Hi all, this will be a pretty quick summary of the different things I have learned throughout my journey to cut out big tech and switch to the more open of the sourced apps.

Chrome -> (brief period with MS Edge) -> Firefox & forks

• There aren’t any extensions missing from Firefox addons and I particularly love the simplicity of the “Dark Background & Light Text” addon.
• On Firefox forks, I have tried Librewolf and Floorp. Librewolf is definitely more privacy focused and I would say is quite good if you’re looking for that. Floorp is super customisable and more fun, and also disables the telemetry stuff Firefox enables by default.

Gmail -> Proton, Tuta, and others

• no ads in my email (why were they there in the first place?)
• Proton Mail is quite good, but you have to use their apps since they do not support IMAP. I don’t like that since their apps are quite slow. Same goes for Tuta, with their apps being EVEN SLOWER.
• Now I frequently swap between different providers. I can say that both Mailfence and Disroot are quite good and pretty reliable and both use IMAP! Emails load quick and setup is easy.
• I’m sure there are plenty of other email providers that are great too, but these are ones I have tried myself. I would like to switch to a different email provider later down the line. Not sure why, but I actually like switching emails and such.

Spotify -> local music players!

• no ads when I’m listening to music
• works offline
• On Windows I used AIMP and now I use Gapless with Fedora Workstation. Both are awesome!
• what more do I have to say

Bambu Studio -> Orca Slicer

• I like the teal more than the Bambu green and orcas are cool
• Orca Slicer is basically just better Bambu Studio

Google Passwords/Apple Keychain -> Bitwarden and KeePassXC

• Bitwarden is cloud based and pretty good, and KeePassXC is local (but can be synced using things like Syncthing) and is also quite good

Google Auth -> Ente Auth

• Nicer looking UI, and also has a desktop app so I don’t need my phone to use 2FA

It’s the big one…Windows -> Linux (I chose Fedora Workstation)

• GNOME looks fantastic! Way better than the clunky Win11 interface with some glass elements, some flat ones, and some ancient looking ones they clearly haven’t updated in a long time. I’ve also tried KDE and it also looks very nice.
• Using the terminal to install + update stuff is really good, I no longer need to search for downloads on the web anymore! Also, looking at all the dependencies install is really cool
• NO MORE MS BLOATWARE!!!
• all my apps have linux versions and/or linux alternatives so the switch was seamless. Only thing was setting up games to work with Proton and Wine. Don’t play many multiplayer fps games so that was not an issue.
• Also, the file system is a bit easier to work with (no more confusing / and \…)
• Also, the level of customisation is insane! I can switch out the icons (I use Papirus), the shell theme, application theme, etc.
• Apparently GNOME is considered not very customisable by LInux standards, meaning KDE and Cinnamon are EVEN MORE CUSTOMISABLE!!!
• penguin is cool

Adobe Illustrator -> Inkscape

• Very similar UI, and also runs a bit faster
• Switched when my subscription ran out, stayed because it’s AWESOME
• still can’t figure out how to make a straight line, but that’s more of a me problem

VSCode -> VSCodium

• Exactly the same, except with some MS extensions unavailable and no MS telemetry
• No Intellicode or C/C++ extension
• I instead used clangd and it works fineish

Google Drive + OneDrive -> pCloud, Jottacloud, and Backblaze

• Google Drive’s app is kind of okay but OneDrive’s app is HORRIBLE. I’m not going to rant about it in this post since this is about the (much, much) better alternatives
• pCloud’s desktop app just. makes. sense. You select folders to sync and it does it in the background, No put-all-the-folders-into-a-ondrive-folder-and-also-there’s-two-of-them-for-some-reason like OneDrive does. OneDrive should be called OneFolder…
• Jottacloud is also nice and easy to work with. They don’t have a Linux app, but they do have an intuitive CLI that just needs to be started and then you give it the path of the folders to sync and that’s it! Again, no put-all-the-folders-into-a-ondrive-folder-and-also-there’s-two-of-them-for-some-reason like OneDrive
• I only use Backblaze for syncing my notes as it’s compatible with Amazon S3, and it syncs well. That’s all I can say.
• I use pCloud for backing up my phone, Jottacloud for my laptop, and Backblaze for syncing a few notes and such.

Google Photos -> ente photos

• Syncing is great, and there’s also decently helpful (local) AI that is, importantly, opt-in rather than opt-out, meaning you don’t have to use it if you don’t want to. whereas google scrapes all your photos to train their AI (probably)
• Their apps are also really nice!
• I am going to attempt to selfhost Immich, hopefully that goes well! :D

GitHub -> Codeberg

• Git still works perfectly fine as expected.
• Codeberg has a very similar interface to GitHub, which is nice
• Two issues though:
  • No mobile app (at least on iOS, not sure about Android. That’s fine for the most part, only issue is not having a contributions widget with the little squares…)
  • Codeberg Pages doesn’t automatically deploy Jekyll pages, so I have to run jekyll build manually. Not a huge deal. I wasn’t bothered to set up woodpecker cli.

YouTube -> Invidious + FreeTube

• Invidious lets me have subscriptions while not needing to log in to a google account!
• I can use Invidious as a web app, since there aren’t many iOS youtube clients.
• FreeTube is pretty awesome! You have subscriptions, playlists, as well as the ability to use things like external players. An amazing program that’s also cross-platform!
• Invidious and FreeTube occasionally don’t work, but that’s YouTube trying to block them. Huge props to the people who maintain the thing! It’s one thing to develop a really cool project, it’s another thing to protect it from multibillion dollar companies like Google from bamming it

[nothing] -> KDE Connect

• File sending and clipboard sharing is AWESOME, like a better more cross-platform version of AirDrop

i think that’s it. I might be missing a few though.