Asklemmy

I've recently been thinking about this.

I've seen plenty of recommendations for the Proton suite, but seeing as the premium plan runs 10 bucks a month for:

• Mail (Need premium for IMAP compatibility with the Proton Bridge)
• Calendar
• Drive service --more on this one later
• VPN (this one looked nice, but IIRC VPNs are less necessary for home traffic if all my requests are HTTPS)
• Password Keeper
• And crypto wallet,

it was a mite expensive for my tastes who was only going to use the mail service and calendar and perhaps the VPN. I looked into Posteo.de and it had all that I wanted from an email provider (encryption on-server, IMAP compatibility and privacy-focused). It's much cheaper (1 EUR/mo.) and it has a fantastically retro and sleek website (the epitome of web design-- nice-looking without being obese or fiddly).

I'm also trying out a few search engines, namely Mojeek and Marginalia-search because I want to both move away from Big Tech and Google in particular as well as open my horizon to the more human side of the web.

I have yet to figure out what to do about Android. I'm trying out using a dumb-phone for a while, but that's more of a temporary thing.

With regards to Proton Drive, it seems nice but I've heard of poor Linux support. That's a big dealbreaker for me.

I'm afraid that I can't step away from Big G just yet; work runs off it. But one can dream. And every bit of data that Google doesn't have is one degree fewer of control they will have over me eventually, when the Big Tech overlords pull the trigger on whatever they have cooking up.

Search: Kagi (paid)

Email and calendar: Tuta (paid)

Synced storage (like Dropbox): Synology Drive (free, used with my Synology NAS)

Photos: Synology Photos (free, used with NAS)

Passwords: Bitwarden (paid)

Music subscription: Tidal

Music purchases: Qobuz and Bandcamp

No complaints about any of these. Quite happy having de-googled and de-appled.

Email

• Proton Mail, (paid) I switched 7 years ago and it's great, I've never looked back. I don't use the attached services like calendar and contacts because it's a little bit too walled-off for the integrations I need, but I do use ProtonVPN and Drive.
• Thunderbird (free) on desktop, to access my IMAP or exchange email addresses (work etc) along with Proton Bridge so I never touch the Proton web app. On Android, I use Thunderbird for the IMAP addresses plus the Proton app, which isn't ideal but not sure what the alternative could be.

Calendar and contacts

• Nextcloud (free) installed on the basic shared hosting for my personal website manages all my contacts
• Etesync (free) is currently syncing my calendars, but I'm planning to swap this soon to the Nextcloud instance just to simplify things.

Notes / Resource management

• Anytype (free) is incredible and I now run my life off of it. Took months to really get the hang of it but it's worth the effort.

Cloud storage

• Proton Drive (paid) is great, I use it for all my work applications, sending to clients etc and sync my most important files, but only have 500gb storage so
• Synology Drive (free) installed on the NAS I use for backups covers all my personal uses, including photo backups.

Browser

• Firefox (of course), with uBlock Origin (of course)

Search

• DuckDuckGo (free), I ran Kagi for a while but the company seems shady and the price is extremely high for what you get

Passwords

• 1Password (paid), migrated after the LastPass incident and before ProtonPass existed. It would make sense to save the money and switch to Proton but tbh 1Password has been great and I wouldn't risk the faff.

Documents

• Honestly I don't have a lot of need for Google Docs replacements but when I do need to work on docs I'll use LibreOffice. If it needs to be shared I'd probably do a public share on Anytype, or use Proton Docs. More likely, someone else will have invited me to a Google doc and I'll have to sign in to use it.

Audio

• PocketCasts (paid) is a great service. I also use Spotify (sorry, all my friends use it)

RSS

• FreshRSS also set up on my web hosting so I get all my news/articles/substacks etc through ReadYou and Fluent Reader.

Google products I still use

• Maps
• YouTube (with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock on both desktop and android), I just sadly can't let go of my carefully crafted algorithm oops

I had to change my name and hairstyle

Tried? That is boring. Stick with what we kept using.