More confessions from a FOSS enthusiast

Well, it’s been about a year since my last round of confessions as a FOSS enthusiast and I do have a few more things that I thought I’d share!

This was in part tangentially inspired by a post by Adrian Perales on controversies around FOSS programs (in Spanish).

Well, controversial decisions happen on an individual level as well so, whatever, I’ll just share some more of those. Make sure to check the first one though, most of them are still valid…

📱 My phone is even less de-googled

Last time I still had a phone with a custom-ROM on it, and I rarely used the Google services on it, which were just a minimal set of GAPPS for my banking apps and similar. I didn’t have the Play Store or anything, and even then it felt wrong.

Well, now that I am using the stock ROM that came with my Nothing (3a), I just have the usual Google experience. I even logged in to my main account to access my paid apps, and I’ve purchased more apps since then! Back in the day I bought Play Store gift cards to get credit without giving them my credit banking info, but now that has changed too.

What have I become?

But hey, I have Balatro on my phone!

🔍 Sill using Google Search

For a while now DuckDuckGo has been my go-to for web search, and it has served me quite well. However, more than once, I end up appending the !Bang syntax for Google: !g, to get those results instead.

And of course, I’d often stick to the quick summarized answer instead of looking for an article or diving deeper. I simply don’t care that much, and for the stuff I need, the results are serviceable.

Besides, nowadays a lot of the big search engines have turned to a life of crime, not just Google. DuckDuckGo has AI-assisted quick answers too. Brave Search has the same plus all the crypto stuff of the brower itself. Kagi Search is paid and also has some AI stuff on it.

I will still find what I need from a regular search sometimes, clicking on a result that leads me to a website and in the proper way, but that rarely happens nowadays, and a lot of top results are slop anyway. Not sure what to do here to be honest.

Perhaps it’s better to stick to independent search engines like Marginalia or Clew.se when possible.

🤖 FOSS with AI on it…

As much as I hate it, there are a lot of FOSS programs openly embracing code not generated by humans. I appreciate those that are honest about it, even if it annoys me.

The truth is that a lot of these programs are just pretty good at what they do, so I still use KeepassXC, I still use Calibre, and I still use Firefox…

And there are also programs that don’t say anything, or that don’t even think twice about it. It’s weird to see how some have just accepted it, sometimes I wonder if the opinion of the fediverse affects me too much.

LLMs are being used in so much stuff now, I am kind of scared to look at the GitHub repositories, I don’t want to end up dissapointed by it, I don’t want to have to switch from even more.

Like, CrossPoint Reader—the beloved community firmware for the XTEINK X4—or Smolfedi—a lovely PHP-based fediverse client, both of those are new and young projects, both have a degree of vibecode on them.

How many new exciting ideas will develop that will be stained by AI in upcoming years? Too many…

💾 Self-hosting? Backups? What is that?

My Raspberry Pi is literally collecting dust, unplugged in exactly the same place where it has been for 3 or 4 years. I am absolutely serious, no exaggeration. I haven’t even bothered to store it somewhere safe, or to check if it still works. I see it on the bottom level of a corner shelf at the dining room next to the Wi-Fi router, every single day.

I’m not doing anything with any sort of private hosting either. This website is using Vercel’s free tier, I pay my email with a custom domain via Zoho, I use a publicly available FreshRSS instance. Jellyfin and Navidrome and whatever else simply vanished from my needs.

Now, it’s not all lost, I prefer to keep stuff local, but if I’m going to do that I should at least keep everything safe right?

Nope, no backups whatsoever.

There are some duplicate files on my phone and my laptop with Syncthing, there is a 2TB hard drive I got which contains some movies and some other things, sure.

But if I’m honest, if in this very second my laptop died, I would lose all of my data there, if the micro SD card of my Anbernic RG35XX SP died, I would lose all of my saves and games in it. Same for whatever is on my PSP. I am sorry y’all, but I’ve gotten lazy.

Finishing thoughts

It’s important to remember that practically speaking, none of these are actually that serious. I am not truly that ashamed or guilty by doing any of this. Sure I feel kinda bad, sure it is annoying sometimes, and there will be some people who become very judgy and point fingers at me for not sticking to an arbitrary measure.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s an ideal I seek to pursue as well, there are things I can do to align better with my goals, and perhaps I’ll take some time to do it. I will look for AI-free alternatives, I may end up hosting my own custom search engine, or at least disabling all the summaries and slop from whatever search engine I use. Maybe I’ll finally get a custom ROM for my phone and actually stick to a degoogled life again. Perhaps I’ll setup a NAS and host my own stuff once more. I still have an old laptop that I could turn into a server, after all.

I’ve done it before, I used to have backups, I’ve lived free of AI slop for many years, I’ve lived with subpar search results for ages. We’ll see what happens.

But I don’t really let things like this stay too much in my head. I have a lot of other things to focus on, maybe some are not as important, I still support and love FOSS. I still support and love software that is human-made, I still care about security practices and ownership of my data, but well, it’s all work in progress.