I use MullvadVPN, GrapheneOS and Linux but I also search for any more apps not like OSes. What’a your favorites?
Monero, SimpleX
- MullvadVPN, and a free and privacy respecting OS is another good idea.
- So is using privacy respecting apps: LibreOffice instead of MS Office, Codium instead of VSCode. And so on, with many FLOSS alternatives to the usual proprietary ones.
- Services also matter, imho: I’m using ProtonMail for my email (Tuta would be another clever choice, imho, and there are probably others). I’ve very recently switched from iCloud to filen.io for my cloud storage needs.
- Using one’s phone as little as possible. I’ve almost nothing on mine, I mean only stuff I’m required to have (banking and IDs, stuff like that), no email, no social, not even music or games (the game I enjoy the most play I also I enjoy it the most when I play it offline: chess ;))
And then… I also started using analog tools much more in the last two years. This helps a lot maintaining one’s privacy. Amazon can’t track my reading habits when I read a printed book (even less if I do not buy it from them), Goofle cant’" track my writings when I use pen and paper instead of their apps, Apple (or Google or Microsoft) can’t track my paper agenda or my paper notebook. And the NSA or whomever is playing that role in my country can’t ask any corporation to install backdoors in my IRL encounters with people so they could spy on me. At least, they cannot do that for now ;)
Lots.
However I want to give FreeTube some love. Out of all the YT frontends, FreeTube has never failed me and always been a treat to use. I’ve used it on both Linux and Windows, and the experience is always reliable.
Matrix messaging apps. It’s nice to have modern messaging features, end-to-end encrypted, with no single point of failure, no Google involvement, and no phone numbers. I expect to start recommending it widely when the 2.0 features land in the popular clients.
WireGuard VPN. It’s fast, even on low-power devices.
Self-hosted Mumble. Excellent low-latency voice quality for chatting or gaming with friends.
Radicale, DAVx⁵, and Thunderbird, for calendar and contact sync between mobile and desktop, without handing the data over to Google or anyone else.
Cromite.
Mulch is a mobile chromium browser made by DivestOS (same folks who make Mull). Maybe worth checking out over Cromite.
Why?
Cromite is excellent.
Too bad it’s chromium based, but works a whole lot smoother and snappier than Firefox based browsers, oh and safer as well… So for the time being, Cromite it is.
Librewolf on desktop Linux is my weapon of choise.