Hello all, Looking for an alternatives to gmail and it’s apps as I’m trying to de-google from their services.
ProtonMail, Tutanota, Self-hosting a mailserver… That’s all that comes to mind right now…
Good painless alternatives:
-
Chrome -> Firefox
-
Gmail/Calendar> Proton
-
Google Search -> Feels like all search engines got SEO’d into uselessness these days, but duckduckgo maybe.
Good but somewhat painful to switch alternatives:
-
Google Drive -> Proton
-
Office -> LaTeX/LibreOffice
-
ChromeOS -> Linux, yeah technically ChromeOS is also linux but come on, you know what I mean.
Less than ideal alternatives:
-
Maps -> Idk, not really many good options, apple maps is good too, but not sure if that’s what you’re looking for.
-
Android -> Idk, lol iOS, or de-googled android roms. Not many great alternatives there.
Is there anything else you need an alternative to?
I switched to Kagi search engine about 3 weeks ago and so far I love it! I’m never going back.
Not really the same thing, but I switched from Google Drive to Syncthing. It’s not as secure in terms of “chance of losing your data”, but I’m replicating data on my main PC, on my phone and on my RPi Zero and this is good enough for me, at least for now. Ideally I would periodically encrypt and upload every synced folder to the cloud (just because it’s encrypted), but that’s for another day.
Syncthing is absolutely amazing, but it doesn’t serve the same purpose as google drive, drive is more of a backup solution. syncthing is not that.
With your current setup if you get some ransomware that encrypts your files in any of your devices you’ll lose access to your files in all of them.
Syncthing is S tier software, but it’s explicitly not a backup solution.
I love the idea of osmand. But it’s not a substitute for maps at all ATM sadly. Im fairly confident that if I tried to use it to navigate somewhere in my city I’d die.
I’ll check immich tho.
Just checked it out. It’s self hosted stuff. Most of the suggestions I had up there were low barrier of entry and high privacy gains.
Self hosting is amazing. I have a server myself. But it’s not something worth suggesting to people just starting to degoogle.
Edit trying the map some more and might be worth an actual fair try. Thank you
You gotta wait for overture maps alternatives. It is an open map project by the linux foundation, microsoft, tomtom and some other companies. Its main purpose is to provide a competent competitor to google maps since these companies don’t want to pay google royalties for their map data. It can also help osm since it is under an open license i think. It is still in alpha though at the time of writing this…
I use an app called Waze for maps, but I don’t know if it’s dependent on Google api in the background or not.
Unfortunately Google bought Waze some years ago. The feature sets are being incorporated into Google Maps.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-brings-waze-and-maps-teams-together-in-cost-cutting-move/
Search (in order of ease):
Nextcloud could be of your interest perhaps. It has drive, calendar, contact, messages, photos, and a few things more.
I’m very ensconced in Googles environment. I stopped using google for searching, and I disabled every single tracking feature I could find in Google Maps, and my Android phone.
But I rely on gmail, google docs, task, and G-Drive a ton. I see some great suggestions here for Gmail replacements, but what about replacements for Google Docs and G-Drive?
G-Drive is the easiest to replace, there are tons of storage options out there.
Google Docs is trickier, of you depend on the “office in your browser” thing. You can self host that, there are no cool options besides that imho. You can just use LibreOffice and sync via the aforementioned cloud space though
I’m surprised not to see https://cryptpad.fr/ here, a FOSS, self-hostable E2EE web based office suite. Not as feature rich as GDocs but offers the basics in a more secure manner.
