CoMaps is great and all but man. Living in an urban environment without traffic details is brutal.
I much prefer Kagi over DuckDuckGo
An aggregator like SearXNG or degoog is the way to these days imo. Any individual search engine will have its own share of problems, whether that’s privacy or AI nonsense or just bad results.
My only major change would be to remove Mullvad.
One of the founders has made major donations to far-right groups in Sweden. People have argues that it’s his money to donate, but if paying for Mullvad puts money into the pockets of a major donor to the far-right, I’d rather support an alternative provider.
I have had a very similar user experience with IVPN, and I have heard people suggest AirVPN as a similar alternative.
So recently I’ve tried finding an alternative but when researching deeper into them I just found worse shit than mullvad. Like AirVPN having their servers seized.
For what it’s worth, I think mullvad is still the best option and worse case scenario you’re donating less than $5 to nazis which is like 2 hamburgers.
That’s two more hamburgers than any Nazi deserves, especially on a recurring payment plan.
I also don’t know if failing to disclose the seizure of a server (that contained no readable user data) is worse than supporting the far right. It also feels like if that’s enough to end your search for an alternative, you weren’t searching very hard.
Oh, they upgraded the standard to 5 devices. I think it was just 2 in the past, which made it far more expensive than Mullvad.
Edit: One large thing missing from Mullvad is the proxy-based browser extension for Firefox. It let’s you select different exit server either for everything in browser, per domain, or randomize server selection per domain.
As someone else started it’s worth noting that Mullvad themselves did not donate to anything. I understand people’s argument that money to Mullvad goes to the founder and thus goes to the people they donate to and that was people’s argument for Proton as well. So do what you will as it’s everyone’s personal preference.
That’s why lists like these, while useful for those who are just looking into privacy, deGoogle, etc. to first learn of projects and services, are almost always lacking nuance without text or all the major alternatives where then people can choose based on their beliefs. 🙂
Note: I understand this is one person’s list and not a general list but just stating my thoughts on the matter as a whole.
Why not Proton as well? The CEO is not any better.
Tbf, when it comes to email services at least, your only real alternative for Proton is Mailbox.org if you use IMAP/SMTP. When it comes to Mullvad, there’s plenty of VPNs as an alternative. Plus, apparently Mullvad has lost talent in light of the controversy so their VPN might degrade in quality anyway, so there’s also that
I have been using Tuta myself and pretty happy with it.
Migadu is great for email
What about Tuta?
Tuta does not support the use of third-party email clients or the protocols IMAP/POP3/SMTP as we cannot guarantee end-to-end encryption of your data.
Tuta also syncs terribly. Often when I open the app, the latest email are from weeks ago. And you can’t swipe down to refresh. I paid for a year, and quickly gave up within a month.
Do you consider a post supporting a Trump policy to be as bad as being the largest donor to a far-right party?
I don’t see a difference honestly, plus you know there is underhand contributions going on.
I’m not aware of any underhand contributions. What might you be referring to?
I strongly believe it’s perfectly reasonable to compliment a generally evil person/people when they do a good thing, but hey, my opinions are boring.
They haven’t donated to political parties, have they? That would have been big news I’m pretty sure I would have seen.
Not aware of donations, but Proton’s CEO was glazing Trump around the start of his second term.
Yes, claiming that the GOP was “for the little guy” And would do antitrust on big tech.
Some people are gullible as fuck, man. Anyway I would trust Mullvad over proton as far as privacy and security goes - it’s just too bad I don’t want my money going there.
What’s your stance on Mullvad’s founder donating significantly to a far right political party in Sweden? Feels contradictory to why I use a VPN in the first place.
It is noteworthy that Mullvad did not donate any money to any political party.
Same could be said of Tesla, but the profitability of the company provided funds for Elon to donate to who he wanted.
I don’t think business and founder separation is really possible.
To be a bit nitpicky, Tesla has a load of shit reputation besides having a con artist and fascist CEO. Worker’s rights abuse, accidents, false claims (lies-lies-lies).
Though it is true that Elon is *so* shit that buying Tesla would be no-go and shameful on my book even if the above wouldn’t be true. So you have a point. Personally, I categorize it as Mullvad’s founder being misled rather than genuinely corrupt and evil. But it’s subjective, and I see and respect if people think differently.
Yeah tesla is much worse. More pointing out that founders have so much more financial ties to their companies than regular employees that their actions become extensions of the company. Its why founders have to be much more careful of their behavior than even regular CEOs who a company can let go and claim to have gotten rid of the problem. Founders generally won’t give up their share of the company.
Yeah for this reason alone Mullvad should no longer be considered viable. IVPN seems promising, I plan to switch to them once my subscription runs out. I don’t like how much they talk about being “politically neutral” but it’s better than donating to nazi freaks I guess.
ive never heard of that before. if true, thats not good, but i still trust Mullvad’s service as they were raided a couple of times and had nothing to show the police. bc of instances like that i still believe them to be very good for privacy. if more news comes of from their CEO doing sketchy stuff i might look for another VPN though…
Immich is a better alternative to Google Photo
I recommend ente.io
I recently made the jump. It’s crazy how much effort goes into optimising Nextcloud it still remains the most demanding thing on your server and your sanity.
Hot take. Nextcloud is hot garbage. If you want file sync use Seafile. So so so so much faster and more resource efficient. For the rest of next cloud functionality just use a tool specific to that.
Nextcloud is still tied to the old php/fpm model. There are better approaches now days. Hell even owncloud is rewriting away from the php/fpm approach.
This is exactly what I did. I replaced it with a Immich, a webdav client, and an xmpp server (prosody). I only needed online storage for phone photo access/backup and syncing my keepass DB and contacts. I set these apps up once and now I don’t need to touch them.
The problem is not php-fpm, the problem is when people who perform as SysAdmin dont know how to tweak it properly.
I deploy Nextcloud instances for production environments. :/
Why would I need to tweak it when what I ran was provided by Nextcloud as a complete package?
I’ve also never used a commercial Nextcloud host that has acceptable performance.
If they are providing their AIO Nextcloud unoptimized that’s even more of a reason to dislike it.
the AIO is not aimed for production in intensive environments. also what do you mean “commercial Nextcloud host”. i never implied you to use this???
Nextcloud is great but too often it’s compared to Google Drive instead of Google Workspace (as seen here). If all you need is cloud storage, use Owncloud (Nextcloud upstream) or any of a thousand similar tools (I use Cloudreve). If you need a full office suite, use Nextcloud.
I am just about to start experimenting with opencloud.eu. It is another developer revolt fork of Opencloud (this time their infinite scale project) so it is supposed to be a lightweight single binary that uses a real filesystem and no database at all. Lacks all the add ons of nextcloud, buy I am tired of maintaining it.
Anyone try it?
uses a real filesystem and no database at all
Sounds very promising! That’s what has always pushed me off Nextcloud.
Setup is incredibly bad. They have a very very strict set of parameters to be able to log in at all. I have pretty much given up OK it as there is no way for me to log in for the first time with default admin credentials. It simply doesn’t accept the states environment variables on docker and you get 1 attempt to log in before it gets stuck in a loop and you have to purge the image and every volume and file to get a second attempt.
Yep, though I have a bug in my use case from a older version, and I still didn’t have the time to try the new stable version. I also translated the Docker compose for the project and extensions into .container files. In the newer version it seems they managed to remove a sidecar container.
So far, it runs on a VPS with a 4-core and 8GB of RAM. On a first run, after upgrading, it needed swap as the system started freezing and the OOM killer stopped the program, zram was enough in my case.
Besides the main container — and the sidecar — I used the Collabora container, LDAP for user management, Keycloak for auth, full Tika for OCR search — modified for my language — and Radicale. Mind you, most probably want the main container and the online office container, be it EuroOffice, Collabora or OnlyOffice.
Here is the memory usage and CPU usage on standby from
podman stats:NAME MEM USAGE / LIMIT CPU % systemd-tika 175MB / 8.054GB 0.68% caddy 43.35MB / 8.054GB 0.24% systemd-ldap 67.08MB / 8.054GB 0.01% radicale 2.425MB / 8.054GB 0.00% syncthing 29.97MB / 8.054GB 0.21% systemd-keycloak-postgres 41.12MB / 8.054GB 0.06% systemd-keycloak 663.4MB / 8.054GB 0.75% systemd-collabora 42.02MB / 8.054GB 0.27% systemd-opencloud 883.4MB / 8.054GB 7.31% systemd-collaboration 57.71MB / 8.054GB 0.31%
tried it, but i couldnt figure out how to add my existing photos in the way i had organised them: /year/event/photo.jpeg and nextcloud made it pretty easy
Both Google Photo and Immich, treat all images individually. And assume that any grouping is done a Tag/ album level. Regardless of file name or hierarchy.
If you what to show your “event” in the UI, you would need to run a onetime script and amend album with the name of parent folder.
Immich is for phones only apparently.
I have my home video also, in Immich.
No?
The web client is full featured.
I mean it’s for the photos from phones. It doesn’t seem to be very well suited to manage a photo archive from an actual camera (there’s dozens of us!).
isn’t immich for photos not images?
It is a good list. Everyone will have their own personal preferences, but I think overall the list is good.
Interestingly i could never invest the time into nextcloud but I can advocate for trying open models in CLI form for anyone looking for good agentic options
I’m using pi + tensorx + glm 5.2 with some pretty good results. EU hosted and competitive prices
This setup is telling me you’re spending too much time on computers. Consider a hobby where you make something with your hands, using tools that aren’t electrified.
Also, fuck Proton.
Great job!! How are you liking /e/?
i like it :3 the default launcher “bliss” is awful, but ive used lawnchair for a while and it was nice. now i switched to ion just to try it. but yeah, pretty much everything works as exected
im completely within the proton eco system, the only reason for my 2fa not being proton is because i made this choice before proton had a 2fa app and i didnt want to bother importing everything
I’d rather use KeePassXC tbh. Local, cloud-free by default password manager.
Very good for you! I can’t change a lot of things cause, school, family, or i don’t understand the tech behind it, but it’s good to see other people protecting there own privacy!
yeah switching away from whatsapp is impossible. i only got my parents to switch lol
The ignorant will never switch if even the informed don’t make the move.
Delete it. Inform those you regularly contact that they can contact you via Signal, email, whatever, but that you don’t have WhatsApp any more.
The only way to break the network effect of WhatsApp is to leave the network.
I have been waging a war of attrition getting people to switch onto Signal. After 5 years I’ve managed to get my spouse, my sister, my mother, 6 of my friends, 6 of my coworkers, and one sports team I play on to begin using it. Only real holdouts are my in-laws, two of my friends I talk to regularly, and another sports team or two. Some I’ve wooed off of basic texting, others off of WhatsApp. It’s been a long hard road, but at this point, I would estimate about 85% of my communications happen over Signal now. Keep fighting the good fight
I honestly wish I could quit Excel - it’s literally the last vestige of Microsoft in my non- professional life, but I find LibreOffice Calc a bit too needlessly different to be able to fully switch across.
Anybody know of a good alternative to Google wallet? I’ve looked around on F-Droid but haven’t seen anything.
Catima? Of maybe Walt in the future?
Catima seems really solid. I’ll probably be using it for a while.
And it’s a shame Walt isn’t ready yet, and probably won’t work for me since I live in the U.S.
Is it tab to pay you want or store tickets and membership cards in it.
Theres one literally called Wallet where you can store information of your credit/debit cards but unfortunatly cant use them (still learning the app). Now Catima is awesome but its for anything you need thats a QR code. For example, I mostly use it so far for my gym membership.
🔥🔥 Well done! It is a fun journey right :) I’m still enjoying discovering better alternatives
its an awesome journey :3 for some of these its a real shame they’re an “alternative” and not just the primary choice
