Well I’m gonna be that guy… It’s overdue.

Also sometimes I eat cereal after dinner and tell myself its better than grabbing sugary stuff for dessert.

I lucked out and my banking app is fine too. Weirdly its the wifi garage door opener which came with my house that refuses to work. I took it offline and am back to a remote now. I may replace it someday when I finally get home assistant going.

I am not an expert.

Many many apps rely on google play services to function, basically for most of the data fetching, push notifications, authentications, etc. Disabling it will break those apps as a result. Since your data is fed through those services you cannot maintain privacy from google without doing so.

So yes, you should disable google play for privacy, but you will need to find replacement apps in many cases.

Graphene does a thing where it “sandboxes” google play services, preventing it from grabbing unnecessary data like your real time location telemetry. I think this lets you use those apps that need it, but they will still get some of your data where thats being used. Banking apps are notorious for needing it for authentication, but you can easily use a different map app like magic earth to avoid google services for other needs.

I’m still exploring this and learning so those are just examples I know of. Not sure how much else this will break if you aren’t using graphene to manage it.

I am wary of ever recommending to completely block or avoid updates. Generally this means opening yourself up to security concerns.

Duly noted, will look into it, thanks!

I just switched to linux and totally forgot about this. Do I really not need one? 99% of what I do is steam gaming anyway so I’m not too worried, worst case I just format and reinstall, but still…

Dude what shitty weed are you smoking that you gotta cut it? With nip?! And lavender?!?! Fuckin break out the potpourri next we just gonna smoke whatever lights on fire holy shit

Its not click bait, its a great layman’s terms explanation of the app and what it does. This is the kind of article I would send to my parents who are basically tech illiterate when this topic inevitably arises. It also clarifies points that were poorly reported by other outlets, which is necessary to call out, especially in our current informational climate.

Fuck exclusives that shit is cancer

I prefer smizmar

Theres always money in the banana stand!

Great idea. I will never buy from amazon so filtering that out automatically would be fantastic when looking for products

The number of times I’ve been directed to a useless discord chat while looking for help on a topic is infuriating. Can’t wait for this shit to stop.

Cool, bookmarking this for later. I haven’t had to do this yet, I’m new to linux and have just been testing out my steam library, but I have a lot of games from other stores I will want to try running eventually. Thanks!

As I recall the powers combined with shooting was really new to the genre, along with the ways you combine them. Lighting enemies on fire who would run to water to put themselves out, then hitting water with electricity to zap a group was creative stuff. The way big daddies acted like a boss fight you could tackle in a bunch of different ways was significant too. The options there and with many other obstacles gave player agency for how to navigate most non-linear levels that was a real rarity. For instance, those turrets - have you shcoked them and hacked them? What about freezing them and hacking them? Or using hypnosis on enemies to make them fight the turret? But hacking all those turrets makes for a great distraction in a big daddy fight. And breaking the turrets gives you more ammo.

At the time most shooter were “go here shoot this, go there shoot that” and hell, thats still really common. This game really shook it up, even if it drew inspiration from thief and system shock, it did a lot to improve and advance them. Combined with the unique environment, smart story line, and interesting characters there’s plenty of reason it sticks in people’s memories as an all time classic.

Freetaxusa.com does pretty much what turbo tax does. Federal filing for free, pretty sure they just charge $15 for state. If your taxes are too complex for freetaxusa you probably shouldn’t use turbo tax anyway.

Or Access, which is the real reason my office will never switch. It’s an ever growing mountain of labor to transfer that to something else

Our government is a Monty Python skit

You are right, I had it a little backward. The e foundation makes /e/OS, and they sell a murena fairphone 5 with the OS preinstalled. So you can get a fairphone thay way, or just install it yourself.

https://e.foundation/e-os/

Fairphone uses their own custom OS to degoogle things and help ensure privacy. I dont think its perfect but its about as good as it gets. Otherwise you can buy a google phone and degoogle it with Graphene

It also sucks that when you buy a game to own it often isnt maintained, so upgrading your phone or sometimed even just OS updates will break the game with no fix, no recourse. I got real fucking tired of losing my purchases to that shit.

Notably I played the ever living shit out of xcom enemy unknown and would have kept doing it too if it weren’t for this issue.