Screw that microSD slot, give me the full fat SD slot like my Treo 650 had back in 2007! The spring loaded kind so I can lose yet another SD when I pull the phone out of my pocket and the card snags on my jeans and goes flying and I don’t realize it until I’m 30 minutes away from where it happened, and now some guy in the AutoZone parking lot has my dog photos and Space Trader save files.
You really should consider dropping Ring for something that doesn’t automatically and enthusiastically give your recordings to cops without a warrant or even a subpoena. I wish I could recommend something cloud based but they all suck; right now I’m planning to install PoE IPTV cameras around the outside of the house so the feeds stay within my network, with a remote access tunnel for myself and family members when we’re not home.
Proton is not the paragon of privacy they claim to be; they have been caught lying about log retention and have volunteered subscriber info to authorities with zero resistance. I use Fastmail for email/calendar/files, I know they don’t advertise themselves as “the one true privacy service” like Proton does, but they have a strong privacy policy and I’ve had almost 100% uptime from them over the past decade. They are also less expensive than Proton, though they don’t offer a VPN. They don’t sell your data or run any advertising in their apps and services, and they haven’t jumped on the “AI” bandwagon like Proton and other similar services have. Their mobile apps are top notch and their desktop app, while just an Electron-wrapped thing, is still pretty damned good and works great on Linux. The web app itself is 100% compatible with Firefox and its far superior forks like Librewolf and Waterfox; it’s my main working environment even in OpenBSD where I spend much of my day.
A good alternative to Spotify is Tidal, a little less expensive and they pay artists much more than the other services, plus they offer independent artists an easy way to distribute their own music, similar to Bandcamp.
Maps is a tough one, Google and Apple have cornered the market there. HERE Maps used to be great, especially a decade ago with Windows Phone devices, but I haven’t looked at them lately.
It’s only going to get more difficult to get Big Tech out of our lives over the next few years, so there’s never a better time than right now to start. I wish you success and freedom on this journey, my friend.
/e/OS is that middle ground between GrapheneOS and stock Android, and it has most of the benefits of the former while stripping away most of the deficiencies of the latter. You also don’t have to use Murena’s cloud suite, but it’s pretty good for what it is if you do want or need that part of it.
And a bonus is that /e/OS runs on every device that can run GrapheneOS in addition to other devices, and the Fairphone 6+ is one of them.
I’ll say it again: it was my experience at the time, ten years ago. There is no misinformation. Apparently the situation has changed for the better for Plex users and that’s great. But I’m not going to change what I said, because it was what I experienced; to do so would be misinformation.
Why would I lie? It was my experience at the time, if it has changed for the better since then, that’s great for Plex users.
Plex requires a Plex Pass subscription to share outside of your local network. Plex doesn’t allow you to watch media on your local network if your internet service is down, even if you have the Pass, because the service requires a constant connection to the Plex service itself. You can’t use apps on most streaming boxes and sticks without a Pass subscription. Plex records telemetry on all of your viewing habits and shares it with any of your associates who also use the service.
I switched from Plex to Emby a decade ago because of the restriction on local network streaming without an internet connection. My internet service went down and I said to myself “well I can at least watch my locally hosted files on my tv sitting next to the server”. Nope, not allowed. I emailed Plex support about it once my internet was back and they said that wasn’t a bug, it was by design. I dropped it then and there even though I had a lifetime Pass subscription.
I forgot to mention as an alternative to Fastmail, Disroot.org. I have an account with them and it’s functionally very similar to Fastmail and Proton, though their backend is based on Nextcloud and it has that baggage so it may not be your thing. Definitely worth checking out though as it’s free and the only hurdle to signing up is passing a human review (as in, real humans making sure you’re a real human). It’s run by a group of folks who have strong positive positions on privacy and decentralization.
Librewolf is great, and you can self-host Mozilla Sync if you choose to use that feature (Librewolf disables it by default). I know some people prefer Waterfox, and I used it in the past before Librewolf existed; I feel they are both great alternatives to Firefox and far superior to any Chromium-based browser.