LinuxForYou is Ditching Google

Community Blog
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Well everyone, the time has finally arrived for me to say goodbye to Google. This is something I’ve meant to do for quite a while now, and I never really got around to it for one reason or another. For a long time now, I’ve been concerned with Google’s privacy practices. In addition to this, Google has continually moved in a direction of censorship e.g. Dragonfly, although it was later cancelled. They’ve also been making some questionable firing decisions amongst there AI Ethics Team, and they’ve been caught union busting. With all of these things taken into account I find myself in a position where I no longer want to support this behavior.

There are many threads on the forum like this one, but this is my journey. I don’t plan on going as hardcore as some of the other users here because convenience is still factor. My primary goal is to move away from Google Workspace (formerly GSuite), and Google Search. First let’s about the steps that I’ve already taken.

Once upon a time I was Chrome user, however, I switched Firefox years ago and never looked back. I may switch to Brave at some point depending on how things go. For a couple of years now I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine. Although, I’ll admit I’m guilty of using !g from time to time. Signal has also been my default messaging app for a while now. There are some services I’ll continue to use. These are primarily YouTube, Google Play Services, and Google Maps because the alternatives just aren’t quite there yet. But here’s my plan moving forward.

Step One (In Progress): Import emails from Gmail to ProtonMail and begin switching my accounts over. I’ve already imported all my emails over this morning and setup email forwarding. Additionally, some of my accounts already use my ProtonMail.

Step Two (Pending): Move files from Google Drive and Google Photos to another service. I’m thinking maybe ProtonMail Drive, but I’m open to suggestions if you have any.

Step Three (Pending): Find an alternative online office suit. I know some have mentioned Collabora in the past, but it doesn’t appear to be production ready yet.

Step Four (Pending): Find alternative apps for those one my phone. I use a Google Pixel 4 and many apps like Phone, GBoard, etc… Will need to be replaced.

Completing these tasks will make things much more oriented with my personal beliefs. I’ll continue to provide updates on my journey, any as always and feedback or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Kind regards,
LinuxForYou

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Something you might like is Sync.com, just another option worth researching into.

Zoho Office Suite would probably be my next best one in terms of usability & online. If the requirement was just offline, then LibreOffice would be my number one choice.

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The other main option I am aware of is OnlyOffice.

I’m assuming that you don’t want ot use MS office online.

If you don’t already have Fdroid on your phone, I’d suggest installing it. For switching apps over to non-google, it’s probably best done one by one as you have time.

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I am just curious why everyone who is against censorship recommends Signal and not Telegram. Signal is based in California and if I recall some of their employees were speaking in support of censorship. Why the hate for Telegram? Even Wendell seems to dislike it for some reason. Is it because it was made by the Russian guy?

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I think because Telegram does not default to a secure encrypted messaging. The feature is not that easy to find. Also the telegram desktop client in Windows and Linux doesn’t have secure encrypted capabilities built into them. The “chat rooms” isnt also encrypted and cannot be encrypted.

Also to my understanding the encryption isn’t a standard encryption method so I guess cracking the algorithm isn’t as well tested as the more popular ones.

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On the same path here, along with Windows…
Try Mailo.com for both. Works as an exchange service, that means you can have Contacts, Calendar, Notes and Reminders synced easily like in Gmail.

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Since you already own a Pixel phone you could think about using GrapheneOS. It is most definitely a Google free experience since none of the Google apps are installed. It is also very privacy focused and not such a mess like many of other custom ROMs are. You can use F-Droid for free software apps and Aurora Store for access to free apps from the PlayStore without needing a Google account. With the Aurora Store you can still install and update things like Whatsapp or Spotify.

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I second what @anon27075190 said, use GrapheneOS. Of all the AOSP derivatives I’ve tried, /e/, lineageOS, lineageOS for microg, and GrapheneOS, the latter is just the best experience if you’re concerned about privacy, in my opinion.

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LineageOS is still good for frequent updates through the nightly branch however, and is entirely bloatware free on its own (non microg version)

I use microG on vanilla LineageOS by running magisk and installing the sandboxed version of xposed framework along with the systemless microG magisk installer and force signature spoofing through the open source xposed module FakeGapps.

Its more steps than usual but that way I’m running vanilla lineage with microG installed through a compatibility layer in stead of being integrated.

Also +1000 to recommending F-Droid and Aurora store. Both are phenomenal and F-Droid is the way the Play Store should have been in my opinion.

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Zoho seems like it could work, although I do wonder about their privacy practices. Sync actually looks very promising. Thanks for the suggestion.

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I have been using F-Droid on and off for a while. It’s great, but it’s limited due to it only containing open source apps. Graphene seems pretty promising and I may install it after I finish paying this phone off, as it’s currently still in a lease. I’ll be checking out Aurora too.

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I haven’t looked at it since I signed up. Last time I did look, it wasn’t super sketch as I was signing up as a paid user. Not sure what it’s like for a free user.

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What about Mega?

I know Kim Dotcom spoke out against them but that may just be because he’s pissed off, because I don’t recall any actual evidence that they aren’t trustworthy. They advertise end-to-end encryption, it’s available on every platform (Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, and Linux) and reasonably-priced. Also their photo backup works well.

Here’s their privacy policy:
https://mega.nz/privacy

I do plan on switching over to ProtonDrive once that’s fully up and running. I have a visionary subscription so I use it for some stuff, but until they release a desktop and mobile app it’s not that useful to me.

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My last bastion of google would be my phone, and my email.

IMO the phone is inescapable, but I guess I should finally switch to a different mail provider.

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I’ve been using Mega for quite some time now, mainly to sync my Uni work across my laptop and desktop, works quite well for what I use it for.
Excellent Linux support for their desktop sync program. The code is public too (not FOSS though).

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Email is kind of a bitch. What I did was just changed them as they came through over the course of about a week. I never bothered setting up forwarding or anything. And I also unsubbed from stuff that I no longer cared about, so now I get less mailing list stuff too.

And another thing to think about: You can use encrypted email, but it really makes no difference if MS, Google, Amazon, etc. are all sharing your data anyways. Like sure, Google can’t read anything that’s in your inbox if you’re not using Gmail, but if they already know the ads that Best Buy, REI, Burger King, or whatever are sending you, they don’t need your inbox to make those ties. The only place encrypted email really matters is private conversations. The rest is just out of principle.

Though I must admit there’s always a constant internal struggle whether any of this really matters or not. Like… society is already fucked anyways. Me breaking a few digital links here and there isn’t even going to save myself because it’s more of a spiderweb of data, not a chain that can just be broken with one link.

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@aLilBabyOtter I’ve actually had a Mega account for a while. Since Proton Drive isn’t going to be available for a bit, I’ve decided to move my files there for a while.

Update: I’ve downloaded NewPipe as a replacement for the YouTube app. The Play store has also been switched out in favor of F-Droid and Aurora, which was a great recommendation by the way. Honestly, the hardest part about switching has been finding a privacy respecting alternative to Gboard. I tried AnySoft, but it’s key press animation made everything feel incredibly laggy. Simple Keyboard was nice, but a bit too simple. At the very least predictive text support and emoji support would be nice.

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I’ve been using AnySoft for quite a while now without any lag or other issues. Have you tried disabling the animations?

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Almost inescapable. Once you’re on LineageOS, its another 5-10 commands and a systemless debloater magisk module to replace and remove google dependencies.

Although if your device can’t modify A-GPS (if its config is loaded on the SIM card) then every time you use GPS I believe your location pings a google server, but falls back to your ISP if it doesn’t load. You can’t change this behavior however on newer devices as far as I can tell.

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After also experiencing anysoft keyboard’s heavy resource usage I went back to google keyboard for its emoji search, clean design and lightweight resource usage.

Then google became evil, and I settled with OpenBoard off of F-Droid. Fully open source, extremely lightweight and material design. The project aims to look and feel like google keyboard but without the proprietary nonsense and telemetry. It also supports all recent emoji fonts, which is important if you want all the latest emojis and/or installed your own custom emoji set like me (joypixels is my favorite by far)

OpenBoard