Just wanted to share some insights after migrating away from Google et al. Curious to hear about others experience.
Please keep a few things in mind when reading this:
- the goal is not to be perfect - this is a long process that will never stop and it's just the start
- personally prefer self-hosted open source to alternatives that might be better at avoiding US, but have too much of a negative impact on my productivity
- you don't have to tackle everything all at once... small steps count too
Sharing this in hopes of inspiring someone to try an alternative or two. Also to hopefully hear about other experiences and what worked best for you.
TL:DR
Migrated from the big G to Vivaldi (browser), Proton (mail), Nextcloud (calendar, full collabora office suite, storage) , Immich (photos), Graphene OS (android).
DONE
Successfully migrated my Google accounts: private (16+ years) and my business Google Workspace - subscription now fully eliminated.
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Email: For now my emails will be with Proton. I know about the situation with their CEO, but wanted to make use of my standing subscription. Will be easy to switch again once it runs out. Proton import with the included migration tool was a breeze.
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Calendar: Tried the calendar but sync interval for remotely subscribed calendars is not high enough for my needs. Happy with the Nextcloud calendar feature.
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Office: Already running a Nextcloud instance for years and enabled contacts + calendar (caldav sync, carddav sync on android) and their office bundle (based on Collabora). Did an in-depth comparison of Cryptpad and Collabora and preferred the latter.
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Photos: Immich is just so good. Set up an instance for our family and everyone is so happy to not worry about Apple/Google storage subscriptions - and the awesome features immich brings. Handles our combined 130k images/videos well.
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Cloud storage: Would love a native Proton Drive sync client for Linux. For now my main storage will stay with Nextcloud.
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OS: Can highly recommend Ubuntu - a bit biased as long-time user. Finally made the switch from stock Android to Graphene OS. Love it so far. Would not recommend it to inexperienced users / non-tech people. Lineage might be more suitable. Love the discussions in this community lately introducing us to /e/OS, Sailfish, PostmarketOS, etc. I hope to see Sailfish and PostmarketOS go mainstream within a few years.
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Browser: Hard to decide as there are so many schools of thought and very vocal groups. Did some in-depth comparisons and decided to at least break free from Chrome for now. Went with Vivaldi and if they are forced to abandon manifest v2 I have LibreWolf and Floorp already set up as alternatives. Can highly recommend Floccus to sync bookmarks between devices (including mobile).
WIP
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Notion: Self-hosted AppFlowy looks promising, but have not tested it lately if it covers all my needs.
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Bitwarden: Hardest to let go for me personally, but might look into Vaultwarden. If Vaultwarden sucks and I really need to ditch Bitwarden it will most likely be Keepass based.
Can someone explain to me why people here seem to love Vivaldi as a browser? Yeah itโs European but itโs still closed source and based on Chromiumโฆ
Can only speak for myself as I don't know a single person IRL who uses it.
Was primarily using Chrome the last years. I haven't had heard about Vivaldi until maybe two or three weeks ago.
THE BAD
Let me start with what I don't like:
They have their own implementation of how internal windows / focus works. As a user you notice it that e.g. the little Bitwarden popup stays open even if you click somewhere else. Which can be nice. The downside is that it makes life as a web dev a bit more complicated, as Keyboard shortcuts don't work exactly as on Chrome - which is just the smoothest (also compared to Firefox)
The tweaking necessary to achieve the behavior I wanted from it took some initial research and set up time. Happy to say that I managed to get everything right, but it was looking up tweaks in user forums, bug tracker, etc. Not the best experience (e.g. vivaldi:// was not associated by default, had to do that manually, several keyboard shortcuts I rely on, start page focus on address bar, other minor tweaks as examples)
It sometimes after a long period of usage begins to freeze to the point where I have to restart it sometimes, which can be a nuisance. Don't really care about it, but want to be honest about that.
It is impossible to drop a current page by dragging the link deep into the folder structure of the bookmarks toolbar. That works on most other browsers, but here you are limited to the very top level of folders only.
THE GOOD
The good parts why I prefer it over all the other browsers currently:
They absolutely got the settings menu right. It is structured in a way that just speaks to my brain. It is absolutely clear where you find what.
Then all the things you CAN configure in the first place. Much is missing in other browser. They could, or can if you heavily tweak random flags and hidden settings, here it's just in the standard configuration interface.
Configurability of the toolbars is awesome. I got it exactly right to my liking. On Firefox there are one or two items I was not able to move. Not even with custom userChrome tweaks.
Their sidebar implementation is just awesome too (for my use case). Has all the features I need and removed all that I don't.
AFTERTHOUGHT
That said I have to say that during testing of different browser I somewhat achieved almost the same with LibreWolf. Except their sidebar and main configuration interface are inferior IMO. I'll immediately switch (if or) once manifest v2 gets dropped.
Love the power of userChrome.css in Firefox.
Also discovered the Stylus extension which works in most browsers. I have already created several custom styles for my most frequently visited websites that sync in my cloud storage to all my devices. Mostly tweaks to get dark mode right on some pages that don't support it yet.
My main point I guess is that actively thinking about what products I use and looking into alternatives made me realize what other great options there are. The spark was all this community. For that I'm grateful.