Ensure any “smart” device like a smart TV is not connected to the internet nor your home wifi. Do not accept any TOS/EULA on a smart TV and do not use any built-in “apps”. Use them only as dumb monitors with hardwired HDMI inputs.
Obviously avoid any of the myriad of smart devices there are out there now, like pretty much any robotic vacuums (they literally have spycams on them now), Amazon Echo, etc. I assume you already know better…
Do your research on any car you might purchase. Cars are trending towards being smartphones with wheels. Anything that might have a feature like remote start is often now using cell service tech not limited range/offline radios, and usually that also comes with a bunch of ET Phone home nonsense as well.
Never been a better time to try Linux. Ubuntu is pretty easy to get started with (download and setup a bootable USB, stick it and go) and ChatGPT is extremely good about walking you through any questions. You don’t even need to ask highly technical questions, just tell it your goal and your system.
“I just installed Ubuntu 22.04 on my computer and want to SSH into it from a Windows computer on my network, how do I do that?”
“I want to download a file from my Ubuntu command line, how do I do that?”
“I want to setup a share that both Windows and Linux computers can access over my network, how do I do that?”
“I have a github action runner provided by github that includes a run.sh file that needs to run constantly. I want to setup as a background service on my Ubuntu Linux computer so it will always be running as long as the computer is on, how can I do that?”
It will spit out every command line you need in what order, contents of a .service file, tell you how to monitor it, and so on. You can ask it what each line does, what the parameters mean, etc. It’s like having a mid-level sys admin at your fingertips. It will interpret any errors you get, and tell you how to fix them.
Perfect? Maybe not, but its close for a remarkable variety of tasks. It may be, and I’m not joking, 20 times more productive and time efficient than Google searches, reading stackoverflow posts, reading documentations/man pages and trying to decipher what you really need out of any of those sources.
I’m sure some are too paranoid to ask ChatGPT certain things for privacy reasons, and I would anonymize anything you paste in, probably just be a bit mindful of anything involving permissions (you can also ask what security risks exist doing something). Just normal ChatGP3.5 (free) is extremely knowledgeable about Linux CLI and administration along with common packages and apps you’d want to use.