Change your distribution to MX Linux and use MX Package Installer there. Select Mullvad VPN from “Popular Apps” tab there and MXPI will do all these steps for you.

For China:

• TikTok is called there Douyin
• WeChat
• microblogging is mainly done on Sina Weibo
• Baidu Baike (by Baidu search engine) is counterpart of Reddit?

Not actually the region you asked about, but wykop.pl is actually larger in Poland, than Reddit.

More on this, in Polish: https://zaufanatrzeciastrona.pl/post/o-trzech-takich-co-zhakowali-prawdziwy-pociag-a-nawet-30-pociagow/

My computer’s hard drive began to be less-than-reliable. And only Linux can be ran from the USB drive. I have got MX Linux, and save changes, updates etc. by remastering the image.

MX does not use systemd by default

System Settings → Appearance → Cursor Theme → Configure Launch Feedback

KDE does exactly like that
(I am using MX Linux)

What chmod step?

When I clicked on new app image, the OS told me, that program /name of app/ will be launched, I clicked “Continue” and it runs! No meddling with “chmod” or anything like that.

Many Linux distributions include Firefox as a default browser, but GNU/Linux is not very popular on desktop either…

I do not see any killer feature of Firefox right now. Even the Mozilla’s official browser comparison site indicates Microsoft Edge being on par with Firefox, based on Mozilla’s own criteria!
This will change in the future. Firefox will be the only major web browser on Android with full-fledged addon support.
I am already using some extensions on Vivaldi (like Consent-o-Matic, some transliteration addons), but this could make me switch to Firefox.

Google Chrome amounts to 63,55% of global browser market share right now.

https://repology.org
Debian testing is Debian 13

Definitely not me. I am on LiveUSB right now which makes my disk volume limited. And native packaging satisfies my needs (even when packages are old)

https://lemmy.zip

At some point they stopped playing whack-a-mole and imported some blocklist for Mastodon

The way is PeerTube - federated and peer-to-peer.

On /kbin you can flag your content as 18+/NSFW when adding it. You can also flag your magazine (equivalent of Lemmy community) the same way, when creating it.