the tech oligarchs forget: we never needed them
The further I go into my quest away from Big Tech, the more interesting stories I hear and facts I learn.
A friend's 75 year old mother, for instance, just switched to Ubuntu after a lifetime of using Windows. She'd simply had it with all the ads and bloatware Windows crams into its operating system now.
By all accounts, this is a woman who had just enough computer knowledge to reliably answer her email and open Facebook. But she discovered Ubuntu, and with a little help from one of her kids, she installed it.
Similarly, another friend sent me a link today to Abode, the Stuart Semple-backed software suite that seeks to do everything Adobe does - except you can buy this one once and own it forever, instead of paying for subscriptions until you die.
Every time I tell someone about my quest away from Big Tech, they inevitably ask: "But what do you use instead of [insert Big Tech product here]?"
At first, I just told people - but then I realized most people don't even know that many alternate products exist, let alone how they compare to the default Big Tech offerings. So I started showing them instead.
The version of Ubuntu installed on my laptop has a 100% success rate so far in converting my friends and family members to a Linux-based OS. They're blown away by how well it just works.
"Just works" is my new standard for tech, by the way. Whatever the system, tool, or program is, it must just work. It must just work. It must not do anything else than the job I acquired it to do.
Some things that just work for me:
- Ubuntu (computer operating system)
- GrapheneOS (Android phone operating system)
- Proton Mail, Drive, Pass, Calendar, and VPN (email, document management, password management, calendar, and VPN, respectively)
- Mailfence (email)
- Firefox and Brave (browsers)
- DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and Kagi (search engines)
- F-Droid (source of phone apps)
- Aurora Store (anonymous access to Google Play Store)
- FreeTube (anonymous YouTube viewer)
- LibreOffice (Office, before Microsoft stripped out a third of its functionality to make room for Pretty)
- CryptPad (online document management and collaboration with way more security and functionality than Google Drive)
- Audacity (audio editing)
- Phocid (music player)
- Feeder and Mire (RSS feed readers)
- VLC Media Player (video and music player)
- MuPDFReader (PDF reader)
- Organic Maps (maps)
- Counter.social (like Twitter if Twitter were actually worth using)
- Signal (messaging)
- GOG, aka Good Old Games (computer game management - buy them once, own them forever)
- a literal kitchen timer that looks like a chicken (instead of "needing" a smart speaker or a smartphone to set timers for me)
- two external hard drives (for backup and backup copy, instead of cloud backups - which just put my data on someone else's computer)
I don't have a replacement solution for everything people ask for. For example, I've never used cloud-based photo storage in my life, so I don't have a good suggestion (though I have heard good things about Ente Photos). Also, I'm still looking for an e-reader app for my phone that I genuinely like. Must have no ads and offer scroll mode. Suggestions are gratefully appreciated.
But even when I'm still looking for the perfect replacement, I trust that it's out there somewhere - or that, if I really wanted to, I could make my own. (See: my plans to create my own games/streaming management device on a Raspberry Pi.)
That's the thing. A combination of advertising and massive spends to position themselves as the "defaults" have got us all assuming that Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta are the only games in town.
They aren't. They really, really are not.
We never needed the tech oligarchs. It's past time we reminded them of that.