I prefer signal because it’s been the easiest one to convince my friends and family to use. I have like 8 friends on Signal, the 1 I got onto Matrix quit after a week. Matrix I treat more like foss Discord so I only use it for communities. ElementX is really nice though so I have hope that eventually it could be as smooth to use as Signal.
I don’t have strong opinions about BlueSky (I have an account, I prefer activitypub but it’s whatever), but to me I will view it as centralized until someone who is not BlueSky runs a second relay server that is federated with the BlueSky run one.
And based on the writings of one of the creators of activitypub, Christine Lemmer-Webber, there are some hurdles to that happening: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
The screenshot doesn’t show any version change to signal - the version number is the same, so I was just answering why you might see an update like that since I thought that was part of your question.
Those might be flatpak “refreshes”, which show up as “updating to the same version”. As described by a flatpak maintainer, sometimes an app or runtime gets updated without changing the user-facing version number. I assume that’s what you’re seeing here.
Did you make sure to stop network manager too? I think disabling it tells it not to start it automatically but I think if it was already running it may have stayed up and maybe it brought the interface back up.
That’s my only guess, if ip link shows it as down still then idk. NetworkManager also has its own Mac spoofing thing so you might have better success editing the properties of the network connection in NetworkManager and putting a new Mac in the cloned Mac address field. I’ve only used macchanger with netctl.
Nowhere did they say that those statements mean immutable to them. Just that your claims that OP “literally said they didn’t want immutable” is not based in reality.