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.
My vote goes to Google, to whom I am tightly married. It's ecosystem and interconnectivity between apps as well as devices is unbeatable. It's super reliant.
It's the one entity that can wreck my online and offline presence. I mean, I use android and Google to login everywhere. If Mr. Google so decrees, my phone could wipe and google account be gone tomorrow. Same applies to Apple and Microsoft, but I don't use their systems as much. The poison I picked is Google and I hate it.
I like Windows, it's MS that I hate and the bullshit they add to Windows.
I hate to break it to you, but the stuff MS added to Windows comprises literally all of Windows.
I've always felt theres multiple sides to Microsoft. Theres devs making a damn good and simple product. Then comes the enterprise devs that over-engineer the product. Then theres the marketing coming in and try to buy up competition or bundle the product with other products to force it on people (MS way of advertising). And THEN the suits either ruin the product for money or shutting it down for not either making enough money or for not helping their enterprise products make money (like for example VSCode is a product that helps MS make money on Azure).
I hate that there's an app for everything, it's like when everything wanted your fuckin email now they want an app plus your email and a phone number, I have having to download POS apps on my phone for simple things that can be done from a browser, like concert tickets.
YES! This is my number one pet peeve. I am so fucking tired of having to install an app just to use my new e-scooter, or light bulb, or to use 100 new different functions that would work perfectly well on your website if you weren't such a fucking money grubbing troglodyte.
Almost anything Google. I have an Android because I hate the restrictions of iOS, but forcing me to sell my location to Google if I want to know where I am (even in an open source app because location is a system thing).
If you don't want that, you should look into microG. It replaces Google Play Services with an open source reimplementation, so apps that use it and stuff like location still work but without actually talking to Google. If an app uses Google Maps, it will instead use OpenStreetMap, for example. There's a version of LineageOS, which ships without Google stuff and instead with microG and F-Droid as well.
Look into custom ROMs, there's a few degoogled privacy focused ROMs but support depends on ur mobile. You can also degoogle it yourself but can be quite time consuming.
Several things from Google.
- Google Maps - none of the OSM-bases options are there yet. I need traffic conditions and good Android Auto support. At the same time I hate that Google Maps is so full of ads. When I search for "breakfast" and the top result is a sponsored result for Dunkin and the closest is 50 miles away...
- YouTube - the content is there so it's hard to go to an alternative.
- Google Photos - my issue with this is really more tied to Gmail. If I stop paying for more Drive storage for my photos, I will stop receiving email because my account is full. But I did switch away from Gmail at least.
Check out piped.video. It's content of youtube without youtube. That means no recommendatios based on their algorythm, which might be nice sometimes but it's a good alternative. LibreTube for an Android app is what I use.
Ente seems good Google Photos alternative, but you do have to pay for it (they have like 1GB free space)
Yeah I use SmartTube on my TV and piped on my phone but I still count that as "using YouTube."
Isn't Waze better, functionalitywise, than google maps? I dont think they are any better on ethical fronts, but still better to use the less powerful evil...
Holy crap, Lois. Where do I even begin?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Linkedin. Pretentious garbage
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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.
- Linux: try installing virtualbox and messing around with it so that you know what you're getting into before having to make the jump. You dont have to go all in in the beginning. Spin up a virtual machine and play around and see if you are able to migrate any of your work to that.
- Google: once you migrate off gmail everything gets way way easier. DuckDuckGo is easily better then google for all search results other then maps and youtube
- Cars: not a car replacement, but ebikes are fun/addicting as shit and allow you to go 4x as far and fast as a regular bike without being totally sweaty at your destination. Again not a total car replacement, but it has replaced many vehicular activities and drastically cut down on me burning fossil fuels
Ubuntu is not hard to install. I think there's even an installer for Windows that you can download.
Google
Startpage uses Google on the back-end but keeps your searches anonymous. Or there's always DuckDuckGo.
My iphone [...] once when its unusable, I'm going for a Linux Pinephone.
Don't, it's not ready yet unless all you do is call and text. (Then it's fine ig)
Windows
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/
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Browsers. Firefox hasnt given me reason to doubt. Yet. And I find that odd. Still uses it. Because every other big browser have given me reasons.
Generally "free" stuff from big companies is giving me more and more the heebie-jeebies. Even if they have good reputation. But there's NO WAY I could ever pay for everything I use. Nor donate to every deserving person who has given their free time to create and publish FOSS.
Mozilla really pushes Pocket through Firefox. I've gone through the about:config to get rid of it. Pocket gives me doubts.
Socks. If I'm at home you'll never see me wearing socks, not even if it's -5°C out there. But got to use them while wearing shoes, I guess.
I hate socks and shoes. Something to do with being on the spectrum. I go barefoot, or wear thongs (flip flops) or crocs if I have to wear something. I pretty much only wear shoes/boots when mowing the lawn.
