How good is Proton as a paid all-in-one solution for e-mail, calendar, and cloud storage?
I’ve been a paid subscriber since they were born.
They are very good, particularly the all-in-one. Lotta good stuff bundled into a subscription.
They are, however, drifting in the “TechBros” direction — or at least, their CEO is.
Still a great product today, and it may stay that way for decades. But, tentatively, I smell the waft of enshittification.
What in particular is giving you that sense of enshittification atm?
Use it for years and have nothing to complain about. Well, if you have a custom domain with ä,ö, or ü then it gets translated into gibberish. Still works but doesn’t look pretty.
E-Mail app works as expected. I receive mails and can send them but I’m not a power user who expect any great features.
Calendar works as well. Share it with other proton user and also with an external person. The external can’t create events for us in the shared calendar but that wasn’t a problem so far, i just did it when we had an event.
Cloud storage is fine too. I don’t use the desktop client but I know there is one for Windows. The upload in the Browser works well and sharing files or folders with externals works with an easy link as you might know it from Google drive.
VPN is also as expected. Huge range of IP’s so you will always find one which isn’t banned by your streaming service or other website. Hadn’t any leaks yet while torrenting.
Hadn’t any contact with the support since setting it up but then it was fast and helpful as far as i remember. As Visonary account i got the priority support so I can’t say how representative that is for the regular support.
@VolumetricShitCompressor @Blaze honestly even just the android email client is somewhat slow, and doesn’t allow downloading emails to save them locally AFAIK. I respect the whole encryption thing, and I know we’re comparing to enshittified services, but there has to be something better out there.
Edit: see below maybe this will improve in the next couple of months.
Technically speaking, it’s good. But 2 questions:
Do you need end-to-end encrypted emails and cloud storage?
If not, you may find cheaper alternatives (if cost is a thing for you). :)What would be those alternatives? My main point would be to get away from microsoft with my mail and a somewhat sizable cloud storage (0,5-1 TB).
What about kSuite? Are they better?
Between Proton & kSuite, both are good, you just need to compare prices and features. :)
Both have beautiful and modern interfaces - you can create a free account on both to test.
Both companies offer very different services from each other included in their suite, e.g., Proton has a VPN and Password Manager, while Infomaniak offer video call, transfer of large files, office online etc.
It also depends on whether you read your emails in a mobile app, browser or email client and the importance you attach to E2E encryption.
So E2E encryption would be Proton and accessing mails on mobile apps would be kSuite, right?
@VolumetricShitCompressor @Blaze I heard good things. However I don’t like that their mail system is a walled garden due to their e2e encryption. You cannot use POP3 or IMAP with default clients like Thunderbird, at least not without running a bridge.
Is there a competitor that supports default clients and has a good cloud storage plan (0,5-1 TB)?
Hmm I’ve seen them in the op but didn’t hear anything about them prior. Any opinions about kSuite?
@VolumetricShitCompressor What kills it for me is the lack of IMAP/POP/SMTP support. I realise this is at odds with the E2E encryption, but honestly I find that portability more valuable than E2E. E2E in email is kinda overrated unless both parties are using PGP or something I think, and even then it’s not necessary on a provider level.
I would also look into allegations of the creator supporting Trump before considering it again (saying this neutrally as I haven’t verified it myself yet).
Does this mean that I can’t integrate their mal addresses into existing mail/calendar apps? I already have to have an ms exchange account that I must not use via outlook app, ao I have already two calendar widgets since my private outlook address stopped working on gmail. State of tech in 2025 smh
@VolumetricShitCompressor When I was looking into it the other day, that’s what it seemed like to me. Goes for both them and tuta (the two most popular EU alternatives), and seems to be a direct consequence of their privacy focus.
kSuite is Google Workspace alternative from Switzerland.
Still no lemmy lol
The creator mods !PurchaseWithPurpose@lemmy.world , as you can see on the footer
Yeah, saw that. Just think it’s funny they have it in the footer but not in the graph
The OS listing of Mint and Ubuntu is just begging for a distro war. Better off leaving the listing at Linux and BSD.
As an alternative to Google Docs / Office, “Docs” by the French 🇫🇷(DINUM) and German 🇩🇪 governments (ZenDiS) is missing: https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/
It’s Open Source, Self-hostable and European + it looks very polished ;)
Hope they’ll do a spreadsheet app too eventually
They are :) https://www.beta.gouv.fr/startups/grist.numerique.gouv.fr.html
Although this one is still at an earlier stage. You can see how they’re planning it out and who might develop it (only in French).
Nice. My french isn’t that good, but if I understand correctly they are constructing it right now :))
En quelques dates Investigation 15 mars 2024
Construction 1er septembre 2024
They investigated in march 2024 and are building it since september 2024
i’d love to see maybe weekly threads where people share their opinion on certain categories. like email, hosting, domain, etc
This community (!PurchaseWithPurpose@lemmy.world) isn’t really used for anything else so the previous posts about specific topics are easy to see. They don’t necessarily have many comments but it might help you find other places these images posted to.
It’s too bad there are so many communities where this stuff is posted to, real downside of federated content if you ask me because it’s so easy to miss content added in the comment of a duplicate post you never see.
I always advocate for consolidating !buyfromeu@feddit.org and !BuyFromEU@europe.pub to !buyeuropean@feddit.uk , but the mods of those two communities aren’t open to the idea
Why shall the to europe consolidate into feddit.uk (uk is not member of eu anymore) Why not the other way around?
But yes, it‘s difficult to distinguish or choose between and follow the duplicates.
Maybe we should tell them it’ll be like a European Union of EU communities! :p
Too bad, i’d be in favor as well. Even if two of them consolidate that would be a step in the right direction.
Feel free to chime in on https://lemm.ee/post/58832070?scrollToComments=true
Feel free to create them!
IDK Floorp, and I have limited experience w/Zen.
I have tested and used every other one on your list.
They are all pretty good, considering the current state of the Internet.
My daily drivers are Librewolf and Vivaldi.
Bruce Schneier says Vivaldi is secure enough for him.
Ecosia also have a desktop browser. It’s basically ungoogled chrome with a green default theme. You can also change the search engine to something else
I use their search engine but wasn’t convinced the browser offered much, personally.
I think Mojeek was missed for free search engines.
Yacy. P2P search engine. Well can used local only too. Crawl the web at your own.
Do you use this? It looks amazing, but almost too good to be true.
I set it up on my Raspberry and run it locally in island mode. So I use it separately from duckduckgo. The quality of the results depends on which mode you use and what you are crawling You can set rules etc. for the search results or their sorting, but I haven’t dealt with that, but it looks powerful in terms of scope. The tasks for crawling can also be set very precisely, including how much hardware resources can be made available for usage and much more. You can also set when and whether these are repeated. With the depth, the whole thing can quickly take on extreme proportions and should not be exaggerated. As I don’t surf the web that much, I have relatively few sources. If I don’t find anything and have to use DDG, I take the domain from the best result and create a new crawl task and then start it. It is definitely worth a look. If you really want to, you can definitely host a powerful search engine yourself.
Thanks, I’m going to have to think about this.
I miss librewolf
Thank you @FallenWalnut@lemmy.world
Is there any browser with account and synchronization - but decentralized? Even just saving local files so I can sync a folder.
Firefox used to let you self-hosted the account sync. They changed the method they used a few years back and it wasn’t backwards compatible, so I stopped self hosting, but they might still have that option.
So i guess this week is about office suits, I barely use it personally (markdown notes work fine) and just open whatever is send to me (most part is Google and Microsoft), but I will download and check the alternatives. Have tried LibreOffice in the past, but some years have passed son will definitely check them out.
Last few weeks i heard a few times about OpenOffice, but it’s not on this list. Guess this the official website Anyone here willing to argue why I should or shouldn’t try it?
OpenOffice is wildly outdated. LibreOffice was started from a copy of OpenOffice and is under continuous development.
They actually have an issue currently because OpenOffice refuse to take down their website and people keep downloading this piece of old software with the consequences that brings (security bugs, putting people off free software etc.
More info if you’re interested: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/10/12/open-letter-to-apache-openoffice/
Thanks, I was surprised when I searched for it online. Just saw it mentioned a bunch of times and that website wasn’t very convincing me to try it. But now I now so thanks, and @Unleaded8163@fedia.io as well
I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong or embarrassingly out of date. LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice back when Oracle bought Sun because their trademark lawyers were all like “Screw you, we own ‘OpenOffice’ now” to the open source community. Then Oracle realised that owning OpenOffice wasn’t all that valuable when your company’s reputation in the open source community is that of Oracle’s, so gave it to Apache. OpenOffice seems to still have some life, but I think LibreOffice is the one most developers and users have stuck with.
