I've been using FreeTube for a while now and this is the first time I've seen this.

Linux Mint seems fine for me.

Which Linux distro do you use? How is it for productivity and gaming? Is LibreOffice suite a good replacement for the Office 365 suite?

Is this okay to uninstall? I've tried looking it up and changing how I word the question but I'm not getting an exact answer

I assume it's not detrimental to berid of and I need the space

And here I thought Chinese-branded phones are safe, I'm damn wrong XD...

A number of years ago, purchased an episode of the original Hawaii 50 show and it has been in my Google Video library ever since. Recently I went to watch it again and it now shows as available for rent. No record of my purchase.

I have the same account now as when it was purchased. This isn't a caching or other local issue.

Yes, the purchase cost was small, but it's the principle that matters. There doesn't seem to be a way to resolve this. It makes me wonder, if this happened to me, how many other customers have this issue?

Any thoughts?

A way to convince people to degoogle, even if they say privacy is immaterial for them: Google controls a huge chunk of your digital life - your documents in Google Drive, photos backed up in Google Photos, and Gmail is the link for everything and contains so much important stuff.

Shopping receipts, bank alerts, bills with your home address, password reset emails for all your online accounts, travel confirmations, tax documents, investments, old job applications, all with personal info attached.

They make it super convenient to search and find things from years ago, but it also means one Google account kind of holds the keys to your entire digital life. If someone ever got access to it and locked you out, the fallout would be huge. With session stealing malware that copies browser cookies, even 2FA auth may not save us. And threats are quickly emerging through AI as well. Grahting AI agents access to your online accounts is a big risk. AI prompt injection attacks are also a threat.

So even if somebody says privacy is immaterial for them, diversifying across several online accounts (preferably open source and trustworthy) is better than linking everything to one account or one ecosystem controlled by one company.

In fact, some of the most upvoted posts on the Gmail subreddit are about losing access to their Google account.

For eg:

https://www.reddit.com/r/GMail/comments/1p4rc19/google_has_officially_held_my_entire_digital_life/

https://www.reddit.com/r/GMail/comments/1mxfn13/gmail_got_hacked_even_with_2fa/

https://www.reddit.com/r/GMail/comments/1nz657p/my_gmail_got_completely_taken_over_password_2fa/

anybody facing this issue? can't login at all after the update.

For my next smartphone, I’m looking at a couple of choices. Either a Motorola Signature 27 smartphone (with installing GrapheneOS if it doesn’t come pre-installed), or buying a phone from Huawei with HarmonyOSNext.

What would be some pros & cons of each, in your opinions?

I just got a new phone and installed GrapheneOS. I thought I would be able to completely remove myself from Google's ecosystem, but no.

Want to continue to receive group text messages? Must use Google Messages

Want to receive notifications from Proton Mail? Must install Google Play Services

Want to check your fantasy baseball lineup? Must install Google Play Services

Want to check your bank account balance? Must install Google Play Services

I was so stoked to begin this journey but now I'm just dejected.

The source-available Futo keyboard's swipe typing seems to be quite good, and they have also open sourced their swipe typing system so that other FOSS keyboard apps can use it too : https://swipe.futo.tech/

It's fully offline and the app has no internet permission at all, which is non-negotiable for any keyboard app IMO.

I would also love a fork of Heliboard with swipe typing integrated.

I've switched to Tuta Mail - even before deGoogling was trending. What I like:

• Nice app from F-Droid & without Google push
• Simple design, easy to use
• Contact sync so I can use it as contacts app on mobile
• Encryption and privacy, no tracking, no ads (this got really annoying on my old gmx)
• 100% from Germany, no hidden US dependency (like hosted on AWS or using Google Push) - this is really rare these days.

What could be better:

• Eagerly waiting for the Drive to come out as I can't move larger files from phone to desktop
• Encrypted emails with password exchange a bit cumbersome
• Search index needs time to build (annoying if I accidentally clear the local copy)
• Calendars can't be shared with externals, only other Tuta users

I love FUTO keyboard, it's simple, accurate, and the arrow row on the bottom is useful. It also seems to run with the least lag on my 4MB ram Viwoods Aipaper Reader eink device. But on my tablet with a physical keyboard, it can't compare with GBoard, Gboard hides the virtual keyboard but have 3 floating icons to the side for bringing the virtual keyboard back and charging input language. Also it allows ctrl space to switch language plus provides word suggestions as popup above the word you type. For FUTO, it only allows hiding virtual keyboard with physical keyboard usage, no way to change language while hidden and if showing virtual keyboard always, while changing input language on it, the physical keyboard still stays as English. I also tried WM Keyboard but it has some floating keyboard flickering issue.

Update: My current compromise is I use FUTO keyboard for only English with the virtual keyboard always displayed (needed for ctrl+space to work for changing language), then I use ctrl+space to switch to Gboard that only contains the Thai language.

Hello,

It struck me, as an IT guy, that literally my whole internet identity is tied with google. That includes Facebook, Steam, personal banks, Investing accounts, news, GitHub, shopping and probably around 100+ or even 1000+ other sites are all accessible via gmail or "sign-in via google". I got sacred when i noticed some google accounts getting blocked for no reason and stuff like that.

Of course it's really really convenient, for example couple months back my phone completely broke and I lost access to everything. Since everything is in google, all it took is to buy a new phone, connect it to my google account via my phone number (my phone umber is my e-signature so it's not so easy to steal) and BAM everything is back like it used to be, since all my accounts are connected to google.

People who also used gmail and google for over 15 years for absolutely everything, how did you change and change to what?

I know that yes, proton exists, but it's nothing as convenient as google. Was thinking at least creating couple of google accounts or hosting my own mail service, using proton more, but all seem to inconvenient.

Hi Guys, I'm going through a de-googling process I've built a home lab server I'm using and have home assistant installed on a VM on the server. However all my devices like smart speakers, home hubs and security cameras etc are all google products. Anyone moved onto home assistant have any good alternatives that work well? Even with an open source voice assistant?

Hey, first off I state that I'm just a basic person with no experience or knowledge about IT stuff, coding or whatsoever.

I got a new phone around a week ago (Realme 16 Pro+) and I've been degoogling a bit, or should I say, dipping my toes in this with the following changes:

- removing/disabling unnecessary apps

- switching gmail partly to proton and tuta

- keyboard to heliboard

- installing f-droid

- calendar to tuta calendar

- installing joplin (not used it just yet)

The question I've been wondering is this;

Is it basically not much better switching to these more private apps if I still use a stock android OS and haven't sandboxed my google play services?

I'm obviously not done with the process but I'm doubting if I should be doing bigger changes than just the apps I've been switching. The problem is just my complete lack of skills in this area and studying in a foreign language is actually pretty exhausting and difficult (I'm from Europe.)

Thanks in advance.

I got tired of every decent to-do app wanting a monthly subscription, and of my whole life sitting on some company's servers.

So I made my own and open-sourced it.

It does the stuff you'd expect.
You type "dentist next tuesday 3pm" and it figures out the date. Recurring tasks, reminders on your phone, a board view, sharing a list with your partner. It works offline too.

You run it on your own little server or a Raspberry Pi. No account, nothing sent anywhere, and if you ever want to leave, you export everything and go.

There's a demo if you want to poke at it without installing anything: https://opentodo-demo.pixari.dev

Code: https://github.com/pixari/opentodo

It's still early, so tell me what's missing or what's annoying.

Ok so Gboard is one of the last 2 Google products I have, and I'm so done with it since it updated and I saw the damned ai crap to 'rewrite' my texts.

The problem is that due to several life factors, weird life choices and family that spread like butter, I need a keyboard that can do quite a lot:

3 languages typing at the same time: English, Polish and Romanian, these are the ones I use constantly so I don't want to switch between. Decent polish autocorrect cos the language gives me a stroke when trying to type longer words.

Japanese separately with decent kana to kanji

Arabic

Turkish QWERTY

Spanish QWERTY

I remember I had to use Gboard because Swiftkey couldn't do more than 2 languages (or 3)

Has clipboard

Has emoji with English to emoji recognition (aka I type facepalm and get 🤦)

Does something like this exists?

This is beyond frustration man. I cant unlock the bootloader with ease, why does it need my acocunt info or sim or wait period of 72 to 350hrs ? none of this makes sense. why the fuck does anyof this matter? i have these fuckass MI phones lying around and are practically useless. Is there really no other way to bypass this unlock method? i wouldn't go about arguing why the shitpiss makers have mandated this, but im really looking for if anyone has found a way to bypass and unlock the bootloader for good. I wanted to boot a custom OS as a secondary phone to run servers. but idk owning a phone doesn't really give you control to modify these days i see

I actually find Gboard very good, so I am having trouble replacing it. I tried heliboard and I gotta say I didn't like it very much. I'm looking for another open source, privacy focused keyboard that allows you to slide type and offers multi language auto correction.

I recently found a Reddit client that claims to be account free and private. What do we think about it.

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.cosmos.unreddit