this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
871 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
59708 readers
1855 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I've started to try and move away from Google as much as possible, which I knew would be difficult, but it's proving to be harder than I thought.
I can't do anything about my work stuff, because our company uses Google for email and cloud storage. I set up an account on Proton Mail for my personal email and file storage. I currently have an android phone, but I don't like iPhones so I don't really know what I want to do there. I switched back to Firefox after 15 years of using Chrome. I actually started using Bing search more. I'm looking into alternatives for the Chromecast that Google doesn't seem interested in supporting anyway, which might just end up being a small PC hooked up to the TV.
I'm just so tired of Google services either being shut down or slowly getting worse and worse until they're nearly unusable.
On the android front, if you don't mind using a pixel phone then Graphene OS would be worth checking out. It's a foss non rooted alternative to base android with a focus on privacy and security. The no root requirement means a good amount of apps like banking work properly on it. It vastly expands the app permission system and removes the special privileges to Google system apps, allowing you to remove it or limit them. It also supports sandboxing of the play store and multiple profiles so you can effectively quarantine Google requiring apps.
+1 for GrapheneOS on a Pixel. I use GrapheneOS on a Pixel 7 Pro. It's just awesome. I will never go back. Camera is awesome too.
@StormWalker @wispy_jsp
I have been using GrapheneOs for many years, now I am using Google Pixel 8, I had to install Google Camera App to make the best use of the camera
Yeah I'm with you there, the pixel camera app is a must for me too. What I love about GrapheneOS is how easy it is to block permissions. So with google pixel camera app, no network and no location permissions means that it cannot report back to google unless I allow it to. It's a safe way to use the odd google app in a limited way when you need to. The other google app I use is the g-keyboard, because it is so much better in some ways. But again it is very restricted and I turned off the features I don't want, like voice typing.
It's not as hard as you'd think. https://github.com/tycrek/degoogle - This has everything you need. Definitely use Firefox. Check out Nextcloud for personal cloud/documents replacement etc. Definitely try a small PC hooked to your TV and look in to plex. Don't use Google/Bing, stick with DuckDuckGo and if you need to, use !g or !b in your searched on ddg to get bing and google results. It's fun exploring all the alternatives in the list.
"Brave search" seems to work good for me with Firefox. Protonmail is awesome yeah 👍🏻 There are alternatives to everything, just finding the good ones!
https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/
Thought this looked cool. Haven't had the need to use it much since discovering this. Offers a lot of googles functionality that I used to use like collaborative documents, spreadsheets, calendars, and more.