News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:How to Live Without Google by mhd on Thursday September 14, 2017 @08:57AM (#15247455)
I tried most of that a few months ago. The problems, as many others pointed out, is that instead of being eaten by one monster, you're being nibbled at by a few.

Stuff that worked:

- gmail/calendar -> fastmail. I still miss a few features of the gmail web interface, but in general I'm very happy with the switch.

- reader -> feedbin. Yeah, as if I had a proper choice.

Partial success:

- search -> DuckDuckGo: I find myself hitting !g often enough for more "fuzzy" searches, or ones where I'm looking for German content. Which happens often enough, as I've had wikipedia/imdb shortcuts for ages and so don't need to google that only to click on the first link popping up.

- maps -> Bing/OpenStreetMap: I'm mostly a desktop user when it comes to maps, and find myself using the !bm tag in DDG more and more. Directions are good and it zooms faster on my Linux desktop. Mobile situation ain't that great.

Failed:

- mobile -> LineageOs: I got my old Nexus 4 and put LineageOs on it. But it's hard to get by just with F-Droid apps alone. As a compromise, I'm using a cheap iPhone 5c for most stuff these days. I'm seriously considering ditching smartphones altogether and lugging my Sony reader, Sansa Fuze and an old Nokia flip phone around again...

Re:How to Live Without Google by glogla on Thursday September 14, 2017 @11:02AM (#15248703)
If you do !sp instead of !g, you get google results, but filteret through startpage, which should protect a little bit of your privacy.
Re:How to Live Without Google by carrier_lost on Thursday September 14, 2017 @01:38PM (#15250408)
Being "nibbled at by a few" could be beneficial when it comes to privacy. Using many services means no single service has a large amount of data about you.
Re:How to Live Without Google by mr_sturd on Thursday September 14, 2017 @09:12AM (#15247593)
> DuckDuckGo: I find myself hitting !g often enough for more "fuzzy" searches

I find myself doing this, too, from time to time, but I have come to rely on the "bang shortcut" feature for so many other sites. It's a great feature.

Re:How to Live Without Google by lucideer on Thursday September 14, 2017 @07:12PM (#15253248)
> ones where I'm looking for German content.

I've found their handy country toggle switch at the top of the page works better and better for this sort of thing recently.

> Bing/OpenStreetMap

There's also wego.here.com but with the amount of wonderful work that goes into the OSM community, the quality of their data, and the polish of some of the modern SaaS options for devs like Mapbox and Mapzen, it really surprises me that the UX on openstreetmap.org itself remains so basic and... not very useful.

> Mobile situation ain't that great.

In case you're still looking, can't recommend Maps.me highly enough.

Re:How to Live Without Google by detaro on Thursday September 14, 2017 @09:02AM (#15247500)
For mobile maps, have you tried https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=net.osmand.plus ? I'm not sure how good navigation is in there (never tried), but having local OSM maps is great
Re:How to Live Without Google by DaveWalk on Thursday September 14, 2017 @06:22PM (#15252974)
I love OSM (I contribute whenever I can!), and navigation on OsmAnd~ is possible, but Google Maps is far, far easier to use. I really struggle with a Google Maps replacement; I've also tried "Here We Go" but it doesn't hold a candle to GMaps unfortunately
Re:How to Live Without Google by detaro on Friday September 15, 2017 @01:18PM (#15258906)
Yeah, for navigation Google Maps is hard to beat.

Everything else I strongly prefer OSM though: their maps are (at least around here) way better, esp. if you aren't driving, they are offline, the apps are less laggy, ...

Re:How to Live Without Google by mhd on Thursday September 14, 2017 @10:49AM (#15248574)
Yes, I used that. It worked pretty well and the map download features was rather convenient on vacation. Still got lost in Venice, but I won't blame that on the app...
Re:How to Live Without Google by tome on Thursday September 14, 2017 @10:09AM (#15248152)
> - gmail/calendar -> fastmail. I still miss a few features of the gmail web interface, but in general I'm very happy with the switch.

I've heard good things about fastmail, but is there a provider that hosts open source calendar software? I think I'd slightly prefer that.

Re:How to Live Without Google by kop316 on Thursday September 14, 2017 @10:41AM (#15248478)
To sort of answer your question, I use Fastmail to host my email and contacts, and I self-host Nextcloud, and that has my calendar and tasks. I use Caldav to have Fastmail see my calendar/tasks, and it is entirely transparent to me.

I can also have Fastmail host my calendar/tasks, and that can use caldav as well.

Re:How to Live Without Google by dublinben on Thursday September 14, 2017 @10:56AM (#15248641)
There's a calendar in Kolab: https://kolabnow.com/feature/calendar
Re:How to Live Without Google by mi100hael on Thursday September 14, 2017 @11:38AM (#15249082)
NextCloud has CalDAV and CardDAV extensions for contact & calendar syncing just like Google. It's self-hosted, though.
Re:How to Live Without Google by qznc on Thursday September 14, 2017 @10:45AM (#15248519)
I use mailbox.org, they use a customized Open-Xchange. Not sure if it is the open source community edition, though.
Re:How to Live Without Google by omnimus on Thursday September 14, 2017 @11:51AM (#15249202)
I use mailbox too. It is privacy minded email/caldav host with great price and nice ui.

I am not sure if they use any proprietary software though.

Re:How to Live Without Google by arosier on Thursday September 14, 2017 @07:42PM (#15253416)
>I still miss a few features of the gmail web interface, but in general I'm very happy with the switch.

Curious what features you miss from Gmail?

Re:How to Live Without Google by qquark on Thursday September 14, 2017 @05:14PM (#15252567)
> - reader -> feedbin. Yeah, as if I had a proper choice.

I don't know about feedbin, but if you're looking for an alternative to reader, inoreader works reasonably well, and doesn't feel like it is missing too many features.

Re:How to Live Without Google by mhd on Thursday September 14, 2017 @05:19PM (#15252612)
I was mostly talking about having no choice but to move away from Google. There's plenty of choice to move to, and after Old REader, Feedly and TinyTiny RSS I ended up with Feedbin. I could do with a desktop application if I didn't use it from both work and home (don't even care too much about mobile).
Re:How to Live Without Google by qquark on Friday September 15, 2017 @02:42AM (#15255114)
I see, I thought you meant the opposite because I had a hard time finding a good replacement myself. I think I tried the 3 others you mentioned and didn't find them suitable to my preferences at the time either.
Re:How to Live Without Google by hadrien01 on Thursday September 14, 2017 @05:08PM (#15252524)
> But it's hard to get by just with F-Droid apps alone

You can use Yalp to download free Google Play apps. But you'll still need Google Play Services most of the time.