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.
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.