For those three, my experience has been Asus - overpriced, Sapphire - great value, Gigabyte - optimised but close to manufacture performance. My target has always been a Sapphire Radeon because they’re cheaper than Asus, but not suspiciously cheap that they might burn your rig down. ASRock are a good choice too, typically above average price:performance.

I use DuckDuckGo’s email proxy service, you can sign up for one custom email and generate any amount of temporary-use addresses for the ones you don’t trust to stop spamming when you ask them to. The purpose of their system is to be the address you sign up with, and they do their best to strip trackers and garbage, and forward it onto an email of your choice. You can change the forwarding email at any point, so it can be incredibly useful for a transitioning period.

I use Mailcow dockerized for a home domain, it is actually a very acceptable price for me being able to:

• Control my own DNS rules (it was a nightmare trying to use DuckDNS for an mailserver because of the rules you need to set)
• Run through a reliable service because DuckDNS occasionally went down, making my domain unreachable and breaking external access of any server I run
• Have a personalised public home for myself, if I ever want to make blogs or provide public services or something

I used a very lovely and helpful YouTuber’s guide for it, Opentaq (here)

Same for me. Although I accepted the apparent potential of it when I was asked to provide all my contact information, I’m happy to not find any of my information public.

Absofuckinglutely, I bought ten years of a domain for £50GBP/~$67USD, unique enough that the price bottomed out and I used a country sub (.uk) which is basically half the price of a .com/.org

I’d drink to that, or Amen to that, if I did either lol

I definitely understand their sentiment though - Google is obviously a search engine monopoly, and I simply found Chromium to be better suited to my needs than Firefox, and settled for a modified Chromium base.

You’re absolutely right about Revanced taking the official app and adding mods, I pretty much rely on being logged in for now but the NewPipe etc. alternatives are definitely a more secure option.

Obsidian actually has more features that I appreciate than OneNote! It not only has community plugins, meaning any dev can bang together a feature, but it specialises in workflow, linking notes together, adding tags, and the golden egg of the app is their Graph view. I used this repo as a guide to set it up, except for manually adding the livesync configuration in-app

I’m on it, I’ll do a test based on your suggestions

That’s pretty accurate tbh, I’m ashamed to say I only know English, but a couple downsides include poor suggestions and aggressive replacement (doesn’t save if you prefer an acronym to be lowercase), and it’s amusing watching it freak out when I enter an email address. I do need it though - I’m glad it *does have those features, and a clipboard. Plus I often remote access my PC and my Linux server, and being able to use up/down arrow keys is an absolute must, at least for now. Not even the Gboard had that and it took a little while to find one.

I suppose the best keyboard for you is determined by your reliance on features like autocomplete, predictive input (i.e. listing emails in an email box), clipboard, multi-language support, and aesthetic customisation!

Yes, I’m so glad that operators like site: and before: are supported. Necessary for weeding out a few bad results aha

Oh I’ve been on that page before. What a doozy.

If you follow the conflict with Al-Qaeda, the furthest I could trace was those who ran the group orchestrated 9/11 because the USA murdered three of their members. Prior to that there was no intent to attack the US. The government is so hellbent on inventing conflict and convincing the poor lambs of their people that some localised conflict in Lebanon, if left unchecked, will end their family’s livelihood, that they seem to create extremists that are hellbent on Liberating their families from the US.

I’ve always thought of the USA as a ‘world police’ and I do not like their overreach.

The US really doesn’t get the definition of voluntary lol. Private churches with ‘voluntary’ demands for money (that’s called a subscription), and this.

Jfc the article blatantly gets it wrong. The title says ‘gender’, the source it talks about says ‘sex’. This is why everyone is confused. Gender is not sex. The bill isn’t even about protecting identity

A wild dirty Sesame St meme!

Without knowing, I like to look at everything with a positive light.

Perhaps it means to support Palestine until they’re not only on their feet, but can fuck up their longtime oppressors so the situation is reversed, i.e. they are the ones doing the oppressing. I’m all for liberation but idk, simple freedom sounds enough

With a bit of research, it does seem legitimately supportive, however some sources that use that phrase elaborate further, saying “Palestinians need to take back their land to win this war” and “Palestinians own that land”

They are referring to Jerusalem, of course, and that attitude is exactly why there has been bloodshed for 2,000 years.
History: Romans occupied the Holy Land, Israelites werent happy and tried to rebel but lost. The first time they were stripped of their positions in power. The second attempt resulted in their banishment from the city. The third attempt resulted in a full blown massacre. In their absence, Palestinians moved in, both Semites and Muslims, but Israelis trickled back and they both started fighting over who it belongs to. In about 150AD. It’s been a Holy War ever since.

I recommend, as a bonus, to use Universal Android Debloater, it has an easy to understand GUI and it uses AndroidDebugBridge to connect to the phone via USB. It shows all the installed apps, recommends with various tiers the apps that are worth uninstalling - every app has a helpful description - and blitzes the fuckers. System or factory bloat isn’t safe from it.

I guess I’ll share my setup aha. Forewarning: I invested heavily into self hosting and being in full control of as much as possible, mainly to try to be ‘Internet independent’.

• Google ads, APIs, telemetry and everything else that is not necessary: AdGuard Home (selfhosted)
• Android app store: Fdroid with IzzyOnDroid repo, failing that Aurora Store, if apps still whine about not being to use Play Services then I use the Play Store
• Gmail: Mailcow Dockerized (selfhosted) with K9 Android client
• SMS (not that I use it anyway): Fossify SMS
• Instant messaging: Matrix (selfhosted) for Discord/Telegram style with Element client, or Telegram FOSS
• File Manager (I goddamn hate that Google Files forces itself onto any phone after initial setup, even when there’s a manufacturer installed one already): Material Files
• GBoard (It’s also really fucking invasive): HeliBoard
• YouTube: via Revanced Manager, with Odysee as a hopeful replacement. Much lower userbase though, obviously.
• Google Photos (refuses to settle for less than 100% file access): Part of a self hosted Samba share that I keep synced to via FolderSync (from Play Store - they charge €10 for the app outside of Google)
• Chrome: Brave (I downloaded a script to debloat it of crypto and AI)
• Google Search: My partner uses Ecosia for environment reasons, and I use DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons
• Chromecast: I recommend a Roku
• AndroidOS: CalyxOS if Pixel, LineageOS if not
• Play Services: Gapps pico or nano because some things are still tied to Play Services
• Maps is superior, unfortunately, but OSMAnd is a good alt
• Google DNS, used by default by a lot of things like routers: Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1

Nice, I have also chosen most of the same as you. For custom ROM there’s CalyxOS, which ironically makes a Pixel phone one of the best picks for deGoogleing
I don’t like the proprietary style of Proton Mail, plus they charge to have more than one account logged in, which is very inconvenient, so I set up my own Mailcow instance

For YouTube I highly recommend ReVanced

For notes I use Apache-CouchDB and connect using Obsidian with the LiveSync plugin. Live sync is fantastic and is as close as I think I’ll ever get to OneNote.

NextCloud is great, a pain in the arse to add existing files as you need to upload everything, but a few hours of uploading with Cloudflare set to DNS only is fine

76% of their Q2 2024 revenue came from adverts. I’d rather pay with capitalist-consumerist shit on my screen than pay with money, but as everyone knows it’s far too invasive rn. Ergo, I use uBlock, sponsorblock and I don’t care about cookies.

The killer for me has to be that it doesn’t support searching for phrases within websites I need. Latest example: github. I can be on the project page, copy a phrase from the code and search ddg with it in double quotemarks, and get 0 results. Copy - google.com - paste - enter - loads of results.

Also the search function broke for about a day, a few days ago