On the morning after the bloated and falsehood strewn State of the Union address by President Trump, I thought I’d reflect on the progress I have made to disentangle my digital dependence on USA tech companies.
I use the Affinity Suite for a lot of my image and text presentation for creative projects. This Windows and Mac application suite has now been straightforwardly enabled on Linux, either through using an AppImage, or a GUI based Wine implementation. Although I can still hope for a native port to Linux, it is more than good enough for me to ditch the Windows PC that I held on to for just this purpose, and switch it to Linux. Microsoft has left my building. My Mrs uses Windows for work and home, but that’s fine, this is my struggle.
A satisfying morning adding repos and apps and making my local network USB HDD available to a fresh Fedora Workstation 43. I’ll add Affinity Suite as a standard these days. I think the main OS changes, away from USA corporations, that are possible for me right now are complete. Default browser is Zen (Firefox based), search engine is currently DuckDuckGo. I have the Brave browser if I need something Chromium based.
There is more that I can do, at a leisurely pace. The majority of my data is now stored locally on a pair of cheap USB HDDs, one live on the router and accessible throughout home, the other a maintained back-up. The backup is kept in sync by a monthly rsync process, sending changes that have occurred on the main HDD to the backup. I was stunned by the simplicity and power of ‘rsync’ on the command line. The process isn’t ideal, but for the nature of my data, this cadence is more than good enough. A proper NAS is likely this year, and I’ll report back on the one I go for and how I find it. Probably UGREEN, but we’ll see. In the mean time I plan to further reduce my Google Drive data, though I am already within the 100GB threshold I had set myself.
I have a full local archive of my Google photos, using their takeout service. It came to more than 40GB, reflecting many years of accumulation. I really should have first gone through the cloud based files and deleted the huge weight of pointless ones!
I need to decide if I am going to commit to Proton for an additional email address and cloud space. It would be part funded by the reduction in Google subscription. I also host websites for conventions on Hostinger, and have a domain there with email access. The cost of hosting is covered as charge to the conventions. I think the web presence is useful for the small charge.
I’m evaluating European alternatives to Google Maps. I think that will be a full switch, over the coming months.
Some elements will remain. Sunk cost on the Google phone and HarmonyOS based tablet will keep me for their lifetime. I’ve already noted alternatives for when the time comes. I really should do something about my bank!
And of course there is this blog. It will probably have to move. It makes sense to migrate the blog by using a WordPress instance on Hostinger. That feels like a significant effort, but it is a further next step.
Progress then. I feel less entangled, less personally dependent. I was disappointed by the speech given in my name by our Prime Minister at Munich. I have rehearsed the one that I would have given. It is a time of rupture, and despite beneficial and enduring cooperation, we have to recognise that a return to a rules based order with a properly cogent and powerful ally is not a given. For now, I’ll do these small things, in one aspect of my life, to give a sense of positive action.
More to come.