Here are various tools (things) that are “harmful”, meaning that they are harmful specifically to the user and should therefore not be used, and some alternatives that should be pursued instead.
All of these claims are backed up empirically and are thus completely correct.
| Harmful things | Less harmful alternatives |
|---|---|
| LaTeX | Pandoc Markdown, groff |
| VSCode, Atom, Sublime Text, Eclipse, Netbeans, Geany, Notepad++, Kate, Notepad, Textedit | vi, Vim, ed, cat, echo |
| Discord, Skype, Teamspeak, Telegram, Matrix, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger | SMS, IRC, email |
| Windows, MacOS, GNU/Linux, Plan 9, 9front, Solaris, FreeBSD, Haiku, GNU Hurd | OpenBSD |
| GNOME, KDE, Budgie, MATE, Cinnamon, Enlightenment | burning to death in a volcano |
| i3wm, dwm, MonsterWM, bspwm, awesomeWM, FrankenWM, herbstluftwm | tty |
| C++, C, Python, Java, Ruby, Scala, Scheme, Kotlin, Rust, Go, OCaml, Haskell, JavaScript, TypeScript, C#, SQL, Dart, HTML, CSS, Node.JS, Lisp, Pascal, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, R, Swift, Bash, XML, MATLAB, Octave, Coq | brainfuck, binary, a Turing machine, MIX as outlined by Donald Knuth in TAOCP |
| PowerPoint, Google Slides, LibreOffice Impress | suckless sent |
Alacritty, Kitty, lxterminal, suckless st |
tty |
| Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, YouTube Music, Deezer, SoundCloud, Qobuz | cmus, mpv |
| PDF, EPUB, MOVI, DOCX, PostScript | HTML |
| SymPy, Sage, Mathematica, MATLAB, Octave, TI-Nspire CAS | Xcas/giac, APL, paper and pencil |
| Steam, Epic Games Store, Google Play Store, App Store | NinjaKiwi.com |
| Jekyll, Bootstrap, Hugo, PHP, Wordpress, Squarespace, WIX.com | HTML and CSS |
| Git | flash drives in an envelope |
Chromium, Google Chrome, Vivaldi, Firefox, Opera, Edge, Brave, Safari, suckless surf, links |
your local library. go touch grass |
| ℝ, ℚ, ℕ | the surreal numbers |
| ℕ = {1,2,3,…} | ℕ = {2,3,4,…} |
| social media | vocal chords |
| the Beatles | the Kinks |
| soup being a food | soup being a drink |
| Nvidia | AMD |
\emptyset |
\varnothing |
\epsilon |
\varepsilon |
| Microsoft Whiteboard, OneNote, Noteability, Krita, GIMP, paint.net, Photoshop | Milton |
| Inkscape | xfig |
| Lenovo, IBM, Razer, MSI, HP, Dell, Apple, Gigabyte, Clevo, Microsoft, ASUS, Huawei, Xiaomi, Samsung | Acer |
| Blackboard, Canvas, Aspen, Google Classroom | static HTML |
| Arch, Slackware, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE, Parabola, Solus, Gentoo, Deepin, Mandriva, MX Linux, Mint, Pop! OS, elementaryOS, Garuda, Zorin, Mageia, Void, Tails, Artix, Alpine, CentOS, Rocky, antiX | Debian stable |