Yes im aware that my search engine choice is not the best option.
- Consider Nextcloud instead of Syncthing. This gives you options for a Google Docs replacement, too.
- Nextcloud notes is a pretty good Keep replacement, too (if you just need simple notes)
- SearXNG is great for seach, and includes DDG
- Love Osmand for hiking/etc, but Organic Maps is a bit better for navigation unless you do some major config changes in Osmand
If self-hosting:
- Nextcloud can manage users/calendar, etc, too
- Immich is more battery efficient than Ente, since the AI is server side. But only for self hosting since no E2E
- Skip Proton for things like self-hosted Vaultwarden. Why use another centralized service?
I prefer Comaps over OSMand.
OSMAnd has a lot more features that I personally use
As others have pointed out, having so many Proton apps might be an issue. However, that line of thought only works if you’re really concerned about having a single point of failure. Most people value convenience much more than that.
The way I see it, this setup is somewhat noob-friendly, but relying heavily on Proton makes it a lot more convenient for many people. Using a greater variety of providers would make sense, but you can’t expect everyone to be ready for a hassle like that. People seem to expect you to be a hard-core privacy warrior who is willing to make significant sacrifices for philosophical reasons.
Most people aren’t like that. Just switching to DDG is hard enough for them, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.
If you take only 1/10th of this diagram, you get the simplified newbie version. Take all of it, and it’s for a person who is clearly interested in security and privacy. Modify a few things here and there, and you get a version for a serious security enthusiast. Different versions for different audiences.
As others have said, remove all proton stuff that you can. You are just replacing one centralized service with another. Google started out good too and look where we are now. Never put too many eggs in one basket.
My answer to this is to use a custom domain with an email aliasing service.
I’ve gone through about half of the 400 accounts in my password manager and moved them over. I’ll migrate the rest over the next week or so.
So, I’m switching from Gmail to Proton for now, but if Proton starts to get worse or Tuta catches up on functionality or there’s a better provider that emerges or I decide to try to self-host, it’s one easy change at the alias provider to redirect all of my mail to a new email provider.
You should try migadu. Thats the most no-bs provider with custom Domains I could find
Just recently discovered Migadu and it’s all I ever wanted!
What does Migadu do? I’m not understanding what “consolidation” means in this context. ELI5?
Typically MailProvider would let you have
<yourusername>@mailprovider.tldand sometimes a limited amount of aliases, right? With some you can bring your own domain and have<yourusername>@<yourdomain>most of the time also with a limited amount of aliases.Migadu let’s you pay a flat fee, bring as many domains as you like and use unlimited aliases. Their pricing scales with actual traffic, not arbitrary limitations on your address namespace.
Oh so you’re thinking about it from the lens of a standard mail provider, correct? I was more so asking what the difference or advantage was compared to an alias service like Addy, Simple login etc.
yea
You got great choices, actually. I’d only recommend to be as little dependent on multiple fronts on one company. So I’d change a few of Proton to something else. As long as Proton doesn’t replace their CEO with an explicitly antifascist one, I don’t know if they re a good spot.
Depending on how private communications must be, Threema might be better than Signal.
If you don’t need to synchronise with others and your threat model is not physical attacks/theft, then agendas can be just on paper. Same for the calendar.
As for distro…
Mint is great (and honestly what I’d rec for people brand new to Linux). If you want to harden privacy/security more though, the following Linux distros might be better:
- Fedora (any of them). It’s an international upstream distro from Red Hat (American company, parent company is IBM). In other words, it’s developed by the community, which is gathered in the Fedora Project. Their headquarters is in NC, USA. Red Hat then uses the community distro to make their own distro, and in return, finances Fedora. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, uses it. If he trusts it, I trust it.
- OpenSUSE Tumbleweed -, developed by the OpenSUSE community, backed by OpenSUSE from Germany. Pretty good all-arounder.
- Arch Linux, developed internationally, but most devs are spread across Europe. Has an extensive wiki (that also is good for other distros), though it’s not exactly “plug and play” and I’d rec it only if you know what you’re doing.
- Debian is another option if privacy is less of a concern for you, than it being FOSS. It’s one of the most FOSS distros out there, and also highly independent and international.
I assume you want to use your distro as daily driver, and that your threat model isn’t too severe. So the above ones should suffice.
If the threat model calls for it, or you’re willing to sacrifice some usability for slightly more security, you could try QubesOS (arguably one of the most secure distros since it sandboxes everything as if they were a separate computer). Tails is another alternative, that’s on a USB and forgets itself after usage.
For search engines…
… go for Qwant (French) or Ecosia (German). Both are European-owned and are busy constructing their own indexes (currently they still use Bing and Google). There’s Mojeek (UK-based) which is independent.
I don’t know how to block specific sites from popping up on them though, since I notice a certain trillionnaire’s personal ““wiki”” pops up a LOT. Probably he’s cheating and search bumping to spread his desinformation. It should be blocked.
Presearch also exists, which is decentralised and uses its own indexes. If you want OSS, there’s SearXNG and YaCy which have metasearch options. Be careful in which instance you pick, though.
There is exactly zero privacy upside to be gained by moving from Mint to Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE or Arch.
Qubes and Tails may give you an edge, but add quite dramatic convenience costs. Unless you have a very specific threat model, this is overkill.
- ChatGPT -> llama.cpp
- Dropbox -> Syncthing + ZFS
- PayPal -> Atto
- Google Home -> Home Assistant
- Google Docs/Sheets -> Collabora Office
Some of these require self-hosting, so you might need Headscale or WireGuard to connect to them
