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A good alternative to ________ is ________.
Fill in the blanks. No parameters from me: I'm leaving the prompt open-ended because I'm curious to see where people go with it.
Also, to prevent low-effort/single sentence posts in response, please explain why your suggestion is a suitable replacement.
A good alternative to google is duckduckgo.
I've used google forever, simply because I thought it was the best. Enter ddg. It has results that are almost always just as relevant to google, without any of the tracking nonsense. You can easily transfer your settings to other devices using a passphrase (and abandon said passphrase as often as you like).It's super custom, and really user-friendly.
Bangs are a great part of it too--if I need to use google for whatever reason, I just end my query with !g in the omnibar. For example, searching for
good searchwill just bring me to ddg, butgood search!gbrings me to google. There's hundreds of others, too (!i for images, !gi for google images, !gh for github, !w for wikipedia, and !r for reddit, to name a few).Finally, all image searches on ddg are proxied through ddg so you aren't welcoming external trackers from other sites onto your search page.
Running uBlock Origin on DDG blocks one script--their in-house improving.duckduckgo.com domain. Additionally, the only connection you make is to duckduckgo.com.
Oh, also-- it has a native dark theme!
ddg.gg for you lazy typers out there
Wasn't duck.com owned by google?
Yes, but they recently gave it to the DDG dudes.
Outstanding writeup!
I'll add a few quality of life things for anyone interested:
If you use their regular domain fresh, without being logged in or having cookies, you get a minimal notification popup. Using
start.duckduckgo.combypasses this (by design--this isn't a hack).Additionally, if you're not logged in or you clear cookies, you can lose your dark mode preference. Adding
?kae=dto the URL puts it in dark mode, and you don't need to login.Both of these together give me my homepage, which yields dark mode with no interruptions and persists even after I clear my browsing data:
https://start.duckduckgo.com/?kae=dYou can then make ddg dark your browser's default search by adding it as a search engine using the following URL
https://start.duckduckgo.com/?kae=d&q=%sThis will add dark mode to any searches you do directly from the browser as well.Now that I've made these changes (and learned some of the bangs) my search experience is entirely frictionless and, dare I say, better than Google!
I like duckduckgo when i'm looking for something on the english part of the internet, the problem is that its useless when searching for something in another language. I dont know why that is, or if there is a trick i dont know to tweak ddg.
(You can also just use Startpage instead of Google, it uses Google results without tracking)
Kind of useless though. On paper, that sounds good. But why do you think Google's results are often better than DDG? Because they have a thousand pages of data on you and know what you're gonna search before you do. Start page usually won't be any more relevant than DDG because of that.
My use case is that Startpage results are sometimes better for what I'm looking for and I'm not sure why it is
A good alternative to Chrome is Firefox. Firefox is faster and less resource-intensive than Chrome, and with Google removing a lot of the non-stanfard parts of Chrome, there isn't much reason to use Chrome as your daily driver anymore. Firefox even uses the same extension architecture as Chrome, so you may be able to use your favorite extensions with little to no modification.
Personally speaking, I trust Mozulla far more than I do Google, which is important because web browsers are essentially data collection machines.
I recently switched to 'new' firefox quantum and its finally on par with chrome again speed wise! Check it out :)
It's actually been better than Chrome for quite a while. I remember being amazed at the difference when I installed it on my Lenovo Chromebook 100s, and that machine is two years old now.
For anyone switching from Chrome to Firefox: if your favorite extension isn't available for Firefox, you can install it from the Chrome or Opera stores using this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-foxified/
Not sure that resources bit is true on macos.
My work computer is a Mac. I will admit the difference is less dramatic than it is on other platforms, but my work computer is so slow it hardly makes a difference.
For Mac, I like Safari. It's fast, light, and simple. (the whole anti-track thing doesn't hurt either)
I generally stick to Safari unless I'm using reddit, in which case I'm on FF.
A good alternative to cure is prevention
I'm gonna throw a bit of a curve-ball for my answer.
A good "alternative" to lots of apps is Rambox. I say "alternative" since it's not really an alternative to using any of those apps/services but merely a way to run multiple ones inside a singular container at the same time to save on system RAM usage and prevent needing to manage/arrange multiple windows around your screen. The community edition is free and opensource, but there is also a paid "pro" version with some more features as well. I just use the community edition though.
I am not sure I understand exactly what this is. It seems that all the "apps" are just regular webapps. So is it just a browser? How does it save computer resources?
Yes, some of them are just ported over webapps, so Rambox is functioning essentially the same as a browser in those cases, but some are being accessed entirely through their APIs which cuts down on resources significantly. But even in the case of ported webapps Rambox generally uses far less resources than the native webapps. E.g. The single Firefox tab I just loaded up with Slack takes up 337mb of RAM and the Discord external app I just loaded takes up 153mb, whereas Rambox is only taking up 434mb total and I have 4 instances of Slack, 2 of IRC, Discord, Gmail, Steam chat and Skype running inside it all at once. Give it a try yourself to see the difference it makes... it's quite amazing.
But resources aren't the only benefit of using Rambox. It has a whole whack of other features that make it absolutely essential if you have these apps open at all times, like I do. First and foremost amongst them being having all of the apps load on startup and instantly available in one convenient place. Second being the UI which is much easier to use for switching between apps than if they were tabs in my browser or, God forbid, all running as external apps. Third it also unifies the notifications systems for all the apps, which you can customize even further than the native webapps often offer. And finally being able to load multiple instances of the same webapp with entirely different credentials/accounts/profiles. So for example I have 2 seperate slack accounts connected to 2 different workspaces each simultaneously and open at the same time, which is way more of a PITA to do in a browser.
I don't use that many webapps, but I think you may have sold me on it.
I second Rambox! It's wonderful.
I found Rambox this past weekend and second this recommendation!
I had been using Franz (which is a similar tool), but was becoming frustrated with the way it was handling upgrades, nag screens, and how it didn't support the last few services I wanted it to.
Rambox has filled those needs nicely!
A good alternative to a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup is a Buckeye. Don't even have to worry about branding. It's a candy already in the public domain. Creative-commons candy.
I have a feeling this is a cause close to your heart, @BuckeyeSundae.
What gave me away!
Oh.
A good alternative for a whisky sour is a sazerac!
Different flavor profiles, but I've never met anyone yet that likes whisky sours to not enjoy a sazerac. Warm and delicious!
Have you ever had an amaretto sour?
Not yet, but it's on my (very long) list of things to try!
There's also a drink called a Honey Badger. Half honey whiskey and half RumChata
A good alternative to Twitter is Mastodon and a good alternative to Skype is Discord.
A good alternative to gluten pizza crust is yucca. Amazing replacement, and i'm not gluten sensitive.
Please, God, no. The amount of user profiles I see on reddit when looking through invite requests with just giant walls of random letters is insane to me. WTF is wrong with people? Why is askOuija even a fucking thing!? :P
They try to use groupthink to form words one post and one letter at a time and...nah, it just makes no sense. It's trying to capitalize (with karma, I guess?) that trend people seem to have for completing a word. Letter by letter. As a group. It's a loosely organized waste of time, at its essence.
Congratulations, you've just described life.
I didn't even think of this when I posted it, but now that you pointed it out I can't unsee it!
A good alternative to streaming music is downloading it old-school style. While downloading music seems like storage space to consider, there are benefits to it.
Seems redundant, right? What I mean is that there's not a possibility of a song getting removed from your playlist because it was removed from the streaming site's database, or a possibility of it being altered, like its lyrics.
If you are on a limited data plan, then this will probably be a significant point for you. Additionally, there's no worrying about a good connection.
What if I really liked a song, but I found the intro to be too long? Well, I can just load the song onto Audacity, crop it, export the song, and that's it. If you're streaming a song, you're at the mercy of the streaming service of providing an easy way to download songs that don't involve third-party sites. Then you have to hope it lets you upload songs onto it again, then delete the local file.
Most streaming services let you listen to a lossy format of the song you're listening to (by lossy I mean a lack of bit rate). MP3, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis are all lossy formats that are commonly used. However, a 320kbps MP3 or 256kbps AAC audio file is usually very hard to tell apart from a lossless or uncompressed audio format, like FLAC or WAV.
For the most part, you can get songs for free, unless you can only get a song by paying for it. Some people might go the way of a pirate in this case, but only the looting and no pirate ship. Streaming services, however, usually have you pay a monthly rate or make you listen to advertisements.
Artists are commonly given not a lot of money per listen on their songs. Unless you listen to a specific artist commonly, it's better for them for you to buy their merchandise and music.
Of course, steaming has some benefits of their own which I should acknowledge.
The month rates on some services like Spotify are really cheap, especially if you're a student. It might even save you money if you often listen to premium music commonly.
Services like Tidal allow you to stream high-quality music, however, their service is kind of expensive.
No worrying about storage space or losing SD cards.
You can share playlists!
Online listening comes with the benefit of useful recommendations.
The main point to streaming is the cost and variety. Albums for the bands I like are like $13 to download, per album. In addition, if i don't know that I like a type of music I'm not going to spend that much money to try it out.
On Spotify, I pay $6 a month for essentially all the music I'd ever want to listen to. I can easily try new songs and bands with no risk.
Pirating is an alternative, but it still takes a lot more effort to try new songs than Spotify, and I want my favorite bands to get at least some money so they can keep doing their thing.
use youtube-dl and get them from youtube, in most countries totally legal. might give you shitty bitrate depending on age of the upload.
Depends on your jurisdiction. In some countries (like mine) it's legal to download, only uploading is criminalised.
Soulseek is a great way to find some of the more obscure stuff in up to FLAC quality, it's an old-school P2P network (sharing is optional though, unlike BitTorrent so you're not seeding unless you want to) and it has everything I ever tried to find. Highly recommend. From what I've heard, searches for more popular artists are filtered off so if you're getting zero results on some query try to search more specifically for the album or track.
A good alternative to r/worldnews is r/neutralnews. Less joking whenever someone dies, commenters are required to source statements, and discussion is generally better.
If you don't want discussion and just want news, there's r/autonewspaper.
A good alternative to /r/neutralnews is ~news
I fucking despise the Reddit hive mind.
A good alternative to depression is...
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A good alternative to DuckDuckGo is Startpage.
Another is DuckDuckGo.com/lite.
A good alternative to cryptocurrency is GNU Taler, an interesting and new approach to digital currency.
A good alternative to Slack is the Matrix protocol with Riot as the front-end.
Another is Discord.
A good alternative to Android and iOS soon will be the Librem 5.
All I need to hop on to a well-intentioned mobile OS is a port of WhatsApp. Yea, I know, it's from Facebook, the most horrible evil ever, aptly written in PHP, but everyone I know uses it, and it's one place where I allow practicality to take over principles in my computer use. Can't really just use texts because how companies abuse users and spam them all the time, nobody really checks their SMS anymore, at least here in Turkey.
Actually, there is a web application version of WhatsApp that should work to a decent extent, at least, if I'm remembering correctly.
But yeah, the situation isn't perfect. There are a lot of people working on making it a lot better, though.
The web application needs the phone running and online, it's nothing but an online interface to the phone app. If only it could be used independently....