Yes im aware that my search engine choice is not the best option.
I prefer Comaps over OSMand.
OSMAnd has a lot more features that I personally use
Arent you using too much proton
Ecosystems which are easy to use are great for users and the reason why Google has a monopoly. If proton is a decent privacy centered alternative then more power to them.
Maps is the hardest thing to replace. I like comaps but it’s hard to find any businesses on it. They should probably start scrapping google maps because there no way to get ahead at this point.
I use Mapy (EU)
Murena Workspace and kDrive instead of Gmail/Gdrive
AlterSend (P2P) instead of DropBox
vgy.me (UK) instead of Google Photos
Search - Mojeek, Startpage, MetaGer
AI - Andisearch
Vivaldi Browser, it’s Calendar, Mail and Mail Client, Feed, Notes
Zen Browser
Mandatory Portmaster on Desktop (Windows/Linux) and InViziblePro (Mobile)
Have you tried Magic Earth Navigation. I tend to switch between Magic Earth and CoMaps but tend to use MAgic Earth more
Its not on fdroid?
Incoming Proton hate. This place has taken to that campaign exceptionally well.
Depends on how much privacy you need and how much tinkering to get things to work that you’re willing to put up with.
In general, using a variety of services will be more private than going with a single entity like Proton.
Bitwarden is self-hostable, which makes it potentially more private than Protonpass… assuming you actually set up the self-hosting.
Signal isn’t a good long-term plan, as it’s entirely hosted in the US. I don’t think there are currently any known compromises to the encryption model, but iirc the company can see all your communications metadata (which means the government could potentially as well). I don’t mind it for talking with friends, but I would recommend against it for extreme privacy needs (e.g. the government starts getting overzealous with who it counts as enemies of the state, and you or your friends become targets).
If you’re already moving to Graphene, just use Vanadium as your browser. It ships with GOS and is an excellent privacy choice.
Also, proton mail kinda sucks. I used it for a while but switched to fastmail because an email account with zero interoperability is kinda a lousy used experience.
Edit: same with proton calendar. I like the concept but in practice having a locked away calendar isn’t a great feel.
What do you mean “zero interoperability”?
Isn’t the point of moving from things like GMAIL is because the interoperability is exactly why all your data is fucked?
Its just where philosophical and practical meet the road for me.
Proton is a cool idea because they say they don’t scan anything, and that brought me in; but not being able to use an email client of my choice made my day to day experience less pleasant. If you’re in desperate need of the encryption on their servers it may be a totally reasonable trade off, but it wasn’t for me and I’ve heard many others say basically the same.
Because my main objective was not having my personal emails feed the corporate giants my personal information, rather than a hard requirement of encryption, it makes a lot more sense to use fastmail or a similar service and keep the day to day usability of not being completely locked into the proton ecosystem.
Same thing for my calendar, more important to be able to share events with people not logged into proton and to use the client I actually like.
Side note: much of the sell of proton mail gets tossed out the window when you send an email to anyone not using proton. If you email someone using gmail or apple or whatever that server side encryption from proton doesn’t mean dick anymore.
Would CoMaps be a better recommendation than OSMand?
For those who are familiar with Ente, how are their apps? I use something different for 2FA and photos, but I need recommendations for people who don’t want to deal with selfhosting and backing up Aegis
I switched from Google Authenticator to Ente Auth recently and am very, very happy. It works great.
I haven’t tried their other apps yet, though. I intend to take a look at their images app.
Ente is pretty nice, Their UI’s are clean and not bloated much. I don’t use their online services though.
Edit: I use Osm since ive been using it for years now, all map’s are pretty much forks, either from Osm or something that uses Open Street Map (from my understanding)
OSMAnd is not OSM. OSMAnd and CoMaps are on equal ground as far as using OSM.
IMO OSMAnd has more features which is great if you want them, but I prefer CoMaps for having what I need while feeling simpler. Can’t really go wrong here, they’re both great.
If you don’t use the online services of Ente photos, check out refra (used to be called “gallery” but changed recently).
Clean UI, customizable to a degree, can download AI models to your phone for photo search. Personally it felt faster than Ente and didn’t have buttons to the online service that I kept clicking on by mistake.
- 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’d add criteria, e.g.
- GDPR compliant
- no link with advertising companies
- free software or open source
- self-hostable
- security audit
etc and overall have a reasonable default option but not hide that there are alternative. We want everybody to move away but if everybody moves to Proton as a suite and they enshitify then we are (nearly) back to square one. So I think showing that good alternatives exist is great. Helping people who already use an alternative others, maybe even better one for THEIR criteria also exist, is even better.
I’d also add a Github (or better CodeBerg or self-hosted Gitea) link at the bottom to https://github.com/ente-io/privacypack with the license (MIT) visible.
Proton Pass. For privacy, either self host or use offline password managers.
What’s with all the hoopla about Google nuking devices with GrapheneOS lately?
I use proton for a lot of stuff. The calendar is useless IMO since their custom bridge doesn’t support linking anything else in. Same with contacts. For those two I use a self-hosted radicalev3 container, works like a charm.
Does someone have suggestions for what proton provides with its passmail? I think their implementation and usage experience with this entire reverse-email feature is pretty great and I dont want to give this anonymity up, selectively being able to send from those passmails is also a great feature that works really well in the rare case of getting something I need to reply to.
For the windows -> Linux mint, I wouldn’t just say Linux mint since there are plenty of other great distros that could be better for users then Linux mint, I myself did start of mint but now I end on arch but I do see myself going to fedora if my system ever borked itself, I think popular Linux distros would be a better option then just mint . Other then that the list looks good
DDG is fine. It’s hard to have a “completely private” search engine as currently only Big Tech has a comprehensive enough index of the internet to effectively provide a search engine.
Obsidian isn’t FOSS though. I’d recommend Notesnook as an alternative. I haven’t tried any of the following but I also know of Logseq (which aims to do what Obsidian does but FOSS), Joplin, and Standard Notes, which you might want to look into.
For Google keep replacement, check out Simple Notes Sync. I’ve been using it for a few months now 🙂
