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.
Great post. Coincidentally, currently experimenting with European services as well.
Moved mail, calendar and storage from Google to Proton. Very happy with it so far. Decent pricing for what I’m getting.
Using Lemmy as a Reddit replacement which is working out great too, obviously ;)
Cancelled a way too expensive YouTube family subscription. Didn’t find an alternative for that. Will be challenging.
Been running Ubuntu since forever. My only real challenge is my phone… I have close to zero existing knowledge on anything mobile :p tips?
For now try FreeTube for that YouTube itch. There is just no real alternative for YouTube sadly. NewPipe or Tubular (= NewPipe + Sponsorblock, but updated less frequently) on Android.
Re: phone
If you have any free funds to spare at all I recommend you buy a cheap test device second hand on your local marketplace. I did exactly that as I did not want to compromise my main daily driver to test Graphene OS. Once I was confident enough I made the final switch and gave my test device to someone in my family.
In general: Linux based projects would be great, but are not mainstream yet - miss a lot of everyday apps sadly (Postmarket OS, Ubuntu touch, Mobian, etc). That would be my preferred ecosystem.
Sailfish has it’s roots in Nokia and shows great potential, but not there yet right now.
You want a de-google phone - even though you’ll most likely re-enable Google Play services for the regular app store. The main idea is to avoid Google as much as possible and only re-enable what you absolutely must. It’s about the choice mostly. That’s what I love about Graphene OS - you decide everything. Have never seen an OS that starts out that bare but can support everything you need. Has one of the biggest learning curves though.
I would recommend /e/OS or LineageOS.
All projects I mentioned always feature a list of supported devices on their website. Check what device is available to you to play around that is supported by one of the projects. Anything less than 3 years old should have decent performance.
Edit: Did not even tackle socials in my post. Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix - all really great services. Love decentralized services.
phone
Sorry, what phone did you end up with?
Got a used Pixel 7a to play around with. Will be supported by Graphene for a few more years I assume and good enough for everything I do.
My main driver is a Pixel 8. Usually skip a few generations in between, but liked the stock Android experience compared to other manufacturer bloat.
Was thinking about trying Graphene for some time now. The last weeks finally gave me the push to do something about it.
Similar with Qubes OS on laptop, but not sure if I’ll ever dig deep there.
Trying out hardware / software is a passion of mine. Got a Pine phone at some point to play around with different Linux based smartphone OS’es and see what the current state is.
I found that LineageOS can be a life saver for “older” hardware that is still perfectly fine but doesn’t get updates from the OEM anymore. In my experience tablets often get treated very badly in that regard.
Thanks!
They mentioned they’re running GrapheneOS, so most likely a Pixel of some kind. GrapheneOS has the strictest requirements I’ve seen of alternative phone OSes, but for good reason.
Exactly. Used a Pixel 7a to test Graphene. Wanted to for a long time but was hesitant to try on my main phone. Just feel lucky I had the opportunity to get a used phone to test on now. Was well worth it IMO.
Getting a cheap second hand phone is a great idea. Thanks!
If I lived in Europe and was looking to buy a new phone, I’d consider getting a Fairphone (Dutch) pre-installed with /e/OS (French degoogled OS).
Can someone explain to me why people here seem to love Vivaldi as a browser? Yeah it’s European but it’s still closed source and based on Chromium…
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:
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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)
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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)
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Filen and syncthing, which Im using them for years.
Uuuuuh. Looks exciting. Thanks for the mention
Keepass (Windows) + Keepass2Android + Nextcloud has ben my winning combo for years. Recently switched to a Linux desktop and went with KeepassXC: still happy, except for Wayland not letting you AutoType (should be solvable though, but I lost interest at “reinstall X.org”…)
Haha. Still running an Xorg session. It’s a shame there were so many nuisances in Wayland. They seem to get fewer and by now I think it will be OK for most things. Still don’t wanna try as long as Xorg works without issues.
Wayland is the future, but not quite the present yet 😅
I self host and highly recommend Passbolt password manager. As an extra benefit, you can export your vaults as KeePass databases.
Ohhh… I like that. A very strong contender if I switch.
I like the TOTP scanner that automatically scans the screen for QR codes that was intorduced lately in Bitwarden and just the user interface in general that I very like.
But nothing I would lose much sleep over. Thanks for the recommendation!
Just in case: 1Password is Canadian, maybe an option?
Not (yet) self-hostable if I’m not mistaken. But solid option for everybody that does not want to self-host.
You’re not mistaken, as far as I can tell.
It’s just that I’m so incompetent I would not dream of self-hosting anything critical like my spouse’s and my passwords. Way too afraid to find ourselves completely locked out of them, or finding that someone else would have gained access to them. Just thinking about these give me goose bumps.
Haha. I still can relate to that thought.
In general my own experiments and the whole migration lately have taught me the value of backups.
It increases peace of mind a lot if you back up important stuff regularly and try recovery from time to time. Just to validate integrity and to see what the process looks like, what can be improved.
There are so many awesome tools and products that are easy to handle, even if you’re not that deep into tech.
Did you try out Proton Pass? I‘m pretty happy with it
Thanks for the recommendation. Have not yet tried it. Prefer to self-host my password manager.
Thanks for this post.
Fairly noob user, I’ve been considering setting up (on my Linux Mint laptop) the Nextcloud All-in-One Docker. Just wondering how you did it?
Today I would use docker all-in-one as well. When I started I had no experience with docker, but with the LAMP stack. So I used the traditional installation from source and keep it updated that way as well.
If you can I would recommend to put it on a dedicated machine to have it available for all your devices in your local network 24/7.
Thanks for the info and tips.
Thank you for this post
