How much of your life have you degoogled?

We’re reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.

Now more than ever, it’s important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to be billboards for these companies anymore.

For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling journey are below:

Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.

Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.

This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its’ users.

thayer,

It’s been a long time in the making, but I’ve finally degoogled and largely removed all proprietary software from my personal life. I know this topic is pretty well covered here and elsewhere so just to add to the list of others, here’s where I’m at these days:

  • OS: Fedora (Silverblue) Linux (w/ AMD Radeon GPU)
  • Email: Thunderbird w/ hosted email over IMAP
  • Calendar/Contacts: Radicale instance w/ DAVx⁵ on Android
  • Storage: Syncthing
  • Web: Firefox
  • Search: Startpage and DuckDuckGo mostly, but still use Google and Bing on occasion
  • IM: Signal
  • Desktop productivity: LibreOffice when I need it (Collabora Office on Android)
  • Notes: Vim, VS Code (Markor on Android); most of my “docs” are just plain text files written in markdown
  • Passwords: KeepassXC/DX
  • Code editor: Vim, VS Code
  • GrapheneOS on mobile, with almost entirely FOSS apps
  • Kindle e-book reader with management via Calibre
  • Media managed by Kodi with a raspberry pi
  • Proxmox hypervisor for Windows/Linux VMs and containers

Gaming under Linux has improved unbelievably these past few years, now that Steam is contributing with their Steam Deck platform. I used to have to dual-boot Windows to keep up with the latest titles, but I wiped it about a year ago and things have been great.

I still rely on Microsoft Excel and Adobe Photoshop for some tasks, but less so now than ever before. Unfortunately, my work will always be a Windows-only environment.

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