My FOSS journey
2022-11-22
Free and open source software (FOSS for short) is a big part of my life nowadays, but it has not always been this way. In this article I am going to talk about my personal FOSS journey and hopefully inspire you to make the switch away from evil big tech too.
In the old days a few years ago, I used what you could call a "normie" hardware and software setup. I had a Google Pixel phone with the stock Android ROM, an iPad Pro for school stuff and a desktop computer running Windows 10. Additionally, I was registered at a million different online services, most of which I did not use on a frequent basis.
Heck, I even got into the terrifiying field of web development with useless frameworks and thought about buying a Chromebook to fully emerge into the Google ecosystem. But luckly it did not came this far as I grew interested in using Linux, because my Windows install broke every 3 months or so and the pinguin is the only real man's operating system. This finally led me to learn about the importance/value of privacy as well as open source.
Within a few months, I switched to the friendly Linux Mint , deleted all of my unnecessary online accounts and started enjoying it! I was not ready yet to switch to a custom Android ROM, delete my Google account and sell my iPad though. This had to do with me either not knowing about the possibility (in case of the custom ROM) or having the requirement to hold on to the status quo for a bit longer due to school.
Fortunately, I was able to resolve the devices related issues in 2020/2021 by flashing CalyxOS onto my phone as well as selling my by then not frequently used iPad and I am just holding on to my now unused Google account for one last project to finish. After that I am all out of the claws of big tech!
Besides gaining a lot of privacy though switching to locally running solutions or privacy respecting services like Bitwarden , Tutanota , Signal and CryptPad , I am just much more productive now that I am not wasting my time on Youtube anymore or beeing bombarded with ads everywhere I go online. This quality of life improvement alone was worth the switch in my humble opinion!
It is not all a piece of cake though. When getting into the Linux world, you will likely end up distro hopping for a bit and have to fight with configurations every once in while. This aspect also generally applies: You have to like experimenting with different solutions and be fine with making compromises in some areas. For example, I use Signal for quick notes on the go as I have not found any good end-to-end-encrypted solution for this yet.
But if you are fine with that, you will have an amazing time and never look back! You also do not have to make the switch in one go, but instead can migrate to a private and open source infrastructure step by step. Just get started...