@parismarx

Oh, that reminds me,
my wife and son cancelled Amazon Prime this weekend.

This is how you vote with your dollars.

@parismarx Great that you made this list 🤩 but I'd remove Opera as browser suggestion.

The Vivaldi browser project emerged from among other people working at Opera. Several people were very angry about the direction Opera was going.

"History Vivaldi began as a virtual community website that replaced My Opera, which was shut down by Opera Software in March 2014.[22] Von Tetzchner was angered by this decision because he believed that this community helped make the Opera web browser what it was. Von Tetzchner then launched the Vivaldi Community—a virtual community focused on providing registered users with a discussion forum, blogging service, and numerous other practical web services—to make up for My Opera's closure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivaldi_(web_browser)#History

And who is the owner of Opera browser ? It is developed in Norway but it is overseen by a Chinese company. https://www.aeanet.org/who-makes-the-opera-browser/

#opera #vivaldi #european #usa #bigtech

@parismarx

Impressive list you made there!

Suggestions for maps could be Lokjo 😉 and for Graphic design Krita.

Thanks!

@parismarx personally would be looking away from opera to some other alternatives due to its invasiveness, personally enjoying librewolf but im not sure where thats based

absolutely can root for purchasing lenovo hardware, recommend supporting them, loving the thinkpad and its repairability and if you want linux preinstalled they have options for that too (or to even have no os installed)

@parismarx I'd rather see people shift to self-hosting with free software. The learning hurdle there is a problem, but nothing else truly frees us.

As for where the free software comes from, that matters a lot less, as long as you don't embrace lock-in platforms with vast interdependencies that are effectively beholden to the same companies you're trying to avoid.

@parismarx I was sharing Ente as a non-US tech alternative to Google Photos but it moved headquarters to the US a few years ago 🤯

That said the company started outside the US, all data uses E2EE and data resides in the EU. It may be a half-measure option if you wanted to include a section for Google Photos alternatives.

I'm sad to find out they set up HQ in the US as it was outside US government jurisdiction up until then. At least it's fully audited and there are no keys to hand over to allow backdoor access.

If you find more options with a solid feature set compared to Google Photos I hope they get included in the article 🙏

@parismarx I switched to Affinity some years ago to avoid the PS subscription jail. It took a week of stubbornness doing tutorials but now I wouldn’t go back to PS even if it was free.

Affinity was recently obtained by Canva and they made the entire Affinity suite free but if you want AI features you’ll have to pay.

Good luck on your endeavours!

@parismarx

It would be great if ISED in Canada would certify Fairphone. To my knowledge it's not and is, therefore, illegal to import.

@parismarx Did you also look at the OS level? I use exclusively Debian GNU/Linux on my laptops, desktop workstations and home servers. On our router I use OpenWRT.

On my phones I use GrapheneOS on a Pixel 8, Mobian on a PinePhone Pro, and probably soon LineageOS on my Samsung phone.

For Email, Calendar and Contacts I use Runbox (Norway), via IMAP/SMTP and CalDav/CardDav.

@parismarx for search engines, I recommend looking at marginalia search, its one of the best search engines I've used. It has a goldmine of quality articles that are simply nonexistent on other search engines, and its more of a formal/scholarly database than a search engine.

Every once in a while when I do research it is such a useful resource, but you must know how to prompt it. It won't know or will present few sites when you give it a "how ...." Or "why ...." Questions.

@parismarx Super article, bookmarked.

I've been trying to switch for a while, but it takes time. Also my last workplace used Google for everything.