Mr. Camel999

If you absolutely need functionality of some Windows only applications on Linux, it’s a bit clunky, but a solution exists to use a VM to integrate the Windows apps into your Linux environment. It’s called winapps, and I use it to run the latest version of Excel, which I do need for some things. Here’s their GitHub: https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps

QUIK is a more up-to-date version of QKSMS. Not the most important thing ever, since SMS/MMS are inherently insecure, but it’s just good to always make sure you have up-to-date versions of things.

It depends on what exactly you’re looking for in a messenger. If you are able to get people onto a specific platform, go with something like Signal, that’s your best case scenario.

If you’re unable to do that though, and need SMS/MMS, you have options. QUIK is an app I highly recommend for SMS and MMS. The big downside, however, is that RCS is seemingly exclusive to Google Messenger on Android. If you want to use RCS, you’re kind of stuck unfortunately.

To minimize needing to use it, you could buy an old iPhone, jailbreak it, and try and set up Beeper Mini on an android device. That’s what I do at least, which helps quite a bit. It’s finicky and just not perfect, but it’s better than just using SMS/MMS.

Hopefully this comment covers your use case and you’re able to get some useful info out of it.

Getting another number helps a lot in my opinion. If you’re getting another sim in the same phone, I suppose it would be possible for whatever cell carrier is providing the service to be able to link your two sim cards to your identity. However, for other companies, I don’t know of a way they could gather that your second sim phone number is linked to your first one. For instance, if you created two Discord accounts with your two phone numbers, you could theoretically be two completely different users that won’t be linked together. I would personally go for a second number.

Here’s a video covering basically all of NextDNS’ settings! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUG57ynLb8I

Have never had a problem using a VPN with programming.dev

I’m aware of a network that blocks Mullvad as well, but found a way around it. It went through just fine if I was using a custom DNS server. I used NextDNS for this, but I imagine it would work with Cloudflare or something as well (but I highly recommend NextDNS anyways). Hope this helps!

I use virt-manager, aka Virtual Machine Manager. Using this specifically because of the winapps for Linux repo has instructions on how to get Windows apps to run through the VM to be integrated in a Linux environment.