Quick PSA: they don’t currently block VPNs, so you can sign up for an account in a cheap country (I picked Nigeria) and use a foreign currency debit card (I use Revolut) to get Premium for like £1.50 a month for my entire family.

If they close that loophole then I think I’ll be done with it, the ads make it basically unusable these days.

Apple Maps and Fastmail.

Fastmail is paid but the 1Password and disposable email address system makes it worth it for me.

I went through a period of de-googling a couple of years ago. Swapping browser, mobile os, search engine, storage, maps, music, video purchases, voice assistant and even email service was relatively simple, there are alternatives out there which do the job just as well if not better than what Google offer.

The only exception is YouTube, yea there are individual sites that occasionally offer some of the videos I want (often with a subscription attached), there are some federated systems like NewPipe which have some videos but there is no one offering remotely the quantity or quality of what you can get on YouTube for free.

As the article states, it’s basically a monopoly at this point without a viable alternative.

Arc is weird but pretty good once you get used to it.

DuckDuckGo is good if you want a minimal browser and don’t really care about extensions

Brave is OK if you want a slightly more private version of Chrome

Honestly though, just use Firefox.

They totally did that

The problem was that people weren’t really interested in any of it.

The UI was cluttered and messy to look at, none of it was as polished or natural to use as iOS or Android.

Plus there was no Google Maps, no Google Docs (and Office 365 wasn’t around to replace it), even that apps that were in the store felt pretty bad quality. I had Spotify on my iPhone and it was nearly flawless, when I switched to Windows Phone it kept cutting out or crashing or disconnecting from the mobile connection, it just wasn’t fully baked.

I wish this was the case with Brexit…

the more traditional style of forums are still around too.

They’re very rare these days though. It’s a whole lot easier to keep all your interests in one place rather than heading off to one forum for gaming chat and another for programming chat and another for gardening chat.

Keeping it all in a single feed means your interest can be piqued at random times and you’ll be more likely to interact.

In the UK at least, switching banks is super easy, I’ve done in twice in the last 2 months because they offered free cash to do so, there is enough competition that the banks have to make it easy to move or else they lose customers.

For government, generally most systems are built to be as accessible as they can be because there has been [https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-public-sector-websites-and-apps ](whole raft of legislation) written up to cover this.

I’m not saying it wouldn’t be a problem (power companies etc could prove to be sticky) but there are legal requirements that entities above a certain site have to meet.

If you want to move them elsewhere(or even just get a csv export of them) there are apps for that.

https://freeyourmusic.com will let you pay a one time fee to do it to as many services as you want, it’s a bit slow but it’ll get there eventually.

Suffocation. Cats falls asleep where it’s nice and warm, like around a kids face.

How about The Expanse or The Martian? They’re both relatively hard sci-fi that focuses mostly on our own solar system.

The Martian tells the tale of a man stuck on Mars and his ability to survive on his own whilst those back on Earth figure out a way to get him back. Both the book and the film are great so you can’t go wrong with either.

The Expanse covers more of the local system. Earth and Mars are on the brink of war, whilst others live out near the asteroid belt, Jupiter and beyond. It goes a little sci-fi later on but it’s an inherently human story that has some great characters living in a time when space travel is still dangerous but achievable by humanity. It starts a little slow but ramps up brilliantly and has a nice conclusion that wraps everything up pretty neatly. You’ve got 9+ books, a 6 season TV series on Amazon Prime, and a newly released TellTale video game, all of which are well produced and worth investing time in.

The best time to leave Twitter was when Elon took over, the second best time is right now.

I think would be a step too far for most

Oh yea, you could do 1080p or even 800p like a Steam Deck in handheld mode and I think that that would be fine, on a TV it should be > 1080p tho

I can’t be the only one thinking finally…

The Switch was reasonably powered at launch but now feels positively antiquated compared to the Steam Deck and the like, there is no way I would buy any third party games on it right now when I’ve got a PS5 sitting right next to it.

All I need is a good spec bump to get games running at 1440p / 60fps in docked mode to make me happy!

As a Brit this seems like such a ridiculous attitude to have.

When you go out for food you are paying for:

• Quality ingredients
• The knowledge and skill of someone to take those ingredients and make a nice meal out of them

If you’re dining in you also get:

• A nice place to sit with good lighting and a nice ambiance
• Someone to bring your food
• Someone to clean away your dirty dishes

If you are getting delivery you instead pay for someone to bring it to you.

The food itself is like 40% of what you’re paying for, the rest is just convenience and atmosphere.

I’m guessing Linus’s investment is safe then :)

Normally I would agree with you, but I often need to use the Postman Interceptor extension which is only on Chromium browsers

Yea, I really liked Edge when it was first launched, clean fast and simple. These days there is so much shoe-horning of Microsoft integrations it just feels like they’re desperately trying to steal all of your personal information

Arc could be amazing but there are some features which just don’t work as I would expect.

As a web developer the problem I have is there are issues with all the browsers that are available today:

• Chrome and Edge are owned by big companies and report god-knows-what back to their motherships whilst constantly pushing their own services
• Firefox uses its own rendering engine so it can have some Firefox specific bugs / differences that might be missed, plus doesn’t have support for some of the extensions that you want
• Safari doesn’t have windows or extensions support
• Opera is full of random features and promotional bumpf that I don’t care about and have to turn off
• Vivaldi is a complicated beast that takes a bunch of work to set up, it also includes a mail client, calendar and feed reader in the browser which I don’t need.
• DuckDuckGo doesn’t have any extension support at all
• Arc is really fiddly and doesn’t always behave how I want it to (bookmarks behave like tabs for some reason)
• Brave pulls things like this and is also full of crypto/wallet type stuff, plus you can’t even change your home page.

I just want a simple Chromium browser that doesn’t require me to turn a bunch of shit off, is private by default and supports extensions, I don’t think it’s too much to ask!