Right now a lot of us are trying to divest and diversify from having our entire lives on Google both because of the way Google spends its money and the long-standing privacy concerns seeming a bit more scary now.

What services have you switched to and what has your experience been? What do you like, what don’t you like, would you recommend them?

1 point

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
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4 points

Desktop Environment

  • Operating System: Fedora Workstation Linux

    • Great package manager updates
    • Excellent performance
  • Productivity Tools:

    • Note-taking: Zim Wiki (preferred for GUI and plaintext storage)
    • Document Editing: Considering OnlyOffice if Collabora Office doesn’t work out
    • Backup Solution: Filen cloud provider with desktop sync app
  • Browsers:

    • Primary: Firefox with Arkenfox
    • Backup: Ungoogled Chromium (for sites incompatible with Firefox)
  • Password Management:

    • Bitwarden (kept on phone)
    • KDE Connect for clipboard sharing between devices

Mobile Setup

  • Device & OS: Pixel 8 Pro running GrapheneOS

    • More stable and polished than previous CalyxOS on Pixel 5
    • Better Google Play sandboxing compared to microG
  • Mobile Apps:

    • Browsers: IronFox and Vanadium
    • App Sources: Primarily open-source from GitHub/F-Droid, updated via Obtainium
    • Non-FOSS Apps: Sandboxed Google Play for banking and other essential apps
    • Maps: HERE WeGo (previously used Magic Earth but it lacked public transport info)
    • Loyalty Cards: Catima
  • Search Engine: Kagi

    • Quality results
    • Sound business model (subscription-based)
    • Fediverse integration for Lemmy search
  • Self-Hosted Services:

    • Contacts and calendar via Radicale on NAS with Nginx
  • Car Integration:

    • Still using Android Auto (found MagSafe holder alternatives more distracting)
    • Physical cards stored in MagSafe wallet on phone back
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10 points
*

for me:

  • google drive > pcloud (objectively better app tbh)
  • chrome > librewolf > floorp (i like having the tab bar at the bottom, and librewolf is a bit annoying sometimes)
  • photos > ente
  • gmail > proton > tuta > “disroot” (proton and tuta aren’t IMAP, and their first-party apps are slow. disroot probably isn’t the best one, I just chose one that supports IMAP)
  • google search > ddg > SearXNG
  • google office > onlyoffice on windows, libreoffice on linux
  • google maps > Organic Maps
  • google passwords > bitwarden
  • google auth > ente auth :)
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1 point
*

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.

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5 points
*

Google office stuff > libreoffice

Chrome > firefox and librewolf

gmail > proton

Google > ddg

Iphone > grapheneos pixel

Youtube account > newpipe, libretube, grayjay with exported subscriptions

Google drive > synology

I think that covers about everything google specific.

Note: I included iphone because even iphones ping google SUPL servers whereas Grapheneos settings host their own servers to ping to avoid sending stuff out to google.

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