DeGoogle Yourself

Good choice! But for search engines, you missed SearX, Startpage, and Brave Search. SearX is a search engine where you can choose your favorite search engines to get results from various search engines privately, and you can also host it. Startpage is a search engine where you can search Google anonymously and without being spied on, and Brave Search is Brave's private search engine that uses its own search results. Stop trusting DuckDuckGo, it depends on Bing, and if you click on one of its ads, you will be exposed to Microsoft tracking. For messaging, it's fine, but you missed Session, which is a messaging app that doesn't require a phone number and is anonymous.

Nice guide! Lemmy is missing though 🐭. Also, what's the point of moving from Twitter to BlueSky? They are no different. Mastodon is a great option.

KDE is friendlier to Windows users than GNOME, but Mint is still a good option.

I see Qobuz on there. IMHO, Bandcamp should be your first stop when buying music. If it's not on bandcamp, Qobuz seems to have just about everything else, more or less, that someone might want. I've complained about them in the past for making me download my purchases one track at a time, which can be pretty annoying if you're buying a super-duper-deluxe version of an album, but, I am pleased to say, they no longer do this; you can download the complete albums you've purchased in a zip file. But only once. Stuff can disappear for annoying rights reasons, and I think they even say, once you buy your music download it immediately, because it may not be there on a subsequent visit.

I think a lot of these guides could use more in-depth companion guides to go along with it. Changing your email provider for one is not a simple thing and there are concerns like loss of functionality (Gmail is a good product run by a shit company) and also how to make the process less overwhelming. Some services will give you the option to migrate all your emails from Gmail but maybe you want to start fresh, etc. Then there's going to all of your providers and updating your contact email. Again, not as simple as signing up for another service.

I am very bothered by the OS section. Bazzite should be the go-to for gaming, period. Ubuntu should never be recommended to anyone. Fedora is far more stable and reliable as a starter distro than either Mint or Ubuntu. Fedora Workstation for Mac expats and Fedora KDE for Windows expats.

I won’t fault anyone for putting Mint in there, but I loathe Cinnamon and would never recommend a distro that excludes KDE by design.

LibreWolf browser

I just tries Lemmy now instead of Reddit 👍

Where are the password managers? When changing your accounts to another email provider, this is a really good time to also make sure all the accounts have a strong, unique password or phrase.

Reddit -> Lemmy is a recent switch that I'm happy with

I don't know where this would fit in on the website but one company that is really important to boycott is Oracle. Larry Ellison is a mega right-wing donor and his son is buying up media companies for the purposes of turning them into right-wing propaganda machines.

One way everyone can make a difference is by uninstalling any Oracle software on your computer. You might have the Oracle JRE installed or if you're into virtualization you may be using Virtualbox. It's especially important to avoid Oracle software in a corporate setting because their lawyers may come after you. If you work for a company and you're either involved in purchasing software or a software developer I would strongly recommend avoiding Oracle not just because of ethical reasons but also because typically they have their products are not as good from a technical standpoint as well.

For the Oracle JRE or JDK you can replace it with Adoptium. Adoptium is run by the Eclipse Foundation which is based in the EU.

For Virtualbox you can replace it with QEMU or Xen. For QEMU there are a lot of good GUI or CLI front-ends that make using it easy. See this article: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/QEMU/Front-ends note that some of the front-ends listing in that article also support Xen.

For Oracle's database some say that PostgreSQL is a good competitor. For this one I acknowledge the topic is more complex. I'm just going to leave it at for new designs please consider avoiding Oracle's database if you can. Oracle has a bad reputation among programmers for a reason.

Correction: Ente is also self-hostable.

This is me, but i did it in reverse. Once windows was behind me it kind of opened up the door to more change. Took me less than a year to arrive at not using my google account at all.

Thanks for putting this together. Stuff like this is good for making it more approachable. I definitely have relatives that would benefit from this.

One note though, it would be good if the key included all of the icons and not just the three causes.

As the other commented pointed out, it would also be good to differentiate decentralized services, for example in the category with Mastodon and Bluesky.

Here is my set up:

• Browser: Helium
• Email: My own domain thru Spacemail
• Search: DDG
• Music: Bandcamp
• Office suite: Jotta
• Files: Jotta
• Photos: Jotta

In your guide, Proton's services have the EU flag, but the company is Swiss.

Great guide! Very useful for people discovering a world outside of the GAFAM’s.

I’ve done everything, but leaving Whatsapp is the most difficult one. I use Threema and Signal with my close friends, but I can’t get rid of Whatsapp because of many groups I have to follow but I’m not close enough to people to ask them to switch.

I’d love it if these two chat services proposed a separate app which would be interoperable with Whatsapp.

Yes Meta would still get some of my data, but less than if I had Whatsapp directly.

Also getting Whatsapp business and setting an automatic answer asking people to contact me through mail, sms or other chats is useful.

Leaving youtube is also difficult as Peertube is lacking non tech content like basketball..

Anyone have an alternative for Google Keep? I just want shared notes and checklists across all my devices

I personally enjoy marginalia search and duckduckgo lite. I never enjoyed/appreciated the current search engine market with all generative AI enshitification. Marginalia search is similar to a database, where you have a limited number of keywords to get a decent search, they also offers filters if you dont want websites with JS and much more. duckduckgo lite is similar to this, but instead of having a specific tab to find website domains, it has it built in the search engine functionality.

I think waterfox was sold to an ad agency.

I stopped looking at it after initial glance, seeing the top line, the browsers.

Vivaldi?

Really.

No.

Original reddit post, because I didn't trust this guy to be telling the truth

https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/1jcqvu0/your_guide_to_move_away_from_big_tech_and_support/

Replace Ubuntu with Zorin OS

What stumped me is that YouTube music and apple music are the starting point, and not Spotify.

Also isn't using your own Mailserver with your own domain on any webhoster plus Thunderbird a viable alternative? I've been doing this for like 20 years. That's the beauty of email imo

leaving big tech

Firefox is big tech