I tried it and liked it a bit. The problem for me was that it was very empty: posts about the same article had more comments in Lemmy than Digg. It also lacked many features that even Lemmy has. And, since everyone was able to create 2 communities, there were more communities than users. Most of them were created and forgotten, while others tried to get bigger with only 1 user posting everyday. The biggest/mainstream communities had less than 100k users each one. After some days, I joined Lemmy and never looked back.

It’s like Opera VPN: they change your location and call it a VPN, but it works like a proxy in their browser. In this case, it’s powered by Cloudflare and works like a limited proxy version of WARP, connecting to the nearest server available instead of changing your country. I think a built-in VPN for the OS with an option to disable it in certain apps would be better.

There are some jobs that need a PC just for basic tasks like sending and receiving messages and emails. Of course they could use a phone for this, but computers have bigger screens. They only need access to the Internet, a frendly GUI, and permissions controls. The way things are going, even big companies will switch to Linux when Windows 10 support finally ends.

I used Qwant years ago, but don’t remember why I stopped. Maybe they introduced ads like Google, or something more annoying. But it’s not 100% european, they use Google and Bing engines (just like most private search engines) to show you results. Also, there are some articles talking about how sketchy it really is (French government public funding, links with Chinese companies, and more).
About Vivaldi, it depends on your devices. In my experience, Vivaldi for Android works fine on weak hardware, faster than Brave and Firefox, but slower than Chrome. Using it on PC always was a headache, it’s the worst optimized browser I’ve used. They care more about productivity features than performance or privacy. It can feel bloated.
I understand your concerns about headquarters and privacy. I think the strongest european options for browsing and searching are Vivaldi and Qwant, but remember to try them before switching.

I used their AI for months, until I read a comparison between multiple AIs and I found out it gave bad results. I thought all of them were very stubborn giving the same wrong answer all the time, but ChatGPT changed my mind. Now I can’t even imagine such ineffective tool having access to sensitive information like emails.

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Windows 7 users are switching to forks that still support the OS, like r3dfox, Pale Moon, Mypal, and Supermium. Home users stuck with 7 and 8 probably won’t upgrade or try Linux, they didn’t even update to 10 for some reason (and it was free!) .

Did you try OnlyOffice? I heard it has good compatibility with Microsoft Office’s files, it’s available on almost every OS, and looks easy to use. However, I’m not sure if you can create very complex documents like with Office.