I’ve cancelled my subscription yesterday, conveniently it was about to renew at the end of the week, so I have a few days to migrate from Proton, here’s what I’m thinking of, but I’d love to hear what other people are switching to
Is there any free good email service other than Tuta?
All pricing are too high for people with average wage of my country.
For meet, I just generate a Signal meet link and share with people.
Instead of bitwarden, I use KeePass with Syncthing.
Instead of Lumo(the app was terribly slow), you can use ddg ai, on fdroid there is a 1mb webview container application of ddg ai specifically so if you dont want to use ddg browser, yoi can use that for their ai.
For 2fa, i use stratumauth.
I need a vpn alternative too.
i use Aegis for 2FA but it’s a PITA as there’s no Linux desktop program, so i need to reach for my phone for 2FA. Any recommendations for something running in Android and Linux desktop??
You can export your Aegis 2FA tokens and import them into a couple of different Linux desktop programs, including OTPClient.
https://community.linuxmint.com/software/view/com.github.paolostivanin.OTPClient
This allows configuring “one” MFA token with each service, but also having it on one or more Linux computers and even on multiple Android devices (Aegis can also import.)
I imagine it is unwise to go nuts with this. Each place the tokens are at carries some small risk.
But I feel much betfer having mine in two places than in just one.
Ente auth has both.
Bitwarden’s gone private equity. I’d hold off on switching to them; maybe try to live with KeePass if you’re not on a family plan.
I would switch to KeePass if its sync method was more sane than “big binary file + Syncthing”, it seems like all the password manager options kindof suck in some way
I switched over to vaultwarden. I am stuck on an iPhone for the time being and I don’t care for all the Keepass ios apps.
Completely valid. I myself am still on Bitwarden, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but my family is already entrenched in it.
I think if I have to move them again, I might seriously consider forking keepass, adding the features I use in bitwarden.
I do not look forward to dealing with IOS tho.
Have people stopped trying Mullvad VPN for some reason? Is it no longer the best privacy focused one?
There was some drama after one of Mullvad’s cofounders was outed for donating considerable sums of money to right wing organizations. It’s fallen out of favour as the default recommendation as a result
Ah, I had no idea. Are any of the others anywhere near as private and secure?
I’m not sure. Mullvad is still a good product, but what it funds is not.
If I’m entirely honest, I mostly see VPN services as a predatory market, inflated by their own marketing campaigns about the risk of personal privacy. There are some products who are true to their word, like Mullvad, but most are looking for a quick buck from the average user who might forget they have a running subscription if they keep the cost low enough.
Frankly, after seeing what’s happened with Proton and Mullvad, I’m not inclined to believe anyone in this market amounts to more than a paranoid libertarian at best.
One of the owners made a huge donation to a right-wing, anti-immigration Swedish political party, I believe. Someone feel free to correct me on the details.
I’ve been looking at both ivpn and airvpn as potential replacements.
Does anyone have a suggestion to replace the email aliases feature of proton? I see mailbox.org has 25 aliases with their premium version, but I have a lot more than 25 aliases and don’t want to go back to just using my email again. I don’t use my domain for most email needs, as my domain is a bit inappropriate lol
I’m tired
Mailbox has Drive/Office and Meet included. VPN is undoubtedly Mullvad. Yes their CEO is a fascist but none of them are perfect. Mullvad is as close as it gets.
If you ever wanted to Cake Wallet is pretty much the gold standard for mobile crypto wallets.
“None are perfect” is typically used to mean they each have imperfections but are otherwise a good choice. The CEO being a fascist is such a large red flag that aircraft need to divert around it.
Any reason not to use ivpn or airvpn? ivpn in particular seemed very privacy-focused with a pricing structure similar to mullvad when I looked at their website.
Airvpn has never been audited IIRC and Italy is an eye.
Dunno about ivpn
Someone mentioned: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/
Anyone know anything about it?
the current owners are israeli, kape technologies
Well, that answers that question… 😔
Thanks!
people better get familiar with docker
Mind giving a bit of a breakdown of why? I’m new to Linux and heard a lot about docker (I think its like separate boxes for an apps?) after I switched and it just seemed too much at the time so I’ve put it on the back burner (was stotally new to terminal stuff).
I’m about to try rigging up an old laptop for self hosting and trying to learn. Was thinking of figuring out docker first before trying immich, keepass, calendar with calDAV and it’s all pretty overwhelming lol.
Running apps directly on Linux is like cooking in a shared kitchen where everyone shares the same spice rack. If one app needs an updated spice that breaks the recipe, your whole kitchen suffers.
Docker is like giving every app its own private kitchen pod with all its exact ingredients pre-packaged inside. Nothing leaks out, nothing interferes with the rest of your system, and if an app breaks, you just throw the whole pod away and start fresh without touching your main computer.
Once you get used to docker, you can stand up 20 apps in a night with standard configs and it all just works.
Later on, if you start really homelabbing it, you can stand up 3 small computers and cluster them to keep a copy of each container you’re using up. If one of the boxes go down, they just shuffle and start the container on other nodes.
First, this makes more sense, thanks for the write up. Second, I really wish I knew this stuff when I went head first into fuck Microsoft mode (I have a feeling I’m gonna be resetting my main PC at some point to do it right, and really dreading that). I have an old laptop returning to me that I’m gonna throw Nix on and fuck with it.
Agreed on all of this. I run docker on one of my PCs and have multiple containers running. But I didn’t know you can cluster multiple PCs to run a copy of the containers and I was just wondering about a week ago if that’s possible. Would you have a resource on how to set up a 2nd PC to do this and cluster with my server?
You need docker swarm for that, it’s pretty easy to setup and it works as an extension to docker.
If you selfhist eg. DNS, or another static app that you want highly available but from a single IP, you can use keepalived directly on the host and this allows you to have two machines that share a third virtual IP, and if server A fails, the IP moves automatically to Server B and you don’t even notice that the server failed, because everything failed over to the other server.
Awesome, I will be looking into setting this up tonight. Thanks for the info.
Well I don’t know much on docker myself. I use it for selfhosting containerized server stuff on local network only. Since Flatpak apps are sandboxed already (only install verified ones and intall Flatseal).
You can mimick a lot of cloud services with docker containers, that’s why I mentioned it. It’s the surest way to have control over your data. Don’t forget to make it rootless after installing.
Best you can do is get on with it at your pace, treat it like a fun hobby, try stuff, break stuff, read documentation, look at examples and learn.
Also regarding using a laptop as a server, don’t forget to remove the battery. Still running it 24/7 might chew a bit on your electricity bill. ARM devices are more beneficial here.
Finding a good 2fa is such PITA. Is this have free limits too?
I’m tired of keeping a book of grudges everytime a CEO says something. I’ll be waiting for now.
yeah, you know, a security company CEO saying to ignore security. Just sleep on that… what could happen?
Like, it’s my business email, it’s on my cards and my site and pretty much everything else related to the business. Just change all that!?
Your business email is a @proton.me address?
You mentioned a website, wouldn’t you rather have an address @ your website domain?
Site is hosted by the accounting software I use, template based and I do no e-commerce.
Proton Mail is free and reasonably secure/not fucking Google, and I don’t computer enough to host my own site.
I cut lawns and maintain gardens, I just need to be reachable.
Honestly, keep it regardless. None of your emails are encrypted anyway once they’re sent. It has to be another proton user or pgp or similar. 🤷
Unless you’re doing some illegal gardening or mowing someone down (literally & pun intended), there’s no reason to switch.
For the future, it might be worth buying your own domain. Besides looking cool, switching providers is as simple as changing your MX records.
For real. A CEO is a figurehead and can be removed at any time
Bitwarden is pivoting towards the same enshittification path as everything else, so that’s not gonna be a good long term for a password manager. They hired a new ceo whose only noteworthy experience is prepping companies for mergers and acquisitions, and briefly removed messaging on their website about always having a free tier which they reinstated after backlash. All signs point to a sinking ship, imo.
I don’t have the answer for what to use instead since I’m still a paid subscriber with them, but I’m looking around. Probably keepassxc but I don’t know enough to host and sync my own.
Bitwarden is pivoting towards the same enshittification path as everything else
Yeah… I’ve noticed as well… also interested in a good alternative.
Nextcloud passwords. If you don’t want to host yourself you get a free one when you sign up for a friendica account at libranet.de.
KeepassDX on android. Any keepass .kdbx file opener on every OS. .kdbx file saved on a local network shared folder on an always on raspberry pi. Access the folder on all devices, open the file with keepass app.
No sync, no extra sync software, no dangling copies, changes are immediate, decryption happens on device not over the network. Step up to network share over sftp. Tailscale tunnel to access when away from home.
Vaultwarden is a great alternative.
However, Vaultwarden only implements the webvault, the client apps are still only supplied by Bitwarden, which they could make incompatible with Vaultwarden at some point.
the client apps are still only supplied by Bitwarden
Not true. You could also use Keyguard.
That is what gives me pause with vaultwarden… the need for bitwarden proprietary apps.
the community already made a custom server that’s compatible with Bitwarden, I imagine if Bitwarden cut them off then they could make a custom client for it as well.
in fact I believe there are community made Bitwarden apps already for Linux desktops, although I never tried them because I just use the browser extension.
Indeed, and I do not like that I have to have another repository just for the bitwarden app.
I am not really worried though. If they completely fuck up, a fork of the app will be a matter of seconds.
AFAIK the concept behind keepassxc is that it’s an encrypted
.kdbxfile that you sync yourself among your devices by any means you can. There are official apps for Windows/Linux/Mac, browser extensions for Firefox/Chrome/Chromium/Vivaldi, there’s integration with ssh-agent, and 3rd-party apps for Android and iOS.I don’t think Keepass does syncing. I just leave the database in my Nextcloud sync folder on my desktop, and I can always pull the latest version to my phone. It’d be a bit more annoying if I routinely added new entries from my phone since Android won’t let the NC app maintain bidirectional sync, but I pretty much always do it from my desktop, so the workflow is fine for me personally. If you do it on your phone, you can upload the changed version, but I think you’d have to do it manually, so not a great flow, but if it’s a rarity, not too big a deal to me.
write a bash script that rsyncs your keepass database to your other devices and run it once in a while. i have seen way too many online password vaults get hacked to ever bother with them.
this is exhausting
It is. I just made the switch last year and spent forever making hide-my-e-mail adresses for every service , web page and online store I had subscribed to. My Proton subscription just renewed so I guess I’ll wait another 11 months to see how this pans out before I make a decision.
Hide-my-emails keep working after you leave proton if you have your own domain. I left proton last year and the alias I created there still point to my email address. But you have to have it point to a custom domain email address
I started with those, but then thankfully quickly realized it’s a great form of vendor lock.
It’ll still be a pain to migrate, but at least not AS bad as it could have been.
Don’t worry, it’ll keep going. There are so few exceptions to multi-product companies becoming shit in the long term
Proton My Recomendation Pass Vaultwarden/KeepassXC/ChiPass (AI-less KPCX fork) 2FA All of the above ^ or Yubikey Drive Nextcloud, Cryptpad? Meet Element Call? XMPP Call? Lumo PocketPal/Hermes/LMStudio Wallet lmao a non-kyc probably Meet -> Jitsi (Matrix also uses Jitsi as a plugin but I think they’re also working on a native Element solution too).
Jitsi is cool, I’m trying Jami too but is a little slow
