Most things should work with mainline kernel. According to archwiki the OLED models still need steams kernel patches to get wifi and bt working but older models work fine.
gravitywell
Mainly Because there is no money in doing it.. people who are privacy can just do it themselves and use VPN, most every chat app these days is already e2ee, and data collection is mostly dependent on what apps you use/have installed rather than whos networks your data travels through.
They have some kind of revenue sharing in place but I doubt it pays much seeing as the company is bleeding money and advertisers want nothing to do with it.
There is two editions of them one with digital noise reduction and one without. You probably got the "No DNR" version of 4k80.
I think archive.org has both. the file/torrent name should be the same just with "DNR" instead of "No DNR"
4k77, 4k80, and 4k83 are the names given to the fan attempt to digitize the original 35mm film reel verisons of the star wars trilogy.
Man the sovcits are getting sneakier
Not sure I follow your reasoning here... Having commercial forks isn't necessarily "competition" or if it is it's not always a bad thing. I suppose you could look at something like say Debian as being in "competition” with Ubuntu, but they both promote the underlying linux kernel and benefit from each other's improvements, while one is very much for profit while the other is a very well funded non profit organization.
Namecheap since I have been using them since the 00s and never had any problems.
Non-paywalled link: https://archive.is/syT6W