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Nine steps road to privacy and freedom from Google and everyone else: Step 1: Switch to DuckDuckGo. Step 2: Create a openmailbox.org account. (Gives you a mai
by rvern 10y ago
Nine steps road to privacy and freedom from Google and everyone else:
Step 1: Switch to DuckDuckGo.
Step 2: Create a openmailbox.org account. (Gives you a mailbox with IMAP and POP3 access, but also an ownCloud account which replaces many of Google's services. All free software, no tracking, and it's reliable.)
Step 3: Switch to a good GNU/Linux distribution that cares about your freedom and privacy, like Fedora or Debian, and not Ubuntu.
Step 4: Use Mozilla Firefox if you are using another browser. All the other major browsers are proprietary, browsers that aren't among the major ones almost never support extensions.
Step 5: Install uBlock Origin and configure it to your liking.
Step 6: Install and configure the Evolution mail client with your openmailbox.org account.
Step 7: Use Pidgin for chat. It supports (with plugins) all the chat protocols, including the proprietary ones such as Skype, Facebook Chat, Hangouts.
Step 8: Use duplicity to have encrypted backups of your home directory made automatically to a portable hard drive or a USB drive.
Step 9: Use applications that run on your computer instead of web apps whenever you can.
You now control all of your data, have all the services you had before but running on your own computer and not on some third party's servers, use only free software that you can trust, and are much harder to track online. Congratulations!
- ljk 10y ago> Step 3: Switch to a good GNU/Linux distribution that cares about your freedom and privacy, like Fedora or Debian, and not Ubuntu. why not ubuntu?
- Nadya 10y agoThis may help explain it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXnfa0H30L4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXnfa0H30L4 Which I believe had to do with it's configuration of Unity (Ubuntu's default DE)? (Can't watch the video ATM to confirm.) Canonical (the people in charge of Ubuntu) have done things that the more zealous advocates of user-first freedoms/privacy are skeptical about or have caused distrust.
- ljk 10y agoAh I remember people complaining about Unity(which had Amazon search enabled by default) Any recommendation for another flavor that's more user-freedom/privacy focused but still relatively stable?(I read somewhere Debian isn't good for personal use since it's designed for servers, is that true?)
- rvern 10y agoDebian is stable and good for personal use. All the major distributions can usually be used on servers as well as for personal use. They are also all stable as far as bugs are concerned (even the riskier rolling release ones), though some distributions like Debian and CentOS use stability in a stronger sense of not pushing any updates to the stable releases except bug fixes and vulnerability fixes.
- ljk 10y agothanks!
- rvern 10y agoUbuntu includes proprietary software in the default installation and has done questionable things in the past. Other distributions (particularly Fedora) do better on user-friendliness in my opinion, despite the common opinion that it is otherwise.