my intent with video posts: on videos
if pewdiepie talked about it it’s mainstream now. 2025 is the year the Linux desktop, Richard Stallman will grace the unwashed masses with their mandatory GPL 3.0 licenses, im tearing up thinking of it already.
really though, there are some banger pieces of advice this man provides i’d like to echo from my own personal experience:
- ditch Windows: they are the devil. Linux is free, it’s only intimidating if you let it be. don’t research distros and get overwhelmed. install Linux Mint and call it. most people only use their PCs for the browser, this will not impact you if so.
- search engine: i disagree that you should lean on duckduckgo. as memory serves, they are basically Bing in disguise these days. Startpage is a free option, but i am biased in this regard – screw them too. no search engine can fund themselves off privacy good will. they all get their money somehow. i pay for Kagi now. its money, but its also piece of mind that they have a financial disinterest in selling my data.
- email: plenty of non Google options. i stick to the mentality that no payment means im losing somewhere. I pay for tutanota. Its great, it has e2e encrypted family sharable calendars, they are even standing up a Google drive alternative. I dont need that sort of thing, but tutanota is great, give them money.
- browser: firefox is hard to support these days, but there aren’t many other great options. browsers are wicked huge code bases that are nightmares to create. essentially all other browsers are chromium based and im not a fan of that monoculture. the web needs variance to not crush under the weight of draconian control, look at what Google has been doing with ad blockers as of late.
- phone OS: i too use a pixel and graphene OS. its discombobulating using a Google product to get away from Google. all my research points to graphene being the real deal, but its hard to say for sure unless your a professional developer who can audit the codebase yourself. and even then, firmware backdoors have been a thing for years now, so the level of trust i have isn’t insanely high. but I still appreciate knowing that certain apps legitimately won’t work because of the lack of Google services on my phone. which is a voluntary thing BTW, you can still install it if you really have to, or sandbox it in another user account. plenty of guides out there, but graphene has minimally impacted my daily usage of my phone for the benefits it provides.
- password manager: i don’t use I browser password management out of principal. i don’t know about vaultwarden personally, i use keepass for management which is simple for local devices. using syncthing is also available for syncing across multiple devices. again, there are guides for this.