatpaks on a Kubuntu laptop I maintain for a family member and installation was about as smooth as it is on my own fedora machine. I use cli exclusively though so ymmv if you prefer gui(Edit: Exclusively use CLI for sysadmin).

Personally, I like the idea of a Fairphone with Lineage/MicroG.

I say like the idea of as opposed to use as currently Fairphone is out of my budget and I can't find a phone in my budget range that's supported by Lineage/MicroG so I just have somewhat reliable <£100 phone with as much de-googling as I can while still having normal android.. (Not much)

Edit: the bonus of phones in this price range is like Fairphones they almost always make it easy to quickly remove the battery so you're certain nothing's running.

Could you roll your own vpn to say your home where you have a a rpi set up as a pihole and your own adblocking dns like you could on android? (Common roll your own VPN's like Wireguard or OpenVPN)