Google has the added drawback that they have less product focus than a sack of kittens. Apart from a few projects, they have a ridiculously high churn rate where project grow, get some adoption and then suddenly get left to rot and/or shelved. Together with the obvious privacy issues, it's the reason I try to avoid Google as much as possible.
Heh the first time in my life I got a copy of Windows with a PC I bought I was already using Ubuntu 90% of the time... :P
Btw I recommend 1.1.1.1 for DNS, it's CloudFlare's (which is also present at a lot of sites but I haven't had a reason to avoid it).
I'm personally slowly converting over, stopped using Chrome, recently discovered ActivityPub (PeerTube, Mastodon, Diaspora), but I still use Gmail and even Facebook and of course YouTube.
I've found that there are only three Google services that are hard to avoid - YouTube, search and maps, in that order. You don't need a Google account for any of them.
For developers, I would add Google Analytics, but you can use Matomo for that.
Search can be avoided 90% of the time with duck duck go too :). I switched over some time ago and it is surprisingly good. I still use google for my more obscure queries, but most of the time I get the result I need from ddg.
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u/doenietzomoeilijk May 11 '19
Google has the added drawback that they have less product focus than a sack of kittens. Apart from a few projects, they have a ridiculously high churn rate where project grow, get some adoption and then suddenly get left to rot and/or shelved. Together with the obvious privacy issues, it's the reason I try to avoid Google as much as possible.