26 Aug 2025
I'm slowly not using software and services I relied on all the time.
I’ve been a Firefox user for over two decades now. Since, hell, at least before Firefox 2. Over the years I switched to using Firefox Dev Edition but in the last year or so Mozilla has been putting in more and more garbage I don’t want into the browser. So I lept for an alternative, and that was LibreWolf. It’s extremely security focused, blocking a lot of site functionalities by default, blocking site fingerprinting, and even having uBlock Origin pre-installed.
It’s secure, unfortunately, to the point of overkill for daily driving a browser. I’m often finding myself checking another browser to see if a site is broken, or if LibreWolf has broken it. At some point I’m going to make the transfer over to Waterfox, another Firefox alternative that’s not as locked-down as LibreWolf is.
This is all preferable to using a chromium browser. Good lord I’m happier with this.
I was a solid Photoshop CS5 user for the longest time. I got some alternatives like Krita and CSP, but I always found myself coming back to Photoshop for the real photo manipulation. Miss me with GIMP, I want a sensible UI. That’s why when Affinity got recommended to me as a one-time purchase Photoshop-like editor I was skeptical but tried it. And holy shit if it doesn’t hit the same buttons. There’s quirks I’m still fucking around with that get annoying. Paste in an image and that makes an Image layer, which is not the same thing as a raster Pixel layer that you can edit. Weird.
As far as brushes or text tool goes it is rivalling Photoshop. Seriously, Krita’s text tool is dog shit and it’s hard to find alternatives to this that aren’t basic text options. Affinity lets me adjust kerning and spacing and 50 million different text options like Photoshop does. Affinity lets me do complex vector paths and masking. Affinity hits all those things that Photoshop practically had the monopoly on and I don’t have to pay them monthly. The only downside is Affinity was acquired by Canva and I’m waiting for them to fuck it up somehow, but for right now it seems safe.
Also I picked up IrfanView, it’s great for compressing the filesizes of a bunch of PNG and JPG images.
I got DaVinci Resolve and sat myself down to learn how to motion track. Like Photoshop, I’ve also used After Effefcts for the longest time and I was fucking tired of it. If I could learn how to do it in Resolve, then I would truly be free of Adobe software. Thank the gods I did, and same for a bunch of other After Effects editing tricks too. It’s like I’ve got Premiere and AE rolled up in one and it’s wonderful. Give DaVinci Resolve a shot if you’re doing video editing and do not want to give adobe money. Hell, even if you do want to give Adobe money, just get this instead.
Christ, they put AI into Notepad? Uhh, fuck. Notepad++.
LibreOffice. Microsoft’s making Office worse and worse. With LibreOffice you get an analogue for each Microsoft Office product without the garbage that entails. Hell the LibreOffice suite comes with a Visio alternative called LibreOffice Draw that I used for designing my current audio setup.
Please stop using Google. Bare minimum, go to DuckDuckGo and set that as your default. There’s an AI assistant for some reason but it’s easily disabled in the search options. I’ve been using DDG for a long time now and the shit’s never re-appeared its ugly head.
I’ve been looking at Manjaro! I’ve currently got Windows 10 and I’m riding that until this PC dies, but in the meantime I’ve been testing out Manjaro in a VM. So far it’s been working pretty smoothly, and I picked it due to it being Arch-based. SteamOS is also Arch-based, so there should be some Proton compatibility on Manjaro so I can run Steam on there fine. I also run AMD stuff so drivers will never be an issue. Once I can get anything I had on Windows over to Manjaro, I will relegate my current Windows machine to a solely “Boot In Case Of Windows Needs” machine.
I’ve currently got an older phone that missed all of the cellphone shittenings of the last half decade. Headphone jacks going away, AI getting shoved in everything, and on top of that any phone pictures are badly AI smoothed. On top of this, Android is getting more restrictive on what I can do with my own phone when the point of it was that I could tinker with it. Apple is not an option, so my alternative to running Android is running Not Android. The two I’m looking at are Graphene and LineageOS for a custom Android firmware that won’t be under Google’s weird restrictions.
And if I’m getting a phone, it weirdly might be a Sony phone because they’ve been providing the good stuff. Headphone jacks, cameras that aren’t inside the screen in a notch or cicle or some dumb shit. The downside of a Sony phone is they’re extremely expensive, but if I could make my current phone last 6 years I’m sure I can get my money’s worth out of a phone I’ll enjoy.
Yeah! It’s slow work, I didn’t make all of these changes overnight. Just making one at a time and getting used to it before making another change. If I were to make any of these a priority over the others, I’d say changing your search engine would be the big one. Just getting Google out of your view every day will help with making other transitions easier.
