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

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

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.

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 :)

I had to change my name and hairstyle