I shared a version of this guide earlier this year, but felt a website was needed to unpack the different options fully. So after an unreasonable number of hours, I put together the necessary data and website.

I hope this is digestible enough for the average person to help those looking to take that first step, or for people who are equally passionate and want to get their friends or family involved.

Details:

Every time I post these guides, there is always feedback on things that can improve, or I got wrong. Please do share, as it is the best way for these to evolve!

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 42 points 8 months ago (1 child)

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.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 36 points 8 months ago (1 child)

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

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • load more comments (1 reply)
    [–] 23 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    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.

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • load more comments (1 reply)
    [–] 20 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    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.

  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • load more comments (2 replies)
    [–] 19 points 8 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 18 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    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.

  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • load more comments (2 replies)
    [–] 16 points 8 months ago (9 children)

    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.

  • source
  • hideshow 10 child comments
  • load more comments (8 replies)
    [–] 16 points 8 months ago

    I just tries Lemmy now instead of Reddit 👍

  • source
  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago

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

  • source
  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

    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.

  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • load more comments (2 replies)
    [–] 9 points 8 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 child)

    Here is my set up:

    • Browser: Helium
    • Email: My own domain thru Spacemail
    • Search: DDG
    • Music: Bandcamp
    • Office suite: Jotta
    • Files: Jotta
    • Photos: Jotta
  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago*

    My set up:

    • Browser: Librewolf on PC and Duckduckgo on phone
    • Email: Protonmail
    • Search: Ecosia on PC and Duckduckgo on phone
    • Music: Locally stored music and VLC (on PC) and Musicolet (phone) as music player
    • Office suite: Libreoffice
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    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.

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • load more comments (1 reply)
    [–] 6 points 8 months ago*

    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.

  • source
  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • load more comments (2 replies)
    [–] 5 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    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..

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • load more comments (1 reply)
    [–] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I think waterfox was sold to an ad agency.

  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (5 children)

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

  • source
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • load more comments (4 replies)
    [–] 4 points 8 months ago (7 children)

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

    Vivaldi?

    Really.

    No.

  • source
  • hideshow 7 child comments
  • load more comments (7 replies)
    [–] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    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

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • load more comments (1 reply)
    [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    Replace Ubuntu with Zorin OS

  • source
  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    leaving big tech

    Firefox is big tech

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [+] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)
    load more comments (5 replies)
    load more comments
    view more: next ›