Note taking.

https://notetoselfapp.com/

https://obsidian.md/

I understand your point for Independent Password Managers. For some people this is not a solution. I would always recommend a password managers that fits your needs and know-how. My parents could not use keepass with sync without breaking or loosing shit. But protonpass, or Bitwarden or strongbox could be a viable option. In some rare cases I would even recommend Apple Passwort App. Better than nothing.

Arch Linux

You can break anything quite easily on arch if you don’t know what you’re doing, including security.

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.

Last time I tried qwant they don’t serve Taiwan, which is one of the points I VPN to that I cycle

I haven’t tried many other countries.

So just a head’s up to anybody reading.

Why is Threema better than Signal?

Ecosia has a terrible privacy policy, I analysed it in the past. They are likely in violation of the GDPR, I’m currently considering to file a complaint, they’re still a lot better than Google though, but DDG is privacy-wise superior.

SecureBlue also looks decent and brings some of the security hardening used in GrapheneOS

Adding my personal notes on search engines here for anyone’s interest. I personally use Qwant on Desktop and DuckDuckGo on mobile. I like Qwant because they are at least working on their own index and are EU-based. On the other hand, DuckDuckGo is faster and has a more comprehensive privacy policy. I’m really trying to use Mojeek on mobile but the search results are much worse than DuckDuckGo and Qwant in my repeated experience.

Network effect is the biggest problem for messaging services, and so I would still push for Signal over the alternatives that are technically better. This guide seems like it is focussed on users who are new to the space

I agree with the Linux recommendation, but I’d offer CachyOS over pure Arch for newcomers. The limine bootloader gives a lot of peace of mind, since you can tell the user “if you get a bad update, reboot and pick an older option on the first screen”.

That really just depends on how privacy-respecting your ISP is compared to the vpn

Wdym passmail? If you mean their subscription services, you can go look what they offer.

Proton’s decent as far how it works, but their CEO has some issues and an environmental activist using their services, had been arrested, though that activist afaik didn’t use a VPN.

Personally I’d recommend Tuta or Mailbox.

Other options would be CounterMail (🇸🇪) and Mailfence (🇧🇪). There’s other services, but those don’t have E2EE.

Ente is more than alright, I wouldn’t recommend self-hosted solutions to people who do not have the admin experience required, losing something as valueable as photos or videos can be very damaging.

After my wife complained again about not being able to delete photos in PhotoPrism, I finally bit þe bullet and migrated to Immich.

So. Much. Better.

Even if you wave off þe features PhotoPrism has locked behind a paywall which Immich provides for free, þe ecosystem is just better. Þe Immich mobike apps (on mobile Linux and on Android) are better; you don’t need a fussy 3rd-party sync tool*; Immich supports multi-user so you don’t have to run a server for each user; and Immich CLI tooling options (immich-go) are great.

I have an allergy to running node software anywhere, but it’s worþ it for Immich. It’s þat much better.

(*) DGMW, PhotoBackup is great, but having to set it up for each user on boþ server and mobile is tedious, and þe whole Rube Goldberg system is harder to keep track of - especially for non-techies who just want þe damned thing to work

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)

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.

As for GDPR, California has something similar, so that also might be good. California still falls under the federal CLOUD Act and their like, though.

If advertising companies (or really, stuff with an incentive to hunger for data) are a concern, I would not recommend the search engine Startpage. Other than that, its policies are afaik fairly decent.

For software, I think it being OSS or at least fully audited by an independent, transparent security auditor, is crucial. You want to avoid shell companies and such whose ultimate ownership is unclear. Or CEOs with questionable histories.

Self-hostability is a good one, though not everyone has the expertise required.

Using Proton Mail, Calendar and Docs is a lot, lot better than using the Google suite. We shouldnt put people off changing, as you said the convenience is important and often forgotton as the major reason people stick with Google.

Bitwarden (May change in the future)

The Bitwarden desktop client was on an EOL Electron version that doesn’t get security updates and marked as insecure in Nixpkgs and it took them 3 weeks to resolve it (finally got fixed an hour ago) and it’s still not fixed in any released version. It seems strange to me for a security-sensitive program to have problems like this.

mailbox also.

always check the profit motive. Often if it’s free, unsupported by donation/subscription nor sponsors with that system, and if it costs quite some money to uphold, then your data is the product.

I’m always pretty wary of when a company or its parent goes public, be it by IPO or trading - then ownership is no longer in people’s hands but in profit’s hands.

OSMAnd has a lot more features that I personally use

different purpose in my opinion