Over the course of the last year, I have slowly been taking steps to pull myself out of actively using the Google ecosystem. It’s hard sometimes — they feel almost ubiquitous — but when Gemini came around and it became clear that active enshittification was the name of the game for the big G, I had to start finding ways to get free.
The other inspiration was just what a fucking miserable experience searching the web had become. So my first de-googlefication was stopping use of Google, and starting to instead use Kagi. This has been a delightful experience, and I’ve talked a number of folks into coming along with me (enough that I have a family plan!), as changing your browser to search somewhere else is fairly low effort.
Next was my browser. When word came out that Google was going to break ad-blockers, I first set up a Pi-Hole on my NAS, then doubled down and swapped to Firefox on my desktop and my phone. The only odd man out at this point was my laptop, because it was a Chromebook; escaping Google’s ecosystem from hardware that’s tied into them from the firmware up felt near-impossible (and no, Firefox in a Linux dev environment was not it).
Last week I took one of the hardest steps and finally stopped using Gmail. I set up an account with Fastmail since it really has the two services I still used — email and calendar — and doesn’t have a sketchy CEO who keeps “accidentally” supporting right-wing causes on the company social media accounts like Proton. So far it’s been really satisfying, even if I’m not fully detached from Gmail yet; I’m slowly changing actual accounts over to use Fastmail, letting Fastmail pull incoming mail from Gmail, and using inbox rules to finally rid myself of a lot of detritus I’ve just been living with over the years.
Today I opened my Chromebook, which is my couch computer, and it had disabled my adblocker. Well, time to completely de-google this thing. With a little research, actual physical work, and help from MrChromebox I managed to flash my Chromebook — an Acer GE 516, so it’s actually not a slouch as a casual-use computer — with new firmware to allow it to boot other operating systems, and (after upgrading the SSD to 2 TB while I was in there, because I just had a 2 TB SSD lying around) installed Nobara Linux, doing what I had previously thought impossible (or at least high effort): de-google-ifying a piece of hardware.
Yes, I’m one of those Linux on the desktop sickos. I blame the Steam Deck for showing me exactly what the capabilities of Linux on modern hardware are like.
