I may not celebrate Thanksgiving (not American) but I would still like to say thanks to hacker news. I don't remember how long ago I discovered it, but it's been an amazing journey. Let it never end. Thank you to this amazing community.
I try to start from the bottom up. I'm "fortunate" to live in a country where we have a saying - The country doesn't have a mafia, rather the mafia has a country. So I'm pretty used to hearing "we need systemic change, individual action is meaningless". But I just keep telling myself to be the change I want to see and - honestly - I see results. I'm not saying I have changed anything, but the situation feels a bit better. And when it comes to democracy the elected officials are a direct representation of the peoples of the country.
Ironically the whole GDPR mess made it easier for me to use ddg first. I just don't have cookies, so every time I use google I'm greeted with that amazing consent form, so I just stick to ddg unless it's really necessary.
To quote a meme... "por que no los dos?" I have been using DuckDuckGo since I don't even remember how long now - pretty much immediately after I heard of it - what made the "switch" easy was the ability to search google (and a slew of other search engines and websites) from the ddg interface using the bang notation. So I have been mainly using ddg the past few years, but when I'm "sure" I would get more relevant results from Google I just add !g to the query and go look there.
I agree it's not ideal - and this is pretty much just a ddg "ad" - but it's a start. The beauty of free software (free as in beer) is that you can just use it all. Yes - again - not ideal, but it's a start.
Why though? Why is that requirement there? Okay, it's nice for me to sync everything and have a seamlessly integrated ecosystem. But what if I have one device and just want to use Word on it and that's it?