No thanks

You wouldn’t download a car?

Fedora’s my favorite. It’s also the most secure without going straight to QubesOS, which is not beginner friendly.

Thunderbird. Free and open source, thus no corporate data collection garbage. Even supports extensions like uBlock Origin and comes with PGP encryption built in. They’ve recently had a major design overhaul as well.

I’d strongly advise against using Spark if you want your emails to remain private.

I’m fine with that.

Keep in mind that the RF values will be completely different if you use other encoders like H.265 or even H.264 with a hardware acceleration encoder. For 1080p, 20-22 is indeed appropriate but lower res like 480p will require a lower RF like 16-18 for the same quality. Meanwhile 4K will be fine with 24. Again, assuming you use the x264 encoder which is not hardware accelerated. For best results, I’d really recommend playing around with the settings and see what works best for you.

Handbrake’s speed depends entirely on your settings. For example, in the video tab next to video encoder you can select codecs like H.264, H.265 or AV1. The newer the codec, the more efficient and space saving your result will be but also the more time it will take. You may or may not also see the same codec twice but with NVENC or some other hardware feature next to it. Those will be significantly faster. If you have a choice between multiple hardware acceleration options, I’d recommend picking Nvidia > Intel > AMD for the best results. If none appear, you could buy a newer graphics card that support those features if budget allows. Other than that, something else that also significant affects how fast Handbrake will be is the preset option in encoder option (also in the video tab). You can select everything from placebo to slow to fast to ultrafast. The slower the higher the quality but also the slower it will be. Faster presets will be faster but will offer lower quality.

Well, if the file sizes are too big you need to reencode them. That’s just how it is, regardless of the software you’re using. If your computer is too slow at that, you may want to use faster settings. For example, you could use a codec that’s hardware accelerated by your GPU.

This is so dumb. I’d rather install an update that bricks the services of a spyware company that I avoid at all costs rather than having an active vulnerability in my OS. Heck, that shouldn’t even be called a bug as it kind of is a feature I actually want.