There have been a LOT of sweeping changes with my various systems and third party services, over the last 6/7 weeks, or so. For a start, I am now using Linux, as the primary OS, on all my systems. My desktop has had Linux for a good long while, but I found myself using Windows more as it was more convenient. But now I’ve gone the whole hog; removing pretty much everything from Windows setups, bar the software that can not be run on Linux. Same goes for my laptop – which was dual boot, and is now Linux only. On my desktop, I’ve even gone as far as to remove Windows from the main NVMe, and relegate it to a secondary SSD (ouch!). This move ended up with me being unable to boot in to Windows, and stubbornly refused to be fixed either, ultimately, resulting in Windows 10 being clean installed on the SSD instead. Not as big a deal, when you’ve consigned the OS to one or two use cases anyway.
The low power mini PC, that lives under my living room TV, also used to run Windows 11. This has now been wiped and replaced with Kubuntu. It feels so much more responsive than previous.
When it comes to ecosystem changes, I’ve also switched to Duckduckgo as my browser’s main search engine. I also signed up for a Proton Email account, and began the laborious process of switching many of my logins and contact details to that, along with the calendar. The more I can get away from Google, the better. Proton offer a free email service, with pretty reasonable upgrade plans, should you need more. I think it’s well worth paying a little bit to have a privacy focused service in this day and age. I’ve also deleted Facebook and Messenger from my phone, and barely log in to it on my PC.
I’ve also brought Pi-Hole back in to play. I’ve not used it in ages but, once I found there was an app for my NAS server, straight on it went. It is quite eye opening to see all the logging various apps are doing: Netflix and Amazon, I’m looking at you in particular. Thousands upon thousands of requests being sent. This has also resulted in me removing my ‘smart’ TVs network access. Even in standby mode, those things are doing all sorts of calls to home. I’ll use a third party device for apps and such. At the moment, those are Amazon devices. Probably not all that much better, but at least I have the choice to change those in future.
If only Android had a viable alternative…
