The last year I’ve been making a conscious effort to pivot away from proprietary/american tech, for a mix of reasons. I’m increasingly worried about #privacy, data collection, data sovereignity, that kind of things. Not wanting to have more or less my entire life stored on servers inside american privacy and data laws jurisdiction. Wanting to support #european tech. And, where possible, a preference for open source #foss #floss #libre software. I’ve been quite in the «apple fanboy» category for the last 20+ years, and deeply buried in the whole iCloud ecosystem. Partly because of Apple’s traditional stance on privacy, and the whole «if a service is free, you’re the product» thing. I used to look forward to #apple event keynotes like others do to football matches. The last handful of iterations of #macOS, #iOS, macs and iPhones has sparked steadily decreasing amounts of enthusiasm from me though. Anyway, the last year has seen me replace most iCloud services with @protonprivacy , my macbook pro with a @tuxedocomputers infinitybook pro running #linux, and my iPhone with a #Fairphone 6 running @murena /e/OS. And a patchwork of other services and apps to replace what I used to have. Here's a summary, and some questions to others. 1/n
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One thing I have in the back of my head my while doing this is that the stuff I end up using has to be really user friendly and intuitive. I’m doing this for myself now, first, but the solutions I adopt are the ones I will recommend to my friends and family in the future. They might not be as intrinsically interested in experimenting with tech as me, and basically stuff need to just work. 2/n
Nothing can really fully replace iCloud (google was obviously never an option). But I’ve made good use of Proton mail, and Proton drive. Looking very much forward to the promised Proton drive linux client. Also, I tried uploading my entire 100K+ iCloud photos album with Proton drive’s photo sync feature. It kind of worked, and eventually completed (took two months), but the app behaves way too slow and lacks the features to replace Apple’s photos app. That might change, though, as Proton drive is being developed. Also, Proton VPN is very good, although I miss a few features I used to have on NordVPN. I was sad to let #1Password go, but with Proton pass included in my subscription I couldn’t really defend the double expense. So all in all, #Proton yeay! 3/n
Missing out on iMessage group chats was kind of a hard one, as 98% of people I know use iPhones. Still, I couldn’t let that stop the decision. Many people I know use @signalapp already, and I’ve managed to convince some others to start using it. I use Signal as my primary messaging service, and resort to (not so) good old SMS otherwise. 4/n
I’ve always preferred Apple’s Numbers, Pages and especially Keynote to their MS equivalents, but I’ve needed both, because of reasons and work. Now I only use @libreoffice . Calc and Writer are amazing, and fully replaces both Apple and MS equivalents, afaic. Warming up to Impress will take a little more getting used to, though. I was *very* fond of Keynote. And all my Keynote presentations are going to need some massive reworking to ever look decent in Impress, is the first impression after trying to convert a couple of them. Not looking forward to that job, but I guess I’ll take them one at a time when I need them. But all in all, I'm very very comfortable and happy about going all in on LibreOffice. 5/n
@hsorlie Glad you like it! Support for importing Apple's proprietary, closed Keynote files is provided by the Document Liberation Project: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/DLP/Libraries/libetonyek – Feel free to send them example files that don't look so great in LibreOffice, so that they can improve compatibility. Thanks!
@libreoffice I had no idea you could import keynote files! Thanks for the tip! I will definitely try this. What I've done so far is export to powerpoint from keynote, and open the export with impress. I suspect that the first step is where it goes wrong.