I’m not sure about using it without a Google account, but you can definitely minimize their involvement. I installed flauncher, then disabled the default “leanback” launcher. Plex is installed from the play store but I side loaded an ad-blocking YouTube app. On a normal day I don’t see anything from or about google on my screen. I’m not sophisticated or, to be honest, concerned enough to know if there’s tracking or other telemetry going on. I mostly just want to avoid ads and moronic suggestions from them.
Even Oracle, a company that funds OpenOffice and has its own proprietary fork of it, doesn’t use it internally. Oracle internal laptops come with libre office installed.
Because the US doesn’t have proportional representation and uses “first past the post” voting, basically any vote for a third party candidate is wasted.
There are other parties but their main effect is to sway elections by “stealing” votes from the two main parties. There’s a group trying to form a party called “No Labels” right now but if you look at their financial backers, you can clearly see they only exist to try to weaken democrats.
Admittedly there are some other parties that genuinely try to get elected, such as the Green Party, but they rarely succeed in even the tiniest local elections.
My friend, who is a windows and android guy, encourage his family to buy Macs and iPhones. That way when they have problems, he sends them to the Apple Store.
Nerdy fact: a gargoyle is only a gargoyle if it’s there for drainage from a roof or other architectural feature. If it’s just decorative, it’s a grotesque or just a plain old statue.
It looks like there’s a Lineage OS build for the shield, so if you want to eradicate google, there’s an option. It loses a fair bit of what makes the shield great though, since some of the audio and video playback stuff on the shield is proprietary to Nvidia.