I’m surprised it took this long

Billionaires doing what a billionaire does: feign a reason to kneecap a service, force complaints about its ineffectiveness, then use that as an excuse to dismantle it entirely. I am so tired of this.

I settled on Mint and now want to hop to CachyOS. I’m not sure I’m a fan of Cinnamon; setting up the panel (aka taskbar) on multiple monitors was an absolute nightmare and I ended up just giving up. There were other hiccups getting things set up here and there, but that’s the Linux life, baby.

I dual boot Windows because I need it for a few professional applications, but I swapped it to Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, have a local account, ran the ChrisTitus WinUtil to debloat and remove telemetry, and completely blocked all Microsoft-owned domains using NextDNS. It’s stable, does what I need, and Microsoft doesn’t need to know every time I turn my computer on.

Not strictly Linux but relevant to ditching Microsoft, I’m currently in the process of moving my projects off Github and into Codeburg for public repos and into Keybase (fully E2EE) for private repos. Fuck Microsoft’s AI data-scraping bullshit.

Bonus, I also recently completely degoogled, and installed GrapheneOS on my phone. It is awesome, and was absurdly easy to set up.

I recently tackled a full degoogle. I still have my email running, I really wouldn’t recommend deleting it for legacy purposes. But the tens of thousands of emails I had are fully deleted from gmail. I unsubscribed from basically everything, and hardly get emails there anymore.

I used Google takeout to get the emails exported. I had to do this per gmail account. They give you something called a .mbox file. I now use proton mail and pay for their service (I think paying makes sense for the service given the alternative is getting your data scraped for advertising revenue). I stored a backup of the .mbox file in my proton drive, and loaded the file in thunderbird (on linux with an encrypted drive) for whenever I need to search those old emails.

Overall it’s pretty easy. The hardest part was a bit of Thunderbird jank for first time setup. This guide was helpful: https://www.howtogeek.com/709718/how-to-open-an-mbox-file-in-mozilla-thunderbird/

Good luck :)