[Raion]

Previous thread here: https://forums.irixnet.org/thread-2443.html

Operating Systems

I reiterate that none of the big three are fantastic choices. GNU/Linux in particular is rather anti-user, but it's probably the least bad of the main three. I'm waiting to go to NetBSD when Framework gets graphics support for it, but until then because nothing else works properly on it that's a modicum of stable I'm using Ubuntu. Windows 10 remains my personal view the most balanced especially LTSC but support is slowly being phased out for 11.

NetBSD and Tribblix are my current highest recommendations for a non-corporatized OS, followed by Haiku and OpenBSD.

Search Engines

Brave Search - Decent. Probably one of the better ones.

Ecosia -  Germany-based search provider with anonymized searches and more reliable ranking in my experience compared to DDG or Bing

DuckDuckGo - Uses Bing and Yandex to help rank itself, but has some level of search manipulation (they don't rank sites they consider to be content mills) and has had numerous controversies.

Startpage (formerly lxquick) - An aggregation search engine as far as I can tell.

Out of the big four search engines that are corporatized, Baidu and Yandex are the only options that don't go directly to American big tech, but both Yandex and Baidu go to foreign governments, so use at your own risk.

Browsers

Don't use Chrome, the main build of Firefox, Safari or Opera. There's dozens of better options:

Vivaldi - For Linux, Windows and macOS users this is my top recommendation. It's clean, fast, has nice built-in features, and it carries Opera better than Opera does anymore. 

Brave - It's a decent webkit browser, with some neat features. In particular, BAT (basic attention tokens). I also have partnered with Brave on irixnet.org - they won't show ads because I'm not a fan of that noise, but you can tip us BAT and it'll go to the site. 

Waterfox - for Mozilla users, use this or GNU Icecat. The main firefox build supports and advertises Mozilla, whose been increasingly political in recent years. They fired Brendan Eich for being a conservative Christian, they support RiseUp, a group associated with antifa and other terrorist organizations, and have been openly pushing a partisan agenda on issues that do not concern the internet itself.

New Moon/ArcticFox - Replacement suggestions for Palemoon/UXP

Midori - for Linux users, a decent option.

Email

Zoho - India-based tech company with an office suite and email attached. A million times better than gmail/google docs IMHO. 

Protonmail - Swiss-based pro-privacy email service.

Mailbox.org - Another Protonmail-esque service

Mailfence - Heard about this from a friend, only briefly glanced. Looks okay at a glance. 

Wiki alternatives

For reference, I do not hate Wikipedia. I do, however, think the english Wikipedia plays into biases more often than it cares to ever admit. I use Wikipedia regularly, but knowing of alternative is perhaps useful:

Scholarpedia - A rather slimmed down, but academically minded Wikipedia hard fork. Basically a more formalized academic Wikipedia. 

Citizendium - A rather inactive Wikipedia fork, really a huge shame. 


I am looking to eventually maybe help with an alternative, but for now I'm focusing on a project with a group of Taiwanese former wikipedia contributors sick of PRC influence over the Chinese Wikipedia

Social Media Alternatives

Yeah hell no. 

Forums to consider

Besides your friendly irixnet, there's a bunch worth looking at:

Agora Road - https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php A forum I lurked in under an alt for a while. Isn't quite as crazy or drama ridden as some places like it. 

EAB - English Amiga Board, a favorite of mine from the Amiga community

VCFed - Usual VCF forum suspects

The CoffeeHouse - A relaxed, shoot-the-shit type forum

I'll admit, we need more forums here. I'm loathe to post super niche car or other forums and won't post any VerticalScope shit.

[johnnym]

I reiterate that none of the big three are fantastic choices. GNU/Linux in particular is rather anti-user, but it's probably the least bad of the main three. I'm waiting to go to NetBSD when Framework gets graphics support for it, but until then because nothing else works properly on it that's a modicum of stable I'm using Ubuntu.

What GUI are you using and what version of Ubuntu? I'm still on 20.04.x and "stayed" with Unity, my wife's using the default Gnome which I find outright user-hostile nowadays.

About web browsers, which of those mentioned do still support accessing FTP servers natively? It's such a PITA you can't do that with Firefox anymore.

For email I'm stuck with Thunderbird (using it since nearly 20 years, that's hard to change) though the recent regular hiccups with new versions (high CPU usage though apparently doing nothing useful for me) and the upcoming Supernova release will surely be another nail in the coffin for me, as the codename is describing.

[vishnu]

I don't really see how GNU/Linux is anti-user, maybe I'm missing something obvious but I don't think so. As I've mentioned a million times before I use Slackware Linux and the Motif Window Manager, which is the polar opposite of a "desktop."

Brendan Eich wasn't fired from Mozilla, he resigned after being appointed CEO and it came out that he'd donated a modicum of cash to the Proposition 8 initiative in California, which proposed a state constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, and the social justice warriors came after him with knives out. Personally, I don't give a crap who marries who, as far as I'm concerned there should be no government restrictions of any sort on marriage. You should be able to marry as many people as you want, you should be able to marry your horse if you want. It'll just make the probate lawyers all the more wealthy when it comes to estate settlement. 😝

[Raion]

As I remember it Mozilla basically gave Eich an ultimatum. I won't say I'm one way or the other but this was basically proto-cancel culture, which I'm against. I don't believe in polygamy or anything like that but my views on society/marriage are not part of this. It's basically just understanding Mozilla is a compromised organization.

As for why GNU/Linux is anti-user, it's quite simple:

You have to conform to a mainstream distro with a specific set of interfaces for most packages or else you're coding/patching a lot of stuff. Everything since the 2.2 kernel days has progressively gotten less and less optional. Basically, to use most packages unpatched/modified, you need at minimum an entire stack of corporatized applications by RedHat. Udev, dbus, systemd etc.

Slackware is a pretty small niche distro. It's not really representative of most people's needs and it possesses a lot of annoyances. No dependency resolution outta the box puts it a step below IRIX if you think about it.

[vishnu]

I guess as a programmer I've never worried about dependency resolution, I've never used Slackware kernels I always compile my own kernels, and I don't use Slackware's Motif, I compile my own from source. Slackware doesn't come with my preferred editor, Nedit, so I compile that myself. I guess really, other than the system libraries and the compilers, I don't use anything that Slackware comes with. Over the nearly 30 years I've been on Slackware, I've never had a problem with it, it just plain works. Compared to the big commercial distributions I think the only thing Slackware doesn't have would be Gnome. There are second party dependency resolution programs that work on Slackware but I've never felt the need for dependency resolution. 😁