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De-Googling: My Progress

geekgonecrazy.com

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Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#321

Post by geekgonecrazy »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #190
ekianjo wrote: post #24

> Iphone: But I think this really helped cut my reliance on Google and I feel a lot less reliant on any particular phone OS. You just became reliant on the iOS system instead of the Google on. Hardly an improvement.

You can use an Apple phone without using a lot of Apple services and contributing a lot to a cloud profile of you. Given how many apps on the Android ecosystem depend on Play Services to function, it's nearly impossible to do this with Android. I have a Brave Heart Edition PinePhone, and I'm hoping to switch to a real Linux phone soon, but for now, carrying an iPhone as a pretty basic phone is still a big privacy imp…

I'm planning to get a PinePhone to play with. I think has a ways to come. But i'm really excited that an affordable phone like this can land in the hands of more developers to work on mobile OS's.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#322

Post by geekgonecrazy »

adiabatty wrote: post #316

Since this place, at this time, seems to be as good as any to ask for recommendations: Is there a paid service that's similar to Google Voice where I can get an extra phone number and have calls to it routed to my normal phone? I'd like to have a phone number that's "out there", so to speak, but not my real number.

Twilio I think you can do this right from their UI.

Calling out might be a bit more tricky though

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#323

Post by geekgonecrazy »

RussianCow wrote: post #34
Semaphor wrote: post #9

> 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?

For some phones, proper hardware support is iffy at best, and things constantly crash at worst. The stability of LineageOS seems to correlate roughly with how popular that phone is with LineageOS devs, so if you have a phone with only one maintainer, chances are that some things might not work super well. (It also depends on how committed to open source the manufacturer is, but these days, the answer is "not at all"…

Yes this! I probably picked some bad phones to give this a go. I had a Samsung Captiva for a while and I flashed hundreds of times on that. Lots of different roms and it took a while for the Cyanogen Rom become stable.

Then the whole Drama with Cyanogen the company also was weird.. kept me from messing with cyanogen specifically for a while.

Over all felt like playing the lottery. I'd do tons and tons of reading through xda forums and had to do things exactly right if misunderstood even a single step some of these phones were bricked.

Kinda like anything at some point you just need a break and it just needs to work :)

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#324

Post by geekgonecrazy »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #184

Amazingly how similar my path is to Aaron’s. I use paid for Google services (GCP, buy lots of movies and books) but I have mostly moved to DDG, combination of FastMail and ProtonMail, (sort of) trust Apple walled garden, and rely heavily on FireFox containers to separate data for all web properties that I visit and use. I do still use Google Photos and Microsoft OneDrive for secondary backups for my photos on iCloud…

right click->Open Link in New Container Tab is great! Can easily pick which container to put it in.

Email was the hardest for me. But felt the most freeing also.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#325

Post by ocdtrekkie »

geekgonecrazy wrote: post #321
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use an Apple phone without using a lot of Apple services and contributing a lot to a cloud profile of you. Given how many apps on the Android ecosystem depend on Play Services to function, it's nearly impossible to do this with Android. I have a Brave Heart Edition PinePhone, and I'm hoping to switch to a real Linux phone soon, but for now, carrying an iPhone as a pretty basic phone is still a big privacy imp…

I'm planning to get a PinePhone to play with. I think has a ways to come. But i'm really excited that an affordable phone like this can land in the hands of more developers to work on mobile OS's.

Yeah, it's really neat. I got the iPhone 11 because I need something reliable for now for work purposes, but my hope is to switch to my PinePhone when I feel it is ready.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#326

Post by Diesel555 »

_-david-_ wrote: post #299
joshmanders wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is not an advertising company, they are a product and service company. Google gives free services in exchange for your data. Facebook Messenger I don't get, I'd use Apple Messages over Facebook, or Telegram, etc.

>Apple is not an advertising company Except when they are https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205223 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202074

Apple protects your data.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

Yes they advertise, but you are not the product on services such as cloud. They often cannot physically read your data intentionally.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#327

Post by abtinf »

pkamb wrote: post #312
abtinf wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox with tree style tabs is on another level. Firefox also supports lazy loading tabs when restarted, so only pinned tabs and tabs you view consume resources. I have nearly 1000 tabs open in Firefox and navigate them extremely efficiently. Does chrome do that?

I don't really want/need to use a new horizontal tab paradigm that supports thousands of tabs. I just want a really good implementation of the standard top-of-the-window tab bar.

*Vertical

I was lured in initially by the novelty. But it has become an amazing tool for organizing myself. When I browse HN, I shift-click on everything interesting, and it automatically gets organized into a nice collapsible tree.

When I am working on a project, I move search results, project pages, and relevant info to a single tree.

I leave other things open indefinitely, which effectively replaces bookmarks.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#328

Post by Semaphor »

RussianCow wrote: post #34
Semaphor wrote: post #9

> 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?

For some phones, proper hardware support is iffy at best, and things constantly crash at worst. The stability of LineageOS seems to correlate roughly with how popular that phone is with LineageOS devs, so if you have a phone with only one maintainer, chances are that some things might not work super well. (It also depends on how committed to open source the manufacturer is, but these days, the answer is "not at all"…

Ah, my last 3 phones were all OnePlus and I think those are pretty popular ;)

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#329

Post by andrewshadura »

kick wrote: post #212
Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very engineer-focused way of looking at it. I don't care about backlinks or population or whatever weighting DDG uses: I want relevant results. DDG is a user-facing search engine, not a tech demo. Showing a UK visitor three pages of results about Worcester, MA is simply bad UX.

Then use regional results! I, personally, am not an engineer. I'm a person who has an actual use for 'global' results, and my main reason for using DuckDuckGo is the ability to not have regional results. If you want relevant results, don't use the global weighting. Use the UK weighting. That's why it's there. Literally so people with your preference of localized results can have localized results.

I set the region to Slovakia: it shows me a map of the UK Worcester and mixed results mostly about the US one:

https://i.imgur.com/i6fb6sz.png

Now I set the region to the UK, I would expect the more relevant results. It shows the map for the US Worcester and mixed results again, but differently mixed:

https://i.imgur.com/OdhCQg9.png

This doesn’t make much sense to me.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#330

Post by andrewshadura »

hgal wrote: post #131
harha wrote: post #8

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 is good for mainstream. But once I search something in Hungarian I have to revert back to google.

Same for Slovak.

P.S. Bojler eladó.

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