What are you talking about?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-engine-firefox#w_add-a-search-engine-from-the-address-bar

That took me like two second to find. You can also use addons, like this one for Qwant:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/qwantcom-for-firefox/?amp%3Butm_medium=referral&amp%3Butm_content=search

Which I like. But none of this is hard or “obfuscated”, and it’s literally identical to changing or adding a new search engine on Waterfox.

I have a lot of issues with Mozilla, not least of which is their reliance on Google for income. It’s like hiring a dingo as a babysitter. But c’mon, man.

Honestly, this is kind of a weird question. It’s Google. They collect all of it. Every picture, every note, every keystroke. All of it.

The answer to "what information does GOOGLE SERVICE collect is always all of it.

I have three possible solutions for you:

1. Switch to Fedora Workstation
2. Install Gnome on Mint
3. Use Pop! OS

Option 1 is probably the best one. Fedora is as easy to use as Ubuntu but without Snaps or the rest of Canonical stuff. The downside is that it’s RPM based instead of DEB, but that’s not as big an issue as you might think, since Flatpaks cover a lot of ground, and between the Fedora and RPM Fusion repositories, most software is still available.

Option 2 is another way to go. It gives you exactly what you’re looking for in a way. Unfortunately, you’re going to end up with some Cinnamon remnants in your Gnome set up. That’s not too big of a deal, though, just some extra cleanup work removing the Cinnamon desktop stuff.

Option 3 is my least favorite. Pop! OS is great, and almost what you’re after once you disable some extensions. The only issue I have here is that Pop! will probably be shifting to their in house desktop environment COSMIC soon. Well, fairly soon anyway. I’m sure they’ll keep the Gnome version going, but it’s very clearly not going to be their focus. Still, Pop! OS might be exactly what you’re looking for!

Depending on what you’re looking for, you might just want a computer monitor. Those are essentially “dumb TVs” without Internet connectivity or an operating system, and they have HDMI connections, so there you go.

You can also look into commercial TVs, although more and more of those are “smart” these days. Even if they’re smart, and they tend to be a bit more pricy, they aren’t preloaded with crapware and usually have excellent warranties. So that’s another option.

What’s stopping you? Just out of curiosity.

And the Platinum Award for Least Surprising News Headline goes to…