TLDR - What you can do to make your computing more European
TLDR - What you can do to make your computing more European
Too long, didn't read - Better Tech
This is my website. It is not commercial.
TLDR - What you can do to make your computing more European
Too long, didn't read - Better Tech
This is my website. It is not commercial.
Firefox
I explained that here: https://better-tech.eu/web/article/switch-browsers/ In short, this is the only thing where I believe keeping the web open by using Firefox is more important than using a "European" browser like Vivaldi. If everyone uses a Chrome-based browser, we will end up in an IE6-like situation where it will be extremely hard to create a 100% European browser and get any traction.
Why Ubuntu only?
There are more options here: https://better-tech.eu/infra/article/operating-systems/
Cloud
Cloud computing is always going to be a technical subject, but this is also the part where I still have to do a lot of work and add a lot of content. Maybe I need to make separate pages for home users and for companies to make the information more accessible.
Btw, Infomaniak is mentioned here: https://better-tech.eu/cloud/article/workspace/
Distributions can be hit or miss depending on the user and hw for sure.
Mint 22.1 still runs Kernel 6.8 whoch means you'll be hitting the terminal to either upgrade to mainline kernel or add extra repositories for the latest drivers if you have f.e. an AMD Radeon 9070.
Mint 22.1 still runs Kernel 6.8 whoch means you’ll be hitting the terminal to either upgrade to mainline kernel
The last two major updates of Mint were done through some GUI. There were a few warnings (about a few extra apps I had installed) but everything was done through that app and went smoothly. Edit: and so quickly (yeah, I'm looking at you, macOS)
or add extra repositories
I don't think I use extra repositories but I did add two PPAs and did it through the GUI 'Software Sources' that comes with Mint. I just checked, it also offers the option to add 'Additional repositories', if that means 'extra'?
Minor correction: browser plugins and extensions are not the same. Please rename the 'plugin' section to 'extensions' :)
I would suggest adding uBlock Origin, since it can block american ad-tech like Google Analytics
In the Maps>OpenStreetMap section, I would love to see Organic Maps linked, as it is one of the best mobile apps for OSM, and apparently Estonian
With the Linux distro recommendations, you opened a can of worms, I'd add Fedora to the big boys and Bazzite in the minor section for gamers
Please rename the ‘plugin’ section to ‘extensions’ :)
Done.
I would suggest adding uBlock Origin
Done.
I would love to see Organic Maps linked
Done.
With the Linux distro recommendations, you opened a can of worms
I sure did. I will keep your suggestions in mind, but I'm not changing anything right now. I'm in the middle of other stuff, not a lot of time to test these distro's.
Thanks for all the feedback!
Fedora is open-source but American btw as it is used to be a pathway for redhat
I don't really like naming specific instances (lemmy.world, mastodon.social) and distro (Ubuntu) instead of at least offering a few choices + a full list of instances.
Many people don't want to get into the topic that much, they wan't it accessable and easy to use. That's also the reason that many Big Tech firms can bring out products to get your data and sell it because those products are easy to use. If we want people to join our alternatives then we should make them accessable and not judge them for their disinterest in the details.
Agreed, I'd take OpenSUSE over an Ubuntu flavour any day if european is important. Generally I roll Debian servers and a Fedora desktop though.
Like others have mentioned, those of us in the know probably don't need much help picking alternatives here, as we're likely to know what the options are and how they differ. For the regular Jane and Joe to even stand a chance in a pretty confusing landscape it needs to be as simple as possible to get going with an alternative, or else I fear most people will just fall back on the well known, well marketed options.
I suggested to a non-techy coworker (a Reddit user) he'd give Lemmy a shot, and when I asked him how it went a couple of days later he said he got confused during the sign up process, "what the heck is an instance, which one should I pick?".
Thank you for posting here
DDG is also amazing, although yes its not European but its open source and is not affiliated with any other search engine
DDG has open sourced a bunch of projects, but I don't think their actual search engine code is open source. And they use Bing results.
Read, and already done all that.
I suggest you add another link: donate to projects you enjoy via Liberapay (or switch to helping projects and creators you enjoy through this rather than patreon/paypal).
Also
Linux Mint is better for average person. See Linus' comparison video.
Also, Floop is a fork of Firefox by a Japanese dev that removes old compatibility libraries to make its performance up to 30% faster. It should run on any machine bought in the last 10 years. It's only missing DRM, so you can't watch Netflix on it.
Papago is a nice complement to DeepL. It's Korean.
Changing your machine's DNS should also be mentioned. AdGuard is from Cyprus. I personally use Cloudflare though. NextDNS is from US by two French devs. Quad9 is Swiss.
Since we're in Buy European, I'm going to plug Softmaker Office. I bought it to replace MS Office at work and no one seems to have noticed. I used see formatting issues in word docs when using LibreOffice.
Added. Thanks.
Hi again. You can actually buy Softmaker Office versions outright (a non-subscription purchase), but they seem to have made the option harder to find these days: https://www.softmaker.com/en/shop/softmaker-office
Nice resource!
I have to say I really like the idea of TLDR page. This is my first time bumping into a website that has a dedicated TLDR.
I know it's kinda obvious in this post (lemmy username), but due to our rules:
OP could you add a disclaimer in your post body that this resource is owned by you :)
Edit: Thanks OP!
Sorry, done.
All good, thanks! :)
I like it. Keeping it simple, with sensible opinionated defaults. I don't necessarily agree with everything, but the choices is in no way bad.
Can I recommend that you make it FOSS, so that there can be discussions on what to add, why something was added/removed etc? Privacyguides have a good system for this 😊
Also the links that are :visited are dark purple and not very visible anymore. Consider a brighter colour
Also the links that are :visited are dark purple and not very visible anymore. Consider a brighter colour
I don't see what you are seeing. On which page and with which browser?
Switch to HERE WeGo for your mapping needs. Read more here.
I tried them and was pleasantly surprised, also tried a bunch of OpenStreetMap based options but they work better for browsing than navigating in my opinion. Especially for looking up public transport options HERE WeGo does a much better job.
I've switched to HERE for navigation too. I've used Citymapper for public transport both at home and on holiday and think it's great.
Nice suggestion, I'll keep it in mind when I find HERE or Organic Maps lacking. Tried to look into their business model, which seems to be advertising and selling tickets but they are very open about it which I like. Unlike here, which give me the 'everything is free and we're not gonna tell you how we can afford to do that'-vibe.
I see it's from the UK so if you want @bettertecheu@lemmy.world, you could add it to the overview.
Added. Thanks.
For cloud PaaS solutions, you are missing two of the most attractive offers in my opinion, namely Scaleway and Upcloud. They are not “direct to OpenStack” solutions which is not necessarily a disadvantage cause OpenStack isn’t that user friendly. But they seem fresh and offer plenty, with Scaleway doing lots of features and Upcloud being more flat, also regarding pricing.
Thanks for the suggestions. I will look into them asap.