Greetings! Recently, i have ditched Windows for Linux. Why? Well, This all started with a Windows Update. I was working on a Discord bot, until my PC decided to restart without my consent. What was it? A Windows Update. I was like: "no big deal, ill just wait". Well, it was over 100+ updates. After all the updates completed, i saw the Windows 11 setup screen. Keep in mind that I was on WIndows 10 before the updates. Now at that point i really got angry. Like, I hate Windows 11. So then i went and completed the setup, and got met with ALL THE BLOATWARE REINSTALLED. So ofcourse, since i did NOT wanna use Windows 11, i backed up my data, and switched to the Secure and Free operating System, Linux. I went with arch, since i have used Ubuntu before, and it's terrible. And since i didn't wanna use any fancy Desktop Enviroments, such as GNOME, KDE, HyprLand, XFCE. I went with dwm. It looks very mininal and customizable.
Now that brings me to the question, What apps should i get rid of?
I know i did the same post like a few weeks ago, but for the sake of Privacy, i know Some apps contain Telemetry, and some Don't. But still.
If you dislike telemetry,
Audacity => Tenacity
Firefox => LibreWolf or FireDragon (GraudaLinux default, good in telemetry respects IIRC)
You may like btop, Mission Control,
Avoid any terminals and editors that advertise as "AI" -- there were some big ones recently but the community thankfully overall was like nah.
Get some decent browser extensions, ublockorigin, privacy badger, libredirect
some people like to pihole their network, opensense/pfsense/ddwrt router is nice to have
AVAHI broadcasts your services on the LAN IIRC.
Obviously vscode has telemetry, if you use that try vscodium IIRC, personally I use neither but that's just me.
I do obviously know that avahi is bloat, but it's a dependency of PulseAudio, preventing me from removing it
I'm pretty sure my Arches with PipeWire audio don't have it if that's of any use to you.
I have used PulseAudio and PipeWire for years and the last few years have preffered the latter when installing all the optional dependencies.
Then again if it ain't broke 🤷♂️
I forgot the exact number but while installing Debian (Bookworm and Sid) this weekend I was shocked by how small the base install, with a window manager ("big" one by your standards, i.e KDE), was. Maybe 2Gb, definitely less than 4Gb. It all worked fine, I could browse the Web, print, edit rich text, watch video, etc.
I installed a ton more stuff since, e.g Steam, Inkscape, Python libraries for computer vision, etc and it's still not even 10Gb.
So... my suggestion is the same as I shared earlier in https://lemmy.ml/post/20673461/13899831 namely do NOT install preemptively! Assuming you have a fast and stable connection I would argue stick to the bare minimum and all add as you need.
In fact... if you want to be minimalist I would suggest to do another fresh install (it's fast, less than 1hr and you can do something else at the same time) and stick to the bare minimum right away.
TL;DR: don't get rid of, just avoid adding from the first place.
Try to still all your desktop apps through Flatpak. Flatpak applications are sandboxes (meaning they are regulated by the system using permission toggles and variables). It is better for security/privacy, and makes transferring app data to a new OS install easy (app data is stored in
~/.var/app/)Flatpak sucks in my opinion. What if i need to install something that is not on flatpak? The AUR exists too.
Application sandboxing is just SO important. If the app isnt available as Flatpak, you could install it normally and use Bubblejail to restrict it.
What specifically don't you like about it?
Takes long to install software, slow, requires reboot after install. That's too much effort for me to handle.
Flatpak shouldn't require a reboot after install. I never have needed on any distro. It takes me about the same time as regular package manager. Odd to say the least.
All proprietary software.
And, in case you install open source software, look at who is behind the project. I wouldn't want to install open source software sponsored by Microsoft, for example.It may be a little too late but if you have a chance to use a feature like btrfs snapshots (+time shift) it can be a game changer.
Any time you need to do something risky to the OS you can just snapshot before like installing 1000 packages, or Nvidia driver update, you can just revert to the old working version by swapping the names on the snapshot and is subvolume.
