If you haven't set up this laptop yet, then I'd suggest installing a server-oriented distro like Debian, AlmaLinux, or Ubuntu Server. Those have minimal install options that come without a desktop environment installed, as most servers do not need one. If you'd like to make the install harder for yourself, this might be a good excuse to give Arch Linux or Gentoo a try, as those have the option of a fully manual install. If you'd like, you can install a desktop environment afterwards using the package manager.
If you already have a Linux with a graphical desktop installed, you can configure the system not to automatically start it with sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target
. (Do not do this on your main device!) You can re-enable it with sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target
.
Regardless, you can then start a graphical session using startx
, or whatever command is more appropriate for your desktop environment (gnome-session
to start GNOME on Wayland, startplasma-wayland
to start KDE Plasma), or by sudo systemctl start
ing your login screen manager (sddm, gdm, lightdm, etc).
This article seems to assume that advertisers don't want our identifying information, and are clamoring for an alternative to tracking that lets them measure ad performance anonymously, which is just not true. Being able to uniquely identify users and target them is a feature, and getting more data points from the browser just helps add to their profiles.