What is something you dislike but still begrudgingly use?
This question was inspired by my hatred of Temporal Anti-Aliasing which, in many games nowadays, is poorly used as a performance bandaid. On lower resolutions it will smudge and blur the image and certain bad cases of TAA will cause visible ghosting.
Yet in spite of all this, certain games won't let you turn it off or have hair/fur/foliage look like dogshit without it so sometimes I still use it.
Microsoft on my desktop. Want to try out Linux but even boomers would make fun of my tech skills. That, and more games are on Windows.
Cars. Born in bumfuck nowhere, and cities with public transit are expensive as hell. If I ever get a better paying job, I'm selling that shit and moving anyways, because cars are also a huge money sink in and of themselves.
Google. I'll give them props, it's a good search engine even in its enshittified form, some of the ads I can deal with because if I am looking for a new t-shirt or something, then it would make perfect sense a Uniqlo ad would pop up. But its privacy that's the problem, and I try to be as "normal" as possible in this KiwiFarmsified hellscape. In the panopticon, the winning strategy is to not be interesting.
My iphone (inb4 avocado toast Venezuela). It would be silly to trash this thing now by principle, but once when its unusable, I'm going for a Linux Pinephone.
YouTube. It's a Monopoly and my broke ass doesn't want to subscribe to curiosity stream. It's like Texas though, while it's mostly derivative cringe, there's small pockets of gold that keep me there.
Linkedin. Pretentious garbage
Suburban life. Again, I am not a suburbanite by choice, decent paying jobs are tight and it's even harder to find an apartment in a state I know I probably won't be killed in AND I can afford.
TL;DR: I REALLY need to start learning 2 tech so I can navigate tech alternatives. Oh, and I need to get my shit together in life so I can afford to live in a blue city.
Linux: try installing virtualbox and messing around with it so that you know what you're getting into before having to make the jump. You dont have to go all in in the beginning. Spin up a virtual machine and play around and see if you are able to migrate any of your work to that.
Google: once you migrate off gmail everything gets way way easier. DuckDuckGo is easily better then google for all search results other then maps and youtube
Cars: not a car replacement, but ebikes are fun/addicting as shit and allow you to go 4x as far and fast as a regular bike without being totally sweaty at your destination. Again not a total car replacement, but it has replaced many vehicular activities and drastically cut down on me burning fossil fuels
Startpage uses Google on the back-end but keeps your searches anonymous. Or there's always DuckDuckGo.
My iphone [...] once when its unusable, I'm going for a Linux Pinephone.
Don't, it's not ready yet unless all you do is call and text. (Then it's fine ig)
Windows
Try out a live USB, it won't save anything you do to it and you won't risk deleting your data by accident (like with dual boot). All you need is an old USB stick / flash drive (just make sure it's big enough, a few Gigabytes should be good)
Here's a walkthrough for Linux Mint (an Ubuntu alternative). I'd recommend specifically Mint Cinnamon (Download Link):