31–40 of 348 posts
I'm a little bummed out that I just switched back to Chromium after several months on Firefox, but Firefox has some very annoying bugs that were driving me crazy. On the plus side, it's the only Google software I use on a regular basis.
I actually think the results on DuckDuckGo are better than on google for many topics especially technical: - there’s less ads (you can turn them off completely, but I’ve only seen one ad on the front page at most which is ok for me) - not as SEOed (still not great though) - the box on the side is often more useful, e.g. Wikipedia instead of shopping ads - on mobile Safari I use the bangs [0] which have a sort of Omni…
DDG results are okay until you need to look up something non computer science related, like results for your local country.
I started a similar journey a couple of years ago. Honestly the biggest challenge was getting people to use my new email address instead of my Gmail. I made mostly the same choices, but swapped in: * Email/Calendar/Contacts: Fastmail * Docs: I don't use a hosted solution for this * Messaging: iMessage/Signal/Discord * Music: local music library While I lived in Seattle I was using Apple Maps, but since moving to Sydn…
Of course the best choice for maximum flexibility is to have your own domain, then you can always move if you want. We want to keep you by being the best, not due to lock-in!
> Cyanogenmod but it was always so buggy Huh? LineageOS has been rock stable for me for years as long as I go with stable builds. Maybe the author meant using something like microG to replace all the google frameworks?
Source: I've been using Cyanogen/LineageOS for years on various phones, and even tried getting it working on an officially unsupported phone (without luck).
> I’ve already pulled down my 2-300GB Google Photos archive How? I've tried several times and can never complete the download. Wired ethernet, not wifi.
Google Takeout works fine for that. It zips and splits everything in chunks. Didn't have any issue extracting 57GB worth of photos a gew months back.
A couple of weeks back I switched to Qwant[1]. Privacy focused, technical-matters-friendly, and most importantly, haven't had to look at Google once. Really enjoying it so far.
After seeing similar threads on HN, I’ve also started a similar journey. I managed to migrate to Firefox with DuckDuckGo as the default search engine. But I’ve also added a shortcut for Google search: if I feel like I am missing something I open a new tab and type “go [keywords]”.
Useful for technical searches, where ddg is sadly, not good enough.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't you guys use an ad blocker? I barely see any ads since I started using uBlock. Occasionally I browse without an ad blocker and the experience is horrible and intimidating. Actually ads and propaganda were the reasons I quit TV around 10 years ago and I have never regretted it. So much time and mental energy is freed up to do constructive and fulfilling things (e.g. reading books, sports, socializing, musing etc…
Threw away TV 15 years ago, zero regret.
My main motivation is slightly different in that being a software engineer I am actually in a unique position to navigate this tricky path and therefore feel a responsibility to tread the de-googled path, so that it might make it easier for others to follow, should they so wish. At the very least we all need readily available choices.
Interestingly, although I went through all the steps to delete my Google account I got stuck at the point of wondering what to do with my Youtube videos. Although, since last time I checked, it seems now I can actually move them to another Google account, I'll look into that.