It's been a long time in the making, but I've finally degoogled and largely removed all proprietary software from my personal life. I know this topic is pretty well covered here and elsewhere so just to add to the list of others, here's where I'm at these days:

• OS: Fedora Linux (w/ AMD Radeon GPU)
• Email: Thunderbird w/ hosted email over IMAP
• Calendar/Contacts: Radicale instance w/ DAVx⁵ on Android
• Storage: Syncthing
• Web: Firefox
• Search: Startpage and DuckDuckGo mostly, but still use Google and Bing on occasion
• IM: Signal
• Desktop productivity: LibreOffice when I need it (Collabora Office on Android)
• Notes: Vim, VS Code (Markor on Android); most of my "docs" are just plain text files written in markdown
• Passwords: KeepassXC/DX
• Code editor: Vim, VS Code
• GrapheneOS on mobile, with almost entirely FOSS apps
• Kindle e-book reader with management via Calibre
• Media managed by Kodi with a raspberry pi
• Proxmox hypervisor for Windows/Linux VMs and containers

Gaming under Linux has improved unbelievably these past few years, now that Steam is contributing with their Steam Deck platform. I used to have to dual-boot Windows to keep up with the latest titles, but I wiped it about a year ago and things have been great.

I still rely on Microsoft Excel and Adobe Photoshop for some tasks, but less so now than ever before. Unfortunately, my work will always be a Windows-dominated environment.

I used to rely almost exclusively on Google for almost anything online. Fortunately, I'm much less dependent on Google and their services now. I'm even self-hosting some of my own services nowadays!

• Search engine: Ecosia and DuckDuckGo
• E-mail: Protonmail
• File storage: Nextcloud (selfhosted)
• Online Office Suite: Nextcloud Office (selfhosted)
• Maps: OpenStreetMaps
• 2FA App: Aegis
• Translator: DeepL
• Notes and Tasks: Obsidian.md
• Calendar: An actual wall calendar :)

Every single one of these apps/services used to be provided by google, so I think it's safe to say I've come a long way!

Of course, things could be better. I still use Google Contacts for synchronizing my, hum, contacts. I also use YouTube quite a bit, but as a paying customer my experience with it is just fine. I also use gboard on my phone — for bilingual speakers there's just no good alternative, imho. And, finally, I download/update most of my phone apps through Google Play.

So um…how do I show the lemmyverse that this is a really important post without the shiny meaningless gold coin?

The biggest thing I de-Googled was gmail. I had my own domain already so it wasn't tough to move (to my web hosting provider's included email service).

I switched to Firefox+uBO from Chrome.

They de-Googled RSS for me (now on Newsblur).

Things I still use:

• Drive for backups (but have a local backup in case their AI bans me)
• YouTube Premium (I hate ads)
• Contacts (Cardbook addon for Thunderbird works well with this)
• Calendar (Thunderbird supports natively)
• Keep (Shared shopping list)
• Pixel phone (I don't really care for Apple, either)

Outside of work I’ve degoogled with the exception of google calendar (shared family google calendar so that would need to bring everyone along with me!) and unfortunately the google Wi-Fi/nests.

I would like to swap out the google Wi-Fi but it just seems like such a lot of money to waste and they are working at the moment for the mesh Wi-Fi. I’ve just made sure to disable and opt out to as many of the google analytic tracking as possible.

I deleted my Google accounts today and made a Proton email to replace my previous emails with. I’m now using Firefox and DDG, and it honestly feels much fresher now. I’m happy to finally be exploring alternatives to Google and learning about online security and integrity.

I moved off a while ago at this point... I still have to use some of it because of work being on G-Suites but otherwise my personal stuff has moved.

• Email: Hey & ProtonMail
• Storage: Dropbox
• Notes: SimpleNotes & Obsidian.md
• Chat: Telegram & Matrix/Element
• 2FA: ProtonPass (as of yesterday, Authy before that)
• Passwords: 1Password
• Other: Apple stuff mostly

I degoogled by switching to an iPhone 😅 DuckDuckGo is my default search engine.

100% degoogled. Everything is selfhosted, except for Telegram. Even at job :)

Just switched from Google photos to photoprism. It's pretty awesome! It only took 8 hours to index and label my 17500~ photos (not including the week and a half Google Takeout took). That was the big one for me. Not I am slowly working through all my other google/centralized services and seeing if there are self hosted or decentralized alternatives.

Basically degoogled except YouTube because content creators are on that platform. Also occasionally needs to use Google search because DDG sometimes doesn't work.

pretty effectively!

I use a Searx instance for searching (with the engine it uses set to DDG), Tutanota for email and Piped/Invidious and Libretube for videos. meanwhile on both my phone and tablet I've used ADB to purge all of Google's malware, and Play Services is outright disabled on my tablet lmao (and contrary to what one might think, the only thing it impacts is I don't get app notifications)

and then I use Aurora Store to update Twitch and Discord, and I use alternatives from F-Droid for stuff like the calendar

I have slowly but surely moved everything important off google. My main email is a proton mail now, and I changed my pixel for a oneplus :).

I have started to degoogle bits and pieces. I self-host the majority of the services I need and really enjoyed the journey so far since I learned so much. I am approaching the stage in my life where I have less time to spend on personal hobbies so I fear this path may not be sustainable. In my opinions here are the pros and cons.

Pros:

• Full control of my data
• Pick the ideal tool from the open source community
• Learning experience
• Engagement with community

Cons:

• Technical knowledge needed to setup and maintain self-hosted tools
• Self-hosted tools have security risks (best to put everything behind VPN)
• Disparate tools don't connect together (requires additional automation configuration)
• Additional costs for services including and not limited to: domain name, email, backup storage, self-host server hardware, VPN, and donations to devs
• Higher personal downtime due to lacking features, server and service maintenance
• Time sink to learn, research, general devops of tools, maintenance of server

Key services to name a few:

• File storage - Nextcloud
• File sync - Syncthing
• Office- Nextcloud + Collabora
• Email - Mailfence
• Photos - Photoprism

So far there are more negatives than positives, but the positives still outweigh negatives. I do have to say degoogling is getting easier than before.

DuckDuckGo got a shoutout from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds this week. Much smoother than Hawaii Five-Oh's "Bing it."

As far as my PCs, I use a subscription service for email (fastmail.com). I'm still using the Chrome browser, but at some point I may have to go to Firefox for the sake of my uBlock Origin extension which I rely on heavily. Functionality of that extension on Chrome may be reduced at some point by the forced migration to Google's new extension platform (Manifest V3).

I have to have a Google account for my Android phone. I don't think I'll ever be able to get away from that. I mean you have two choices with phones, Android or iOS. I'm not going anywhere near Apple so Android is it. I've audited all my privacy settings in my Google account to minimize personal data, whether they actually honor those settings or not, who knows.

Tried DDG a few times over the years. Sorry, but it just doesn't do it for me. Results were terrible. Google had lots of results and it was just too much effort to keep switching from DDG if it doesn't provide an answer. Because I know Google will.

Working on it
Had to give them some money for a Pixel 7, at least it was half off plus a trade-in on the old phone Installed GrapheneOS a couple of days ago

Proton's services, Cryptomator, Invideous, GrapheneOS, a handful of apps from f-droid.

Also, quick plug - !privacyguides@lemmy.one is the official Privacy Guides community on Lemmy!

I'm still in the Google android stuff just because of convenience but I have ditched Chrome and Google search. Eventually I would like to do more.

The only thing I still hold onto my account for is YouTube. I pay for mailbox.org which covers email, calendar and cloud stuff. Their website could be better but the service is quality and their privacy policy is tight. When I was on android I used a bunch of custom roms with microg. My favourite ended up being calyxos but they all had a little jank here or there. I dearly miss NewPipe for android as a replacement for the official youtube app.

I deleted my google drive content so they can't arbitrarily decide something I wrote is worth banning my account over or use it to train their AIs, I made a backup, obviously.

Even though my content is safe, deleting it off of Google's servers felt like drowning my own children in a bathtub

I was degoogled until late last year. Then 2 things happened. 1, I got a Fitbit watch, and 2, I started a delivery gig job where I needed play store and google services. Fortunately I might be getting another job soon (got a conditional job offer yesterday) and quitting the delivery since I'm making less money now. Also, looking at getting a different watch. When these things happen, I'll probably reinstall LineageOS without play services and delete the fitbit account (which is soon going to require switching to a google account.)

I have hosted email and nextcloud that I use for storage, calendar, etc. I've lived without google before with no inconvenience and I can do it again.

Basically outside of Youtube I don’t use any Google service. Started by migrating to Kagi search, and while it requires a subscription, its a price I am willing to pay for a search engine that actually work good.

Everything else I use a mix of FOSS and subscription services.

The problem is that I'm pretty sure that spammers are specifically targeting Google with a lot of their effort because of the size of its userbase.

So DDG or whoever else can be a solution for some, but if they get a big enough userbase, the SEO dollars are going to go towards hitting them too. Leveraging smaller size can't be a fix for everyone.

Kinda like Reddit and the Fediverse. Right now -- and in the past -- there's a limited amount of money in trying to jam spam in front of the userbase's eyeballs on lemmy and kbin. But whenever the userbase grows by a factor of ten, so does the return-on-investment to a spammer in gaming their system. If the entire Reddit userbase collectively moved here tomorrow, the spammers would very quickly follow.