Salutations everyone

[SergioEduP]

Heya I'm Sergio, and I just realized yesterday that I never got around to create an account and introduce myself here even though Reject Convenience was the channel that actually pushed me to start this journey of creating my own website and, well, rejecting the convenience (and constant tracking) of big tech in December last year.

I am a pretty big nerd and a maker from Portugal who also has a couple of hobbies (maybe to many hobbies) of which include:

• Gaming,
• Sketching,
• 3D modeling for 3D printing,
• Designing and making things that I use like furniture or accessories,
• Coding,
• Reading,
• Photography,
• Learning (currently learning to play the drums and Japanese)

As of right now I'm doing my best to fight my anxiety and reduce my dependence on big (mainly American) tech companies, among other small projects, and I'm posting about those things on my web blog on my own website if you want to read more about it.

I fully endorse the use and creation of Free and Open Source Software, mandatory "I Run Arch BTW™" for a few years and being forced to use Windows at work makes me more sure every day that I'm not going back to in on any of my personal machines. And even after the PR team of Mozilla pulled a bit of a stunt that eroded the trust that we as a community had on them recently I still stand by Firefox as a software (at least for now) even though I can't really say the same for Mozilla themselves, but we can only hope that the changes in the TOS don't also mean a change on how the company operates as a whole (as they do make sense for some of the services that they provide, just not for the browser itself IMO), never the less I've been exploring some forks and I'm sticking with Zen as I really like the way it looks and it also stands for a cleaner and more private way of browsing the web.

Anyway I think that is about it for my little introduction, I will also be making some other posts in a bit on other sections of the forum but for now I want to thank Reject Convenience for being that little push that I needed to start making my own website and freeing myself from the self-imposed shackles of modern social media and big tech.

[QueriesNTheories]

Hey there Sergio, welcome to the forum

lol your hobbies are kind of like mine! Lucky you having a 3D printer, they’re so cool… and props to you for learning Japanese, best of luck!
What kind of games do you play and what do you like to draw?

Heck yeah, FOSS rules I’m trying to hunt down some software alternatives for my Linux move but I don’t think I’m going to be able to swap over from everything due to my window of tolerance, like Spotify. It has its flaws (like massive massive flaws) but I’m gonna be staying for a little longer unfortunately because I haven’t found a decent alternative that’ll still benefit artists, besides buying what I can from Bandcamp. What FOSS programs do you use?

I’m with you, I’m not sure how I feel about Mozilla as of late with the update we got, but I’m not entirely inclined to switch browsers again, not yet. I really don’t want to lose what I already have with them despite the new wording, even if it sucks :/
How is Zen? Do you get a lot of customisation and extensions?

Can’t wait to see you around here more, will definitely keep an eye on your website

[Crazyroostereye]

Servus Sergio and welcome to the Forum,

It is nice seeing you here! I love reading your Posts and you Journey to fight Anxiety, but you know that already .
I hope this week went great for you with your Projects.

I agree with the Mozilla thing, but the ToU sadly is directed at Firefox, and while nothing technical in Firefox exist to gather a worrying amount Information. The Legal Aspect is just to broad and shouldn't be Accepted that way it Is.
I have been using Zen for the past half Year, and it has been very Good Experience, but changed a lot in that time. It is now in the Beta, so less major change, but it is still changing a lot. So be careful.

[SergioEduP]

Heya Q!
I'm thankful to be in a position where I can afford to buy cool toys like my 3D printers, it never gets old to watch them print something that I designed it's almost hypnotic!

As of right now I think my game collection is over (or at least close to) 600 games across multiple platforms ranging from the Sega Genesis/Megadrive to last gen Xbox, but the ones I find myself coming back to regularly are Minecraft, OpenTTD, Pistol Whip, the two Portal games (my favorite games of all time), BeamNG Drive and Factorio. But I play most kinds of games, especially if they are multiplayer since there is a lot of possibilities to just mess around with friends.

As for drawing so far it's been mostly geometric slightly abstract shapes and simple objects and simple concept sketches of the things that I want to 3d print to get a sense of proportions and sometimes scale before jumping into CAD, but more recently as I started to read a bunch of manga and watching more anime I've gotten more interest in the styles and content of those series that I'm enjoying, I'm not particularly good at drawing from imagination yet but I'm happy with how I'm improving

Just looking at my favorite pins on my start menu I have Blender, OpenSCAD, FreeCAD, QCAD, Inkscape, Krita, GIMP, Librespite and Code-OSS installed right now, I can also think of Godot, 0AD, OpenTTD, Audacity, Firefox/Zen, not to mention the entire desktop environment and countless tools that are part of KDE/Gnome projects and command line tools that I've got so accustomed to use that I don't even think about them anymore (some might have more permissive license than others but as far as I'm concerned they all seem to fit really well into the whole FOSS philosophy). And like you I've also been looking for an alternative, in my case to YouTube Music, but I'm not too bothered with using it since YouTube Premium also sends some money towards creators that I enjoy watching and I've managed to reduce a lot of the things that annoy me on YouTube.

And I'm really liking Zen so far, extensions wise it's based on Firefox so pretty much all of the same extensions seem to work, I say pretty much all because Zen changes the UI a bit so those might not work but they added their own "Zen Mods" for the UI so it still offers a great deal of customization by the community, I am personally using Zen's compact mode with the tabs on the left side of the screen, it's taking a bit of mental effort to move the mouse to the side of the screen instead of the top (Breaking over two decades of a habit is not easy) but I really like how clean it looks and works.

I want to wish you the best of luck with your Linux journey! I would be happy to help you with it if I'm able to, as the old saying goes "the more you know, the more you realize you don't know", and after over a decade using Linux regularly, and about 6 years "full time" on my personal computers I understand that I only scratched the tip of the iceberg.

Hey there Sergio, welcome to the forum

lol your hobbies are kind of like mine! Lucky you having a 3D printer, they’re so cool… and props to you for learning Japanese, best of luck!
What kind of games do you play and what do you like to draw?

Heck yeah, FOSS rules I’m trying to hunt down some software alternatives for my Linux move but I don’t think I’m going to be able to swap over from everything due to my window of tolerance, like Spotify. It has its flaws (like massive massive flaws) but I’m gonna be staying for a little longer unfortunately because I haven’t found a decent alternative that’ll still benefit artists, besides buying what I can from Bandcamp. What FOSS programs do you use?

I’m with you, I’m not sure how I feel about Mozilla as of late with the update we got, but I’m not entirely inclined to switch browsers again, not yet. I really don’t want to lose what I already have with them despite the new wording, even if it sucks :/
How is Zen? Do you get a lot of customisation and extensions?

Can’t wait to see you around here more, will definitely keep an eye on your website

[SergioEduP]

Heya Julian, happy to see you here too ,

I just don't want to jump into conclusions with Firefox and Mozilla, as long as they stay open with the code and the community can keep an eye on it I'll still be happy to use and recommend (even if with some caution and warnings) it but if they start to make more aggressive changes with proprietary blobs and data collection I will fully abandon them. They would be no different than Google and Chrome.

I started using Zen about two weeks ago and I'm really liking how it looks and works, I'm not afraid of change and I'm fully aware that it is almost certain that a Beta software will change, but as long as it respects the users I'm happy, and judging by their website they seem to have a pretty clear goal of what they want their browser to be so I'm staying with it at least for now.

Servus Sergio and welcome to the Forum,

It is nice seeing you here! I love reading your Posts and you Journey to fight Anxiety, but you know that already .
I hope this week went great for you with your Projects.

I agree with the Mozilla thing, but the ToU sadly is directed at Firefox, and while nothing technical in Firefox exist to gather a worrying amount Information. The Legal Aspect is just to broad and shouldn't be Accepted that way it Is.
I have been using Zen for the past half Year, and it has been very Good Experience, but changed a lot in that time. It is now in the Beta, so less major change, but it is still changing a lot. So be careful.