
Sorry, I got confused too, what you are asking can be found if you go to a search engine and type “xiaomi spyware”. Xiaomi is just a Chinese company, don’t expect them to care about privacy, they don’t see that as a right of their users, and they do what Chinese government wants. Same with any USA product, by law they are enforced to do and not talk about it.

That’s my point of view, you want a more deep detail.

I already said Fairphone.
For example, with a ethical OS would be https://murena.com/shop/smartphones/brand-new/murena-fairphone-4-fr/
This is mostly in Europe as it gets or got subventions from Europe. Those smartphones are expensive for the specs they have but that’s because they are paying fairly the resources and manufacturing.
If you want to know more about the smartphone: https://www.fairphone.com/
The OS is open source, a project to help people to get privacy easily. They even have Tor network built in. https://e.foundation/e-os/ https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/os/releases/-/releases
The good thing about this is that it is super easy to repair and replaced parts. I think this started with European founding, so it’s basically on Europe as not many people cares about ethical manufacturing, most people want cheap 200 euros china phones. The US is mainly capitalist looking to bother other countries to extract their resources at the lowest cost, so it would make sense that Fairphone isn’t there.
For something ethical and privacy respectful, I would go to Fairphone + /e/ project. https://esolutions.shop/shop/murena-fairphone-4-eu/

What I was saying is that I only use my desktop to browse internet, the app Portmaster also blocks trackers and everything AdBlock or PiHole do so if I go outside with my laptop it still works, on Android the same thing, if I go on phone data this AdBlock or PiHole will not work, I can still use other solutions, but I don’t really do anything on phone to care about trackers or ads, I neither have Google on my android.
So if I setup this DNS service on my own house LAN just for a desktop device… my Phone or Laptop which I only use when I’m outside will still have no protection, so I better have my own blocker on my localhost instead of my LAN and no need to run extra servers at home for just a desktop.
And I think if I wanted to do it, I would use a OpenWrt package to run it on my own router instead of a docker service. https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/ad-blocking

I only have Linux and I only use phone when I’m outside… I never neither have any ad issue on phone because I don’t really use it at all… I never liked services like that and PiHole as I could route all my traffic over VPN and skip LAN DNS. And if I go with my laptop to another house or to work, it would still work.

I always thought this kind of tools are useless, it’s better to have an ad block on your own PC, so you can use different DNS, VPN tunnels or even leaving home and still have this protection. For me the best is https://safing.io/portmaster/ which is free and open source, if you want also VPN you can pay the membership, but they are still on beta.

Maybe just use the browser and any instance of https://redirect.invidious.io/ , should be the same as a app.
Russia often lies
USA also lies on a way much worse. -> https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=D5xJuyrUIIA
This is a film that explains how they did with Afghanistan -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Lake_(film) Basically USA created the Talibans, without them Taliban would not exist.
I’m neither saying Russia is right, Russia is also a bad country (all of them are just some are worse than others), they just aren’t invading south America just to get closer to USA.
As far as I know, NATO and USA has been and still hiring mercenaries to mess up and make conflicts near Russia frontiers. USA is the country that has been in war more than the 95% of the existence, did criminal wars and a war fanatic. I doubt Russia will use the force to invade Ukraine, makes no sense, instead war/force they would go for pro-russians politics on Ukraine using “democracy” rules.
I feel a bit repetitive but any KDE distro like manjaro already gives you a nice and working interface, I think it’s the same just KDE has more options, you have a search bar to find the options easily which gnome don’t have so KDE could be easier than gnome to find a option too. If you don’t want to customize your desktop environment you will not do even if it’s KDE, LXDE, XFCE, Gnome… and any desktop environment… for example, on my laptop I have KDE with just a blank bar on the top with the icons system try + apps opened. Nothing more… I use shortcuts to open rofi to open apps and more shortcuts to change between workspaces, it is more simple and fast than Gnome.
I think you are right, Telegram is better, if you want a end to end chat just start a “secret chat” and you will get it. There is more features on Telegram but I would still use another chat app for personal conversations that respects the privacy like matrix.org, you can still use Telegram for your groups and likes like as you post on Lemmy or any other forum.
None of the points in the comment you replied is about the topic on root of the replies, I replied the two guys talking how they dislike KDE because they get distracted by customization. Go reply someone else if you want to say why KDE or Gnome is better, I don’t want to discuss this I was just saying why saying “I get distracted” is not a valid argument as you can keep KDE with default settings and you can get distracted by anything else on your physical room, “overwhelming” can be anything new to learn if you don’t know where the options are placed, and to do work and daily tasks you don’t need to configure anything on any distro with KDE. Plus KDE also has a system-wide dark mode. Again, I don’t want to discuss about why KDE or why Gnome, just test and use the most you like but don’t tell me KDE is distracting you from doing your daily tasks…
The thing is, you can’t blame the desktop environment the lack of focus on your work. You can keep KDE defaul look and get used to it, getting yourself limitated sounds a excuse. You can lose the focus with anything on your room too and you are not going to live in a prision to focus on your daily tasks neither.
KDE and Gnome is getting better every year, each one is different and has different options and everything you want to argument but the lack of focus on your work is not because of the bunch of customization options.
What I’m saying is that just because Gnome is more limited doesn’t make it more productive… if you like customizing things you’ll spend time customizing it, if you don’t like customizing you can still get KDE with the default settings. That’s what I meant in a bad and exaggerated way. Also, Gnome addons sucks… I had so much problems and is a mess.

Grauda is pretty neat, for me much better than Manjaro… https://garudalinux.org/index.html
I actually install the XFCE version which is more simple and then I use my own i3WM configuration/environment stuff. This way I can use their repos and their “Garuda Welcome” GUI which has pretty neat options to automatize steps.
I’m not an expert on Xiaomi, but if you take your time to type that on the search engine, you will find a lot of experts about different topics about it.