I think what they are getting at is that Meta does this and they find it likely Microsoft might be doing something similar.

Defaulted to Google Maps for me as well. And I don’t use them

I’m quite happy with the products. Not as happy with the company after the event you mentioned. I upgraded my plan not long before that happened (they had a pretty good deal going) so I will stay with them for now but I will need to consider what to do once the prepaid time is up.

Weird, works flawlesly for me

Ri Music is an alternative frontend for Google music and pretty great

Not sure about how you use Google Home but Home Assistant perhaps?

That’s fair. Though the free service is more of an infinite trial tbh

May I ask what triggers thr scummy feeling for you?

Huh. I always wondered. When I’m poiring our dog water to the bowl when hiking, he always prefers to drink “from the bottle” - the bowl is there basically to catch the rest to return to the bottle (or for the other dog to drink). Guess now I maybe know why he does it.

Ente is an awesome Google Photos alternative.

RiMusic is a great Youtube music frontend.

Tubular is a NewPipe fork with sponsorblock that I currently enjoy. Used LibreTube but Piped was fucked for me for awhile.

Very inconvenient for a PC login. Also, you need a password you can remember for your password manager at least

Piped and other different frontends are not really Youtube alternatives. It’s just alternate ways to watch Youtube. They are still priceless

Depends on the place I guess. I’m pretty sure some are updated

And once you are finished you can probably start over to stay up to date

I tried MagicEarth for navigation and quite happy with it. It is not open source, but should be privacy respecting (not seen anything as of now that would suggest they don’t mean it). Even has trafic info (though not as reliable as Waze/Google). A middle road for when you want to degoogle but also have some convinience in places where OSM is not as up to date.

Though I don’t think it has additional details for the businesses and such like Google Maps, it’s purely for navigation.

Quite

How so?

I had no idea they have hiking trails! You opened a whole new world for me!

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This was exactly what I eas thinking.

I’ve spent a lot of time with offline open source AI running on my computer

Can you elaborate on this? Are there some that are worth looking into?

I’m honestly kinda excited about the possibilities in the greater scheme of things, but the fact that Microsoft will pretty much record whatever people are doing on their systems is just nuts nd slightly terifying. This is something that should ideally be done locally, without big corporations looking in - but that’s for sure not what they are doing.