It was a great couple decades, growing up in Silicon Valley and seeing all the big tech companies around me flourishing and striving for greatness. Unfortunately, as I've grown and matured, I've been forced to confront the fact that these companies pursue profit over all else. They will drive humanity to the brink of extinction if it makes next quarter's profits go up by even the smallest amount. This has finally driven me mad, and I've decided to ditch these services as much as possible.
The first and biggest change I made was ditching Microsoft Windows for Linux. In 2024, I first started experimenting with Linux on a home server for self-hosting some services, as well as in WSL for Rust development. However, as Microsoft continued to do things that pissed me off, I finally installed Linux on my main PC in early 2025, and was using it as my daily-driver operating system by the middle of the year. I've tried multiple different Linux distributions, including Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, NixOS, and CachyOS, but I won't go into too much more detail about that here. That deserves its own post. At the time of writing, I have been using CachyOS for about six months, and I'm very happy with it and not planning to switch any time soon.
More recently, I've decided to begin migrating my entire life off the Google suite. That includes the Gmail address I've been using for most of my life. The replacement I've chosen is Proton, and it has seriously impressed me thus far. The thing with creating a paid service in a market that's dominated by a competitor who offers their service for free* is that you actually need to make your serice worth paying for. If you've ever heard the quote by Gabe Newell of Valve about having to make a service that was so convenient that people were willing to pay instead of pirate, it's the same idea. Proton walked me through setting up my own custom domain email address, and pointed out all potential issues and gave very good instructions on how to fix them. This was something that I was completely unable to figure out in Gmail. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC were just never quite right, but Proton got me up and running perfectly within minutes. I've also been using their calendar, password manager, authenticator, and VPN, as they're included in the subscription.
Other things that I will write about at a later date: Kagi, browsers, Qobuz, Bunny, Obsidian, and more. To be continued...