I used to be much better at side-stepping the big tech companies, but over the past year I've realised that I'm now just as tangled up in them as anyone else. To be fair, a certain fruit-based company started out small and alternative, but rather exploded under me. This forum's own @dandanache has recently spurred me to continue my efforts with his move away from GitHub to Codeberg.
Some things I've quite easily ditched. Facebook I never liked, so that got deleted. Twitter turned out to be a piece of cake to drop, and rather than fall back into using other centralised services, I've found Mastodon to be the exact nerdy mix of folk I like.
Others are more tricky because of external influences, namely "work" and "other people". Sadly, my employer is entrenched in Microsoft's online services, so '365, Outlook and Teams are unavoidable.
Given we've all got to be at least a little alternate-minded given the platform we're using here, this little thread is just to ask which things you've managed to rid yourself of, find alternatives to, or if there are some big centralised services which you've decided you can't do without?
I do find my time spend here on the Community can be counter-productive at times (for me).... Not that I see that as a negative... More a personal reflection that I can spend more time here than is healthy, not a reflection on the Community itself...
But seriously, I can, in recent times, appreciate the negative impacts that a "connected life" can bring. I somewhat remember people getting caught up in the social medial craze, including facebook, but I never saw the attraction. Once you do experience some level of connection with a wider group online, it can be attractive... which I have definitely felt in a positive way here.
the undying issue with little tech is, if good enough, will itself become (either alone or through acquisition) big tech... give up, drink the kool aid
Generally I absolutely do not like (said very soft) anything cloud-based from day #1 all these cloud services was introduced. Unfortunately as of today clouds ate almost everything. For the home automation anything cloud-based is absolutely "no go". Next step is - AI will replace all human brains resulting in brain-dead society.
I used to have Adobe Photoshop and that was kind of getting expensive having to pay monthly fees (for a hobby), when Affinity Photo came up with a 6 month free trial, I decided to try them out, after 3 months I just bought there complete suite at 1/2 off which includes Photo, Designer and Publisher including free updates during all of it's 2.x lifetime. Cancelled Adobe all together.
After a small learning curve I'm very happy, latest version (2.6) now includes 100% local AI selection tools that are in most situations better than what Photoshop had, Designer works very well also for vector based graphics that funny enough I had some side work that came up for me to do for my employer, did not have to use Publisher but my daughter needed to make a flyer for her work that they needed to get printed professionally and said it was a breeze to work with.
Also when doing Video, I have been using Davinci Resolve for a few years and the free version gives me pretty much everything I would need to do and a lot more.
So no more Adobe on my PC except for Adobe Reader (still looking for a good alternative), every version of this software introduces more garbage around the main window that you just can't turn off by default and hate it, if anyone has a good alternative, let me know!!!
I started using it when I was working with HUGE building plan files and Adobe (even the paid pro version) would choke on them. PDF-X I found worked much better, and had better commenting features.
I have dumped Google search on all of my devices. I use Duck Duck Go. Years ago it wasn’t that great. But now days it’s about 98% as good at searches as Google.
I use Firefox browser instead of Chrome. I have always liked it better.
That's not good, not good at all, Google returns anything that will help make them $$$ before serving you the results that matter and that you are looking for (like they did about 10 years ago or more ago). It's like searching for something in Facebook Marketplace, 1 in 4 results in a paid advertisement and the genuine stuff most likely has nothing to do with the words you used for the search
In my own personal experience, (and my family, and most of my clients), I find that Alexa/Google Home is the product that they can't do without. I know that I could pitch a Sonos product as a speaker, but that doesn't have a microphone.
Voice Control + Voice Output is a hard set of functions to replace without Alexa or Google Home.
And, they do those functions remarkably well.
Thanks Jeff, just installed it and the free version is really feature rich and I love the preference page when opening a new PDF to the way I like it, and ability to remember recent files to epen the way I closed it. Really nice!!!
We are a completely Open Source household except for:
Hubitat
iPhones
Apple Home
Alexa
my work laptop
Unifi and Cisco gear
While there are Open Source alternatives for all the above except for my work laptop, we use the above for ease of use and reduced management overhead on my part.
As far as Cloud is concerned, it’s just Amazon and Apple, and those are explicitly restricted to the devices that need them.
Slowly replacing Alexa devices with Apple ones, but current lack of an Apple Echo Show like device is really holding me back.
We, even my wife, mostly only use MX Linux or Debian based stuff, but I have a few Unix server VMs.
I changed from Echo's to HomePods a couple of years ago when Alexa started getting too chatty, so I am not up on exactly a Echo Show would get you that couldn't be also on an iPad?
More a personal reflection that I can spend more time here than is healthy, not a reflection on the Community itself...
