This question was inspired by my hatred of Temporal Anti-Aliasing which, in many games nowadays, is poorly used as a performance bandaid. On lower resolutions it will smudge and blur the image and certain bad cases of TAA will cause visible ghosting.
Yet in spite of all this, certain games won't let you turn it off or have hair/fur/foliage look like dogshit without it so sometimes I still use it.
Holy crap, Lois. Where do I even begin?
Microsoft on my desktop. Want to try out Linux but even boomers would make fun of my tech skills. That, and more games are on Windows.
Cars. Born in bumfuck nowhere, and cities with public transit are expensive as hell. If I ever get a better paying job, I'm selling that shit and moving anyways, because cars are also a huge money sink in and of themselves.
Google. I'll give them props, it's a good search engine even in its enshittified form, some of the ads I can deal with because if I am looking for a new t-shirt or something, then it would make perfect sense a Uniqlo ad would pop up. But its privacy that's the problem, and I try to be as "normal" as possible in this KiwiFarmsified hellscape. In the panopticon, the winning strategy is to not be interesting.
My iphone (inb4 avocado toast Venezuela). It would be silly to trash this thing now by principle, but once when its unusable, I'm going for a Linux Pinephone.
YouTube. It's a Monopoly and my broke ass doesn't want to subscribe to curiosity stream. It's like Texas though, while it's mostly derivative cringe, there's small pockets of gold that keep me there.
Linkedin. Pretentious garbage
Suburban life. Again, I am not a suburbanite by choice, decent paying jobs are tight and it's even harder to find an apartment in a state I know I probably won't be killed in AND I can afford.
TL;DR: I REALLY need to start learning 2 tech so I can navigate tech alternatives. Oh, and I need to get my shit together in life so I can afford to live in a blue city.
Startpage uses Google on the back-end but keeps your searches anonymous. Or there's always DuckDuckGo.
Don't, it's not ready yet unless all you do is call and text. (Then it's fine ig)
Try out a live USB, it won't save anything you do to it and you won't risk deleting your data by accident (like with dual boot). All you need is an old USB stick / flash drive (just make sure it's big enough, a few Gigabytes should be good)
Here's a walkthrough for Linux Mint (an Ubuntu alternative). I'd recommend specifically Mint Cinnamon (Download Link):
https://itsfoss.com/linux-mint-live-usb/
Ubuntu is not hard to install. I think there's even an installer for Windows that you can download.