I wasn’t trolling, but okay. I probably should stop arguing with a bot designed to astro turf for big corporate data ownership.

Getting a little touchy are we? Try deep breaths, it helps with the anger issues 😉

Ahh there it is, I knew you’d do that.

I abide by my own lectures, I am actively putting effort into it and am 99% of the way there, which is 100% more than you.

Been slowly chipping away at those for the last decade (could have gone way faster but I’m lazy), and I’m almost completely google-free. I dont use any microsoft products at home (work forces me to), and Apple can eat my ass. My phone is a completely de-googled GrapheneOS device (I don’t have an issue relying on companies for hardware, just software), and hopefully in the future a Liberux or Pinephone linux phone.

I self-host my own movies, music, and cloud storage. I also host my own chat service for friends and family, built on top of XMPP. The services i do use are generally very privacy respecting like Signal for people outside of my social sphere, or freedom respecting like Lemmy (mostly weaned off of reddit).

Any time you rely on another company to handle your data, you are beholden to their whims, end of story. Don’t like what they’re doing? Too bad. Give up the convenience and host it yourself, or continue to be a slave to their corporate interests.

You can stream remotely via jellyfin if you expose your server to the internet. VPN is safer but not the only option.

Run it on ancient hardware. If it chokes on computers from the '90s, it’s slow.

Don’t reject connections to port 22, honeypot it and ban on connection attempt.

I was waiting for someone to say that.

I like that Mate is a thing, but like I said, I’m looking for something thats based on it but as if its had the same 20 years of enhancements everything else got.

The closest thing to that I’ve found is quite literally KDE. So I use KDE.

I miss old Gnome. I wish they’d stuck with the old Gnome 2 design philosophy but breathed new modern design principals into it, instead of trying to go the Ubuntu Unity route. Maybe something like Cinnamon but even more flexible and feature-rich.

For those of us that expect room to breathe and make our machine work for us rather than the other way around, we feel like Gnome takes a lot of liberties away for the sake of “simplicity.” There is so much missing from Gnome that is present in most other DEs and even custom WM setups.

The primary contributors who work under The Gnome Foundation also come off as controlling and arrogant in a lot of cases, and refuse to take community feedback to heart, whereas KDE has literal summits to get user feedback on major core features we want to see which then later get added to their backlogs and sprints as Epics. Gnome acts a lot like Apple in the sense that they’re very much “we know what’s best for you better than you do.”

Now, the singular area I can give Gnome true props in is their accessibility functionality, but that’s primarily it. KDE’s accessibility is fairly behind by about a decade in comparison.

That’s just my take, take it as you will.

Kmail is simple and to the point, and at least in my experience is easier to set up. Bonus, if youre on KDE, it integrates very nicely.

It’s also more performant than Thunderbird.

• AMD drivers: use the built-in MESA drivers that include the official AMD support.

• Gmail: ProtonMail for the service, Kmail for the desktop client.

• Chrome: Firefox, or Librewolf if you care about privacy.

• Office365: LibreOffice for full FOSS or OnlyOfficr for less freedom but more comfort.

• iTunes: depends entirely on what you use it for, but I buy my music mostly off of BandCamp these days.

• MuseScore: MuseScore

• Norton: Why were you using Norton in the first place? It’s practically a virus itself. If you need an antivirus on Linux, you might want ClamAV/ClamTK for something that runs locally only, or Microsoft Defender for Linux.

• Py-Charm: Py-Charm, VSCode, Vim, Kate/KWrite

• Remote Desktop to iOS: I got nothin’

• Star Citizen: Star Citizen

• Steam: Steam

• VPN: Wireguard

• Windows Games: install locally using Wine and then add to Steam as a non-Steam game to use Proton for better support.

Windows 10: run it in a VM if you still need it, or keep it on a separate SSD and dual boot into that.

I’ve always been a fan of for-ged-joe (like forget Joe, but with a d instead of a t)