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Inspirational or utterly unwatchable—certainly controversial—YouTuber PewDiePie’s latest ruse is one you might actually be interested in. He’s deGoogling and using a Steam Deck of all things to help him along that path.
Felix Kjellberg, to know him by his actual name, has a new video polemic taking you through the reasons why he’s decided to cut Google out of his life and deep diving into all the methods and machinery he’s using to achieve that.
“The past couple of weeks I’ve completely deGoogled,” he says. “I don’t use any of Google’s so-called free services. Except YouTube, I literally can’t escape.”
“This all started because of privacy concerns,” Kjellberg explains. “Being tracked with literally everything I do just feels kind of odd.” It’s also about regaining control over his software and devices.
“I realised there’s always an open source alternative, and a lot of times they’re better, they just don’t have a billion budget to market themselves,” he points out. He then reels out a list of what he sees as the most important services and devices to focus on when de-Googling.
That includes everything from switching to the DuckDuckGo search engine to dumping the Chrome browser and ditching Gmail. Where things begin to get a little more complicated is his advice to install a custom OS on an Android phone.
He uses Graphene and particularly likes the granular control that gives you over what files and folders apps have access to and the fact that you can decide if any given app even has internet access. Indeed, Graphene asks you if you want to allow internet access whenever you install an app.
Anyway, where ye olde Steam Deck comes in is that his preferred note taking app requires x86 CPU support, so won’t run on the Raspberry Pi he’s also using as part of the de-Googling process.
The rather convoluted solution is to use his Steam Deck for that and to use a clean install of the Arch distro which he also has on his desktop, despite the fact that SteamOS itself is based on Arch. Whatever, the result is that he has his “notes app running beautifully.”
If that seems like a lot of effort for one app, he also added an extension so he can run his Deck over ethernet, so that it uses less power. “I thought it’d be kind of cool to use the display, so I can use that for monitoring. I run Tmax and Btop on it and it looks so cool.”
“And before you ask, yes I can still game on it all right. It runs 2% of my cpu. It’s like this weird home lab abomination at this point, but I love it,” he adds. His overarching point with the Deck he says, isn’t that it specifically is essential, but that, “if you want to deGoogle, you can use whatever you have at your disposal.”
Without doubt, this particular has given plenty of cause for concern over the years in terms of political views. And his delivery will be an instant turn off for many. But there’s no doubting that this is an interesting take on and guide to de-Googling, an idea that’s only becoming more relevant.
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