I finally made the jump and initiated the deletion of my Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat accounts. I downloaded my account data and uploaded it to Proton Drive for safekeeping. At some point, I’ll probably go through and add the photos from those accounts to Ente. While I still have LinkedIn, my personal social media is just Mastodon and Pixelfed now.
I factory reset my MacBook Pro to do a clean install of only the apps that I use. I have used Homebrew before, but didn’t realize how well it supports GUI applications. Besides FreeFileSync, I was able to download everything via Homebrew. While I am planning to move to Linux at some point, installing all of my applications via Homebrew makes it really easy to reinstall applications if I decide to stick with a MacBook or want/need to do a factory reset in the future.
I am going to try switching from JetBrains IDEs to VSCodium, which is a free and open source version of Visual Studio Code. Besides being FOSS, VSCodium does it’s best to opt out of Microsoft’s telemetry that comes pre-enabled and baked into VSC. IntelliJ keybindings and extensions for main programming languages are all available in the Open VSX Registry, which has made the switch pretty easy. I’m hoping to have luck with Twinny and Ollama for getting local AI code completion.
Finally, I got my Dad to switch over to Signal since he doesn’t have an iPhone.