this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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Good painless alternatives:
Chrome -> Firefox
Gmail/Calendar> Proton
Google Search -> Feels like all search engines got SEO'd into uselessness these days, but duckduckgo maybe.
Good but somewhat painful to switch alternatives:
Google Drive -> Proton
Office -> LaTeX/LibreOffice
ChromeOS -> Linux, yeah technically ChromeOS is also linux but come on, you know what I mean.
Less than ideal alternatives:
Maps -> Idk, not really many good options, apple maps is good too, but not sure if that's what you're looking for.
Android -> Idk, lol iOS, or de-googled android roms. Not many great alternatives there.
Is there anything else you need an alternative to?
I like OpenStreetMap more than Google Maps.
I switched to Kagi search engine about 3 weeks ago and so far I love it! I'm never going back.
Same. Love Kagi.
I love the idea of osmand. But it's not a substitute for maps at all ATM sadly. Im fairly confident that if I tried to use it to navigate somewhere in my city I'd die.
I'll check immich tho.
Just checked it out. It's self hosted stuff. Most of the suggestions I had up there were low barrier of entry and high privacy gains.
Self hosting is amazing. I have a server myself. But it's not something worth suggesting to people just starting to degoogle.
Edit trying the map some more and might be worth an actual fair try. Thank you
OrganicMaps seems promising for its simplicity
Not really the same thing, but I switched from Google Drive to Syncthing. It's not as secure in terms of "chance of losing your data", but I'm replicating data on my main PC, on my phone and on my RPi Zero and this is good enough for me, at least for now. Ideally I would periodically encrypt and upload every synced folder to the cloud (just because it's encrypted), but that's for another day.
Syncthing is absolutely amazing, but it doesn't serve the same purpose as google drive, drive is more of a backup solution. syncthing is not that.
With your current setup if you get some ransomware that encrypts your files in any of your devices you'll lose access to your files in all of them.
Syncthing is S tier software, but it's explicitly not a backup solution.
I use an app called Waze for maps, but I don't know if it's dependent on Google api in the background or not.
Unfortunately Google bought Waze some years ago. The feature sets are being incorporated into Google Maps.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-brings-waze-and-maps-teams-together-in-cost-cutting-move/
Dang. Was afraid of that. Wish I could say I'm surprised. :(
you can switch from 365 to onlyoffice too
You gotta wait for overture maps alternatives. It is an open map project by the linux foundation, microsoft, tomtom and some other companies. Its main purpose is to provide a competent competitor to google maps since these companies don't want to pay google royalties for their map data. It can also help osm since it is under an open license i think. It is still in alpha though at the time of writing this...
i use ecosia instead of google, i help the planet and it isn't a bad search engine, st least for my use
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