So here I want to document my try to de-googlify myself.
Why?
So why do this? There are a couple of reasons.
Privacy concerns. We all know Google tracks you, it doesn’t matter if they really do it for ads, I don’t like the concept.
All your eggs in one basket. What if Google goes down, unlikely, but what if they close a service (that happened), what if they get hacked? Having most of your computing (at least in web) done via Google is simply dumb IMO.
Not agreeing with Google’s polices. “Don’t like it, don’t use it”
How Googlifyed are you?
I started as any other and slowly added Google services to my everyday life. But lately I’ve been cutting service by service, wherever I could.
Also keep in mind there’s nothing you can do about indirect tracking.
Make yourself a Facebook account with just your name and you’ll see people you know appear as suggestions.
If anybody you know tags you in a photo they’ve uploaded its all building on those relationship databases.
I would make the argument that keeping the trackers and loading them with erroneous data would be more effective.
Setup a honeypot phone and send it bogus GPS data lol. Things like that would be interesting.
You can use Nextcloud for more than just replacing your Google drive. I am using it for my emails, files, music streaming, calendar, contacts and notes sync with my Android phone, Trello replacement and saving my bookmarks.
If you want to use a browser that is based on Chromium like Chrome is, you should try Vivaldi. It is perfect.
//edit
For translation I am using DeepL which is even better when it comes to translating texts or even files.
Just rent a server and host it there. That’s what I did. Or if you have a computer, NAS or Raspberry Pi left, you can install it on there as well.
I would recommend to host it on a server somewhere, so you have fast and reliable access to it. I am using nextcloud on a daily basis and besides my games I host everything in my cloud, so that I can have access to it from everywhere.
Well, you should be able to rent space inside a data center and put your own PC there but that is too expensive to be honest. Why do you want to own the hardware? If you rent a server and secure the nextcloud enough you shouldn’t run into problems.
That’s true but not likely to happen I am renting a VPS since 2002 at the same provider and it only had one outage that was even caused by myself due to a distro upgrade that destroyed the whole server But fingers crossed that you will achieve everything as you want.
It is a bit of a trade-off between convenience and flexibility. Personally I am using the Nextcloud snap on my own “server” at home. The snap is always quite a bit behind the Nextcloud server releases though.
So far I had a very good experience and I am a PC and Linux noob compared to you.
The snap actually has beta and experimental channels if you want the newer stuff. You can even run the very latest (potentially broken) code with: sudo snap install nextcloud --edge
we’ll see.
I am renting a VPS since 2002 at the same provider and it only had one outage that was even caused by myself due to a distro upgrade that destroyed the whole server 