[gumballindie]

Exactly. I made the switch from MacOS and couldn't be happier. The fun thing is that with Linux these days you have the option of a powerful workstation that you can upgrade be it laptop or desktop, can do gaming, and is private. The next thing for me is to "decloud" - meaning remove any and all online services that are not mission critical.

[dagw]

Yup, same here. And the sad things is that Windows was getting so close. Between WSL2, the new terminal and ssh, all the support for VSCode and better dev tools and open source language support, I was becoming a bit of Windows 'fan' and this close to seriously considering Windows 10 a fully usable developer desktop. Then they released Windows 11 and completely shit the bed.

[Corsome]

Personally I think there are multiple forces acting on Windows at the same time. Some of them push it to a good direction (cases you mentioned) some of them less so.

We live in a times that are good for developers: we not only have free access to powerful tools that other professionals need to pay big bucks but it goes even further: with open source we can co-shape these tools and in the extreme cases fork and create our own derivatives.

Why not take advantage of this and just avoid proprietary solutions as much as possible?

[Corsome]

Well said.

> The next thing for me is to "decloud" - meaning remove any and all online services that are not mission critical.

For me there are multiple parallel "side quests" and decloud is definitely one of them (I strive to minimize cloud and select solutions that can be self hosted and that are E2EE. Then I pay for hosting anyway but I always have an option of rolling my own. Example: etesync for calendars and contacts).

Other side quests: instead of Gnome use Sway, this requires manually picking wifi/Bluetooth connection managers (iwctl and bluetoothctl work well) and other tooling.

Yet another: convert my entire family to use Linux. Sadly this is harder since schools teach Windows but Gnome looks very similar to what they use.

These are just some examples. The good thing is that all of these are small steps that can be taken in any order to improve the situation in small increments.

[nateb2022]

> The next thing for me is to "decloud" - meaning remove any and all online services that are not mission critical.

These are often useful, so the better option is to host your own privacy-respecting versions of these tools.

[gumballindie]

I should have phrased it better, indeed what I meant is self hosting by "declouding" from public clouds. My only concern is realiable self hosted backups. But I already have my own setup for newsfeeds, document storage, even for calling friends and relatives, and at the fraction of the cost (I factor in the value of my privacy as part of overall cost). I think there is good potential for self hosted products out there. A major pain point though is self hosting emails, since that requires a lot of work around spam protection and availability.

[trustingtrust]

I use an iPhone and other than that I hope to not use anything else that’s so cloud reliable. Maybe an AppleTV if I get one, but I only watch sports so a few cable channels are more than enough for me I think.

[gumballindie]

The nasty issue is that even tvs are turning into covert spies and are starting to show ads. So even if all you do is watch cable channels, the TV itself might still be spying on you. You perhaps need a "filter" such as a raspberry pi or a device that can transfer content via HDMI and have the tv completely cutoff from the internet. Really dubious times we are in.

[trustingtrust]

Just don't use wifi or connect your TV to the internet. That works for me. My TV is online only during firmware updates which almost never happen cause its become old and those stopped long time ago.