It’s been a long time in the making, but I’ve finally degoogled and largely removed all proprietary software from my personal life. I know this topic is pretty well covered here and elsewhere so just to add to the list of others, here’s where I’m at these days:

• OS: Fedora (Silverblue) Linux (w/ AMD Radeon GPU)
• Email: Thunderbird w/ hosted email over IMAP
• Calendar/Contacts: Radicale instance w/ DAVx⁵ on Android
• Storage: Syncthing
• Web: Firefox
• Search: Startpage and DuckDuckGo mostly, but still use Google and Bing on occasion
• IM: Signal
• Desktop productivity: LibreOffice when I need it (Collabora Office on Android)
• Notes: Vim, VS Code (Markor on Android); most of my “docs” are just plain text files written in markdown
• Passwords: KeepassXC/DX
• Code editor: Vim, VS Code
• GrapheneOS on mobile, with almost entirely FOSS apps
• Kindle e-book reader with management via Calibre
• Media managed by Kodi with a raspberry pi
• Proxmox hypervisor for Windows/Linux VMs and containers

Gaming under Linux has improved unbelievably these past few years, now that Steam is contributing with their Steam Deck platform. I used to have to dual-boot Windows to keep up with the latest titles, but I wiped it about a year ago and things have been great.

I still rely on Microsoft Excel and Adobe Photoshop for some tasks, but less so now than ever before. Unfortunately, my work will always be a Windows-only environment.

I have started to degoogle bits and pieces. I self-host the majority of the services I need and really enjoyed the journey so far since I learned so much. I am approaching the stage in my life where I have less time to spend on personal hobbies so I fear this path may not be sustainable. In my opinions here are the pros and cons.

Pros:

• Full control of my data
• Pick the ideal tool from the open source community
• Learning experience
• Engagement with community

Cons:

• Technical knowledge needed to setup and maintain self-hosted tools
• Self-hosted environments have security risks (best to put everything behind VPN)
• Disparate tools don’t connect together (requires additional automation configuration)
• Additional costs for services including and not limited to: domain name, email, backup storage, self-host server hardware, VPN, and donations to devs
• Higher personal downtime due to lacking features, server and service maintenance
• Time sink to learn, research, general devops of tools, maintenance of server

Key services to name a few:

• File storage - Nextcloud
• File sync - Syncthing
• Office - Nextcloud + Collabora
• Email - Mailfence
• Photos - Photoprism

So far there are more negatives than positives, but the positives still outweigh negatives. I do have to say degoogling is getting easier than before.

I deleted my google drive content so they can’t arbitrarily decide something I wrote is worth banning my account over or use it to train their AIs, I made a backup, obviously.

Even though my content is safe, deleting it off of Google’s servers felt like drowning my own children in a bathtub

I’m using ProtonMail with my own domain, DuckDuckGo, self-hosted photo album, Firefox and PC/iOS devices. The only thing I have a Google account for is for a paid YouTube subscription, which I use in a Firefox container tab.

I’d like to think I’m pretty degoogled, but due to network effects, I’m probably not. Everyone I send email to has a Gmail address, every web page I visit has Google Analytics (which Firefox may or may not block, I cannot be sure about that) and most people who have my phone number have it stored on their Android device. So Google gets a shit ton of data about me indirectly, regardless of whether I consent to it or not.