Funny, I tried out Brave 2 days before the thread was posted and really like it but then yeah, same: back to firefox +Privacy badger, ublock and "ddg privacy essentials"!
I had to use Windows 7 at my last holiday internship, and really liked it. Faster and more stable than that sh**** windows 10. I can see why a huge tech company (and I mean really huge, so they probably know their stuff) would prefer it aver windows 10. It works and does the job.
We have one in our cellar, proudly displayed in my father's "man cave" of sort (well it's more like just everything that has to do with tech and modelmaking crammed into a really tiny space). I've never used it though but it supposedly still works... For some reason I really like the aesthetics of old tech; the bulky, beige frame just has it's own appeal. And those tactile MK are just really, really awesome. (too bad I'm a minimalist when it comes to tech [in terms of looks] for actual every-day usage.) Oh, and the design of the old Thinkpads when IBM still made them.
One problem is, that that stuff was in plain sight in git hub for a long time, afaik. Makes you wonder how much privacy malpractice is "hidden" in plain sight in open source and no one simply found it or bothered with looking through the code.
As for Ubuntu, while the controversy is kinda old by now, what I don't like it that Ubuntu goes more and more into the direction of forcing the snap store down people's throats. That's a deal breaker for me. (also , yum and pacman are way better than apt!) If you really want to know what happens on your system and exactly want to say what's on your system from the very start you gotta go with Arch Linux but then again, most people (Including me) usually don't want to go through some endlessly tedious installation just to have a working system to browse on the internet.