Just to give more unique feedback (although everything you have is good) if your willing to self host, add immich to google photo replacements since it'll back up photos across devices (I haven't personally looked at ente photos) and depending on how important hiding your traffic from your ISP is, consider replacing a VPN with TrackerControl which helps to stop apps from phoning home.
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
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Privacy
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Have you heard of Privacy Guides? They have a whole community of people there and provide privacy focused software and service recommendations, with lots of details explaining their reasoning.
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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.
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This is really great, especially as a jumping off point. You might consider a ranked approach, like good, better, best. Most marginally privacy conscious services are going to be better than their Google analog, but some are better.
Proton Pass. For privacy, either self host or use offline password managers.
A little trick I use with obsidian is that if you use syncthing to sync the vault folder you can basically have a shared vault (in my experience the time to get edits from one device to another is like 10/15 seconds which is not bad at all)
What is obsidian and signal note to self?
Rn I just add me wife to new chats and keep my notes there. Im sre she loves it.
Don't know Ente, but the GrapheneOS gallery works fine for basics, and pop Immich on Mint for the rest of google photos functionality. I'll suggest Bazzite for the distro, especially if they game or are likely to break things.
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.
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Contacts > the stock apps on GOS without network access.
Keep > Notesnook.
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.
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mailbox.org > proton mail
it's not free, but it is secure.
the base plan is €12 (~$14 USD) /year
A big difference (for some) is that the mailbox is not fully encrypted. However I only see that as a requirement if there is an actual potential threat against you (like as a journalist).
Also, Mailbox has app passwords, so you can control which applications can access it and a simple revocation will end it. Connecting directly is not possible for security reasons.
They also offer 25 free aliases, 50 additional ones if you use your own domain. And they do make it rather easy to set up the necessary records to send via your domain. Plus throwaway addresses (which will only exist for 90 days each and can only receive emails).
Mailbox offers a secure version for your email that's automatically encrypted, but also supports PGP for your reg email too (what I do). Proton is only encrupted when mailing other Proton users anyway, right? I say this as a former Proton Mail user.
I'm not sure about the Proton thing, but yeah, Mailbox sets up PGP for you at server-level, which means they are still unencrypted on the server but will always be sent encrypted.
The initial mode is that they will try to negotiate whether PGP is supported by the other side, with you having the option to always use it for the price of the opposite side having to encrypt them.
You can even enforce it on a case by case basis by adding "secure." To the mailbox.org domain, however I don't know if that is also possible when using your own domain.
What's with all the hoopla about Google nuking devices with GrapheneOS lately?
- 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?