Since most people here are either hoping this soon becomes the replacement to the former bird site, or have already fully commited to the switch, I figure now is a good time to boost alternatives to other deteriorating monopolized products 🧵
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YESSS KRITA AND DAVINCI RESOLVE MENTION !!!! i just downloaded davinci and i'm so excited to use it. i've had krita for almost 3 years now. finally started animating in it :]
Resolve has a similar level of compositing functionality to After Effects, but playback is smoother than premiere, it's genuinely insane. It also supports OFX effects plugins, so you can add so much more. The UI may be a disjointed mess, but you can absolutely cook once you get the hang of it.
LibreOffice and NextCloud both replace common productivity software suites. LibreOffice has a close equivalent for everything in Microsoft Office and is even more lightweight, and NextCloud allows you to host your own collaborative apps like GoogleDocs. Both support Microsoft Office formats.
I would be absolutely insane if I didn't mention Blender. It's not really competing with much, because Cinema4D and Maya are both decent, but Blender is completely FREE and arguably better. Not only does it do 3D animation, it also can do 2D animation, video editing, motion tracking and compositing.
Adobe is expensive, their apps are getting clunkier, and they are constantly trying to collect user data. Krita is better for digital painting than photoshop, photopea is great for image editing, Inkscape is better than illustrator IMO, and Davinci Resolve has replaced Premiere for my video editing.
DuckDuckGo is a privacy focused search engine that actually gives real results instead of a bunch of ads and algorithmic content. I consistently find more useful results on DuckDuckGo like 70% of the time, except for in rare cases where image results are less plentiful, but have way fewer AI images.
For browsers, almost all Google alternatives are based on Chromium, the framework of Chrome, which has built in connections to Google services. Firefox is built from scratch, is open source and I've been using it for the last year with no complaints. There are also other browsers based on firefox.
In addition to a privacy browser, there are tons of addons for chrome and firefox that block many trackers, strip tracking prefixes from URLs, block ads and any connections to specific domains known to be used for tracking and malware. And of course a VPN helps.
For added anonymity & compatibility when using a VPN, setting a fake GPS addon like LocationGuard to the same location as your VPN fools most VPN detectors. Sometimes they'll default to your PCs location services, but you can turn those off and set them to a default location of your choosing.
Google seems to own most of the web, and the OS used on most of the devices people use to access it, but there are several Linux mobile OSs, and degoogled versions of android like Graphene OS, which actually lets you download the play store, but in a sandbox that keeps google from spying on you.
From almost everyone I've talked to, the most user-friendly Linux version for Windows users to pick up is Linux Mint Cinnamon. Also, Steam's proton compatibility layer is available for other versions of Linux, as is Wine, so it's possible to play tons of windows games on it.
With Microsoft ending support for Windows 10 in January, and forcing copilot and recall on everyone, it would be amazing for user-friendly linux distros to get more support to hopefully keep improving so less technical users can make the switch.
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