Depends on how much privacy you need and how much tinkering to get things to work that you're willing to put up with.

In general, using a variety of services will be more private than going with a single entity like Proton.

Bitwarden is self-hostable, which makes it potentially more private than Protonpass... assuming you actually set up the self-hosting.

Signal isn't a good long-term plan, as it's entirely hosted in the US. I don't think there are currently any known compromises to the encryption model, but iirc the company can see all your communications metadata (which means the government could potentially as well). I don't mind it for talking with friends, but I would recommend against it for extreme privacy needs (e.g. the government starts getting overzealous with who it counts as enemies of the state, and you or your friends become targets).

Obsidian is closed source or not fully open source iirc. Try Notesnook if you need sync.

Anyone have thoughts on mailbox.org? I have been thinking of switching. Anyone with experience with the service?

I prefer Comaps over OsmAnd, it's just much simpler

• ChatGPT -> llama.cpp
• Dropbox -> Syncthing + ZFS
• PayPal -> Atto
• Google Home -> Home Assistant
• Google Docs/Sheets -> Collabora Office

Some of these require self-hosting, so you might need Headscale or WireGuard to connect to them

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.

I don't trust proton.

Get a 5$/ month Nextcloud instance on Hertzner or selfhost it. You'll get 1 tb drive, calendar, notes, office suite, sync with phone, and much much more.

Just to give more unique feedback (although everything you have is good) if your willing to self host, immich 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.

I prefer Comaps over OSMand.

In my honest opinion? Nothing. There is nothing worth changing here, all the other advice is just different kinds of extreme.

based on your selection and the fact that you asked this question is good a indicator that any other alternative people would suggest won't do you that much benefit while carrying a much higher chance of being highly inconvenient.

First off: you've come a long way. Great setup, keep it up!

As others have said, I'd reduce your reliance on Proton. I'd particularly ditch their password manager in favour of something like KeepassXC and combine it with Syncthing (which you're already using) in order to keep your passwords out of the cloud, but synced between your devices. Always think in terms of blast radius: if an attacker gets access to your Proton account (either because you fuck up or they do), they will have access to anything that's in there. Having your e-mail + pw manager there increases blast radius dramatically and allows not only for access to, but full takeover of your accounts in case of a breach.

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.

As others have said, remove all proton stuff that you can. You are just replacing one centralized service with another. Google started out good too and look where we are now. Never put too many eggs in one basket.

As others have pointed out, having so many Proton apps might be an issue. However, that line of thought only works if you’re really concerned about having a single point of failure. Most people value convenience much more than that.

The way I see it, this setup is somewhat noob-friendly, but relying heavily on Proton makes it a lot more convenient for many people. Using a greater variety of providers would make sense, but you can’t expect everyone to be ready for a hassle like that. People seem to expect you to be a hard-core privacy warrior who is willing to make significant sacrifices for philosophical reasons.

Most people aren’t like that. Just switching to DDG is hard enough for them, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.

If you take only 1/10th of this diagram, you get the simplified newbie version. Take all of it, and it’s for a person who is clearly interested in security and privacy. Modify a few things here and there, and you get a version for a serious security enthusiast. Different versions for different audiences.

Duckduckgo -> selfhosted searxng… startpage has also not yet been involved in any controversy for a non selfhosted option.

Copy paste of why duck duck go is a problem:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/duckduckgo-browser-allows-microsoft-trackers-due-to-search-agreement/

Now I little after this came out they do claim they removed them (odd how that suddenly changes after it was no longer secret) But then much more recent as listed on wikipedia, verifying they still have some long term deals with microsoft in **2025**… microsoft is not going to make a deal with a perceived competitor for nothing in return.

By August 2025, Bing planned to cut off access to its search APIs in a push to sell more AI-related APIs, though **DuckDuckGo believed that larger companies like it with long-term deals would not be affected** 62 Bing had dramatically raised rates for its search API in 2022 after ChatGPT debuted. 62

There is also more general proof that while duck may technically use other sources also. It really is mostly bing:

During a Bing API outage in 2024, DuckDuckGo stopped showing results, indicating that Bing provided a substantial portion of DuckDuckGo's results.69 70

I literally do not understand how they managed to take such foothold in real privacy communities. I used to love brave till the i was repeatedly pointed to the scandals that many people are aware of and informing others about… but considering ddg i rarely see anyone pointing this out. It actually smells like a huge successful marketing adventure to sell bing to privacy enthusiasts, but for that i obvio do not have proof. I often imagine this meme with bing instead of google and a cute duck go as mr incognito

mailbox.org > proton mail

it's not free, but it is secure.

the base plan is €12 (~$14 USD) /year

Maps - > CoMaps Photos - > Immich (if you can self host) Passwords - > Bitwarden (May change in the future)

I agree with others on trying to not have one service for everything, which proton is trying to become. An alternative to Proton Mail and Calendar would be Tuta, though I haven't used them.

People will agree and disagree on individual choices, as we can see by the other comments, but I think that is an excellent start.

A message for others, improving your privacy can be a gradual process, you don't need change everything at once, since that would be overwhelming. Start with one or two, and if that works for you, move on to other items.

For passwords, you can use the same KeepassXC database on multiple devices. It's encrypted, and you can have the passphrase file locally on multiple devices, and the cloud provider cannot access it even by brute forcing. The database itself would not be reliant on the cloud service, you can easily switch between any provider (I currently use dropbox)

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.

You got great choices, actually. I'd only recommend to be as little dependent on multiple fronts on one company. So I'd change a few of Proton to something else.

Depending on how private communications must be, Threema might be better than Signal.

If you don't need to synchronise with others and your threat model is not physical attacks/theft, then agendas can be just on paper. Same for the calendar.

As for distro...

Mint is great (and honestly what I'd rec for people brand new to Linux). If you want to harden privacy/security more though, the following Linux distros might be better:

• Fedora (any of them). It's an international upstream distro from Red Hat (American company, parent company is IBM). In other words, it's developed by the community, which is gathered in the Fedora Project. Their headquarters is in NC, USA. Red Hat then uses the community distro to make their own distro, and in return, finances Fedora. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, uses it. If he trusts it, I trust it.
• OpenSUSE Tumbleweed -, developed by the OpenSUSE community, backed by OpenSUSE from Germany. Pretty good all-arounder.
• Arch Linux, developed internationally, but most devs are spread across Europe. Has an extensive wiki (that also is good for other distros), though it's not exactly "plug and play" and I'd rec it only if you know what you're doing.
• Debian is another option if privacy is less of a concern for you, than it being FOSS. It's one of the most FOSS distros out there, and also highly independent and international.

I assume you want to use your distro as daily driver, and that your threat model isn't too severe. So the above ones should suffice.

If the threat model calls for it, or you're willing to sacrifice some usability for slightly more security, you could try QubesOS (arguably one of the most secure distros since it sandboxes everything as if they were a separate computer). Tails is another alternative, that's on a USB and forgets itself after usage.

For search engines...

... go for Qwant (French) or Ecosia (German). Both are European-owned and are busy constructing their own indexes (currently they still use Bing and Google). There's Mojeek (UK-based) which is independent.

I don't know how to block specific sites from popping up on them though, since I notice a certain trillionnaire's personal ""wiki"" pops up a LOT. Probably he's cheating and search bumping to spread his desinformation. It should be blocked.

Presearch also exists, which is decentralised and uses its own indexes. If you want OSS, there's SearXNG and YaCy which have metasearch options. Be careful in which instance you pick, though.

For Google keep replacement, check out Simple Notes Sync. I've been using it for a few months now 🙂

Proton Pass could be replaced by a synchronised KeePassXC/DX database.

Contacts > the stock apps on GOS without network access.

Keep > Notesnook.

Would CoMaps be a better recommendation than OSMand?

For those who are familiar with Ente, how are their apps? I use something different for 2FA and photos, but I need recommendations for people who don't want to deal with selfhosting and backing up Aegis

I think your search engine is more than alright. Regarding the rest, I believe it requires no change aslong as you feel satisfied with it.

I use proton for a lot of stuff. The calendar is useless IMO since their custom bridge doesn't support linking anything else in. Same with contacts. For those two I use a self-hosted radicalev3 container, works like a charm.

Does someone have suggestions for what proton provides with its passmail? I think their implementation and usage experience with this entire reverse-email feature is pretty great and I dont want to give this anonymity up, selectively being able to send from those passmails is also a great feature that works really well in the rare case of getting something I need to reply to.

Isn't google auth an OTP service? Proton Pass also supports that btw! Haven't heard about Ente before and what purpose it replaces a gallery with, but again you can upload and view photos to Proton Drive as well. Although I have not yet tried it myself because I like to keep them local.

Kagi is one of the search engines I actually trust, but it is paid. I can give you trial if you want to try it out. Oh and it being US based might also be drawback.

Pretty solid list I'd say!

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)

DDG is fine. It's hard to have a "completely private" search engine as currently only Big Tech has a comprehensive enough index of the internet to effectively provide a search engine.

Obsidian isn't FOSS though. I'd recommend Notesnook as an alternative. I haven't tried any of the following but I also know of Logseq (which aims to do what Obsidian does but FOSS), Joplin, and Standard Notes, which you might want to look into.

I'm also slowly breaking out of the Google noose.

The only thing that is still holding me back is the OS, i have a HMD Skyline and it's great but it doesn't get a lot of open source support, the only option that pops up is /e/os and even on their website HMD isn't listed, anyone have suggestions for a HMD OS alternative?

Also have a Motorola and an older Sony Xperia to use as guinea pigs.

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.

No VPN -> Mullvad VPN

Bro what? Using a VPN depends highly on your use case. This is way to general. I would remove that.