1 month without US tech giants

For the last month or so, I've been running an experiment living as much as possible without American tech giants. That's what this fool says on an American streaming platform. Okay, I obviously didn't get to 100%, but I actually got surprisingly far. I got a German laptop with a mostly German operating system running software and internet services that are almost entirely European and or open source, and then I also got a Dutch phone with a mostly French operating system, which I managed to use pretty much completely without Google and Co. too. I can tell you right away that I won't be sticking with every one of these after my experiment, but I also ended up liking a lot of these solutions way more than I thought I would. Here's what I found. As a disclaimer, I got both the laptop and the phone sent over as review units, but none of the companies mentioned in this video have sponsored it or had any control over what I said. Instead, this video was sponsored by Nebula, who I'll talk about later. Okay, starting with the devices, this is a laptop from Tuxedo, which is as German as a machine can get. Tuxedo is a German company who even assembles all of their machines in Germany. Now, of course, they use 4 components, like an Intel chip, for example, but the operating system here is Tuxedo OS, which is actually their own version of Linux, too. It's based on something called Ubuntu and KDE Plasma, and KDE, the developers of the desktop environment, and also many of the popular pre-installed open source apps on it, actually have their headquarters in Berlin, not far from where I work. In other words, this laptop is really about as local as I could get for myself in a hyper globalized world. Now, I've never actually seriously tried using Linux in the past beyond WSL, and so there was a bit of a learning curve, but I guess these days even people like PewDiePie are using it, so I wasn't too worried. And one benefit with Tuxedo is that their machines are actually specifically made for Linux, including custom drivers and all, so you know that everything will just work out of the box, unlike when you slap Linux on a system yourself. That is very handy for a novice like me. The specific model I got is called the Aura 14 Gen 3, which is one of their most affordable offerings just to try out if I can even become friends with a Linux setup at all for now. It has a 12th Gen U-Series Intel i5 processor, which means it's likely 2 or 3 generations behind the bleeding edge, and this spec costs about 779 Euros including VAT, which is more than the 500 or 600 Euros I see for similarly specced Windows machines on Amazon, but given that this laptop is custom made by a smaller company in Germany, I guess that's mostly fine. Tuxedo, of course, has a whole range of other machines to choose from, including more premium ones, but all of them run Tuxedo OS out of the box by default, and starting with the OS, I actually found it really quite easy to get used to overall. This was as plug and play as possible, as there was basically no setup and everything just worked out of the box. I initially had to do a couple of web searches as a Linux noob to understand how the operating system wanted me to approach things, but as a person with no desire to reinvent or super highly customize their computer, using Tuxedo OS felt no more confusing than macOS did when I first switched to that from Windows. As for apps and programs, obviously everyone has their own very unique requirements, so if you want to make a switch, then definitely make sure that you look those up before you switch, but here's a quick list of what I was looking into. For video editing, my usual program, DaVinci Resolve, which is by the way made by an Australian company, is supported on Linux, but sadly not on the puny little integrated Intel GPU like I have in this entry-level machine, so while I could install it, I couldn't actually use it. I obviously wouldn't have chosen this exact configuration if I wanted to do a lot of video editing on it anyway, so it's not the end of the world for me, but it's good to know that at least in theory it should work. More interesting though is that for almost everything else, I intentionally chose to use open source tools like LibreOffice for document editing, GIMP for image editing, KDE Connect for hooking up my phone with my desktop and sharing clipboards and files between them, Firefox for browsing the web, and Signal for messaging and video calling, and I found that they all largely worked just fine. I perhaps stupidly assumed that the open source alternatives would be kind of the poor man's solution to not having access to the more high-end commercial applications, and I think while that is partially true in some cases, like with GIMP for example, which I never really got to love, in many other cases it really doesn't seem to be the case. KDE Connect, made presumably by the Germans in Berlin, looks a little basic but works super well and I totally recommend it to any Android user now, while for example LibreOffice especially was surprisingly pleasant, leaving me with basically nothing to complain about besides the perhaps slightly more dated looking UI. I'm mostly a writer and I don't do crazy complex office stuff and spreadsheets for example, so your mileage may definitely vary, but I even made a somewhat complex slideshow and I found that it worked just fine. Now of course the real power of something like Google Docs and Microsoft Office these days comes from their cloud solutions and while I was initially worried about replacing those, I landed on a tool that perhaps blew my mind even more than any other. Next cloud. Now maybe I've been living under a rock or something but I've never actually heard of it before making this video and I have to say as a complete noob I was pretty blown away by how impressive it was. So Nextcloud is a bunch of open source software from a German company that you can download and use for free to create your own fully featured cloud on basically any machine that you want. Imagine Google Drive, Docs, Calendar etc. except completely your own and it can scale from a single user to entire government agencies or large corporations. And before I explain how this actually works, here's a quick look at the web app of how I have it set up for myself. I start with a nice little dashboard which I can customize and for now it shows my latest files and appointments. Then I can see all of my files in a pretty standard directory structure. And when I click on a file, I can not only view it but actually even edit it in a fully featured office suite right in the browser. Now since I'm using basically the cheapest server that I could get, this online office powered by Colabora is a little bit laggy but still usable. I've also seen that you can somehow set up real collaborative editing as well but since I'm alone in my instance, I haven't bothered with that yet. And overall, this is just nice. Then besides documents, the web view also shows my photos that I synced up from my phone and it lets me make quick edits to them too. And again, you could go further and set up more advanced tools like using local machine learning models to recognize faces in the photos but I couldn't be bothered to do that. Then I also have Nextcloud set up to sync my contacts plus also my calendars, both of which seems to work pretty well. And finally, I've also tried something called Collectives which is a kind of version of a Notion or Confluence which especially makes sense for making, for example, shared wikis for your team. That is as far as I got in my two weeks but there's also an app store where I could go and install more stuff like a whiteboard app, a tasks app to manage to-dos, a kanban board app, a PDF signing tool, an entire password manager if you wanted to host that yourself and even an optional AI assistant built into Nextcloud apps that you can host yourself and a ton more. You can basically add as many or as few of these as you want. You can add as many users to your Nextcloud as you want. You can set up permissions however you want. You can share files internally, externally, practically everything. I find that the web UI, while not beautiful, isn't actually ugly either and while I've heard others complain about performance with more users, for me as a single person running everything on a pretty cheap server, most things have been pretty smooth. There's of course also a desktop app for Windows, Mac and Linux which allows you to properly sync your files from your machine which is perfect for editing documents in something like LibreOffice offline plus there are also mobile apps too which I'll talk about in the phone section a bit later. Now, I won't say that there aren't any downsides to this setup and I can think of three in particular. One, working with most others is just harder. While you can share documents externally, almost nobody has an existing Nextcloud account which makes this much less spontaneous than, say, a Google Doc that most people can start working on right away right in their browser. Second, you might find some of their apps a little too basic. I tried using Collectives as a replacement for Notion for myself and I found that it wasn't quite there and you might run into your own limitations too. And third, by using Nextcloud, you've just made yourself a Linux system administrator. If you do this, it's your job to secure your things, to troubleshoot random errors, to keep everything up to date, to make sure that everything is triple backed up, etc. That is quite a bit of responsibility and I've heard from some people who eventually just stopped using Nextcloud because they found it too much work long term. I haven't actually had any significant issues myself in about three weeks and maybe I'm still in a short honeymoon phase but yeah, despite all of these shortcomings, I still found all of this to be pretty good. Now, if you want to use Nextcloud, you'll have to find a way to actually host it. I've actually made a detailed document explaining my specific Nextcloud setup and also some alternatives plus all the other products and apps that I've used from hardware to software in this whole video too which you can find linked below if you're interested in recreating any of it for yourself. Anyway, the basic overview is that you can install Nextcloud on your own hardware like a home server for example, you can host it yourself by choosing a remote server or you can even just pick a company to do the hosting for you if you just want to become a user. I chose a path of perhaps medium complexity by picking a German cloud provider called Hetzner who lets you rent a virtual server that automatically installs a correctly configured Nextcloud instance for you right away. I'm still my own admin but at least that setup itself was pretty easy and I chose the most basic version from Hetzner which comes with 40 gigs of storage and a shared CPU all for under 4 euros. That is a really attractive price and then I can scale it up to more resources if I need it. Alright, I think that's about enough about Nextcloud and now let's move on to some other services that I've tried too. For email, I use ProtonMail which is made by a Swiss company and is partially open source and also partially end-to-end encrypted. I made a whole video about ProtonMail a few months ago and I've been using their cheapest email tier with my own domain since then. I think it's a simple, great service, their web app in my opinion is perhaps even nicer than that of Gmail and I basically have no complaints. Proton also has Drive, Calendar, Docs, a VPN and a password manager plus a few other services and if you find the idea of hosting your own Nextcloud too daunting, this is probably the closest easy alternative to that. For me, some of their apps were a little bit too limited but they are simple and very pretty. Alright, and as for search, I've actually been using Ecosia for about 2 to 3 years now and I slowly made that my main search engine. Disclaimer, they've once sponsored one of my videos multiple years ago but obviously not this one. Anyway, Ecosia is a German non-profit and their search results include those from Google and Bing so they're not fully independent but they have announced a partnership with the French company called Quant to build their own index next which should launch in the coming months too. Let's hope it's actually good. Then as for social media, I switched to Mastodon about 2 and a half years ago as my main presence and their team is mostly from Germany, their apps are mostly open source and anyone can host their own server so I guess this is about as far from a US corporation as social media can get. That's it for services and you can go to european-alternatives.eu if you want to find more that I haven't listed here but I want to move on to talk about phones. This is a Fairphone 5 and it's running EOS. I've made a dedicated in-depth video about the device itself which is linked in the description but in this video, I'll just say that this is a phone with kind of lower mid-range specs that is focused on being ultra-repairable and sustainable. Fairphone is a Dutch company and they not only allow you to flash alternative operating systems on your usually Google-powered device, they even have an official sponsorship with the mostly French team behind EOS which is what I installed here. This official support means that most of the tricky hardware from the fingerprint readers to the multiple cameras and so on should just work out of the box and while I found a few small bugs here and there, overall things worked just fine. And EOS is definitely the most complete de-googled Android experience that I've tried myself. Because yes, EOS is basically a fork of open-source Android, something that many people would call a custom ROM except with three pretty important tweaks. First, it comes pre-installed with something called the App Lounge. This uses Google's own APIs to list and let you download apps straight from the Google Play Store so you can basically get all the apps that you're used to right away. This works even for Google's own apps if you really can't live without one and in my case, that would be Google Maps for example. Second, while on a normal Android phone, most people rely on Google to sync their contacts, their calendar, etc. Marina actually also offers their own solutions for all of those. Not just pre-installed apps, but actual services for hosting your contacts, your cloud storage, email, etc. hosted in the European Union, of course, which even come with their own web apps. And third, EOS comes with Micro G built-in which is basically an open-source way of emulating some of the Google components that even third-party apps rely on. You might know that without this, even basic things like notifications and random apps often don't work in custom ROMs, but that's just not an issue here. Almost all the apps worked out of the box and so did my YubiKey hardware key, for example, which somehow also needs a Google API to authenticate me. Cool. These three changes, so the App Lounge, Micro G being pre-installed and working well, and also the Marina services, probably make EOS the easiest alternative to switch to if you want to move away from Google. One app that I'd like to highlight that made my switching easier is called Curve, which is a European payments app that I used instead of Google Pay for contactless NFC payments and that worked great in my brief testing, plus I also actually used my own Nextcloud server instead of using any of Marina's own services. So, for example, my contacts from Nextcloud synced just fine to my phone and even showed up in my phone's dialer app, which is really nice. Same with my calendar. And I also like that the Nextcloud app can automatically back up my photos just like Google Photos would, for example. As for documents, I could do edits right in the Nextcloud app or in the Colabora mobile apps and this did work, but sadly, it was pretty laggy on my Fairphone. Thankfully, in a more high-end Samsung flagship, the experience was significantly smoother, so I guess mobile editing is a little bit hit and miss. Anyway, in general, I was pretty impressed by Nextcloud on the phone as well, even though I think they could use some more optimizations here. So all of this sounds pretty good, but there are also three things I didn't exactly love about this mobile experience. One, the Fairphone itself is just a little bit too basic for my spoiled tech reviewer heart. Others might not mind the performance and EOS can be installed on many other devices too, but compared to a sleek flagship foldable phone that I'm used to, this is a pretty clear downgrade. Two, some of the banking apps, like Revolut for example, just don't work on the phone. I guess the Micro G setup isn't enough to fool all of them and so they refuse to do anything, and you might want to check in the EOS forums whether your finance apps in particular work before you make the switch. Some do, some don't. And third, I feel weird about the App Lounge and kind of third-party app stores in general. I mean, functionally, it's amazing to have all the apps available to you right away, but the App Lounge is basically an unauthorized middleman between Google and your phone. I actually wrote them to ask how the App Lounge wasn't just breaking Google's own Terms of Service agreements, to which they responded, very kindly mind you, that this is basically how all the alternative app stores get their Google Play catalogs, and so they think it's fine, which I understand in theory, but yeah, this leaves me with some security questions. As a middleman, you have to trust that the App Lounge does not tinker with any of the apps that you install. Now, like most things from Mirena, the app is open source and as far as I can tell, they have a pretty good reputation, so maybe you can trust them, but I'm not technical enough to assess that, and I also don't want to keep auditing them long-term just in case. So for me, those were my three issues that I wasn't super happy with, and you can decide for yourself whether they're deal-breakers for you or not, and if not, you might find EOS to be a pretty amazing alternative. Now, I'm personally not actually planning to cut out non-European tech from my workflow completely. I obviously make a living on YouTube and on Nebula, so it's not even possible for me, and I also generally don't think that isolationism is a healthy approach for all of us to be going towards in general. Instead, I've treated all of the stuff that I've learned in this video as basically an experiment. I wanted to show to all of you what's even out there, and I also wanted to see for myself whether I actually like the alternatives enough to want to stick to any of them myself. If you want to see my plans for going through each of these solutions one by one, then I made a whole second video doing just that that you can watch over on Nebula. This joins dozens of other bonus videos that I've uploaded to Nebula already, along with ad-free early access to all of my regular videos, plus even whole big-budget Nebula originals. Originals include big-budget documentaries like 17 Pages, which Bobby Broccoli has just announced. It includes comedy shows like the hilarious Abolish Everything. It includes Nebula making its own font, and then also making a documentary about making the font, and so on. If you want more choice on the internet that is run by the actual creators themselves instead of some mega-corporation, then Nebula might be right up your alley, and in exchange for your support, you get extra content. Nebula is a video streaming service that a bunch of great creators have built, so that we can take our own destiny into our own hands instead of relying on mega-corporations that we might not be able to control, and also so that we can finance our way towards bringing you more and better content without always having to resort to advertising. With my link, go.nebula.tv.techaltar, which is also linked down in the description, you can also get a big discount, which brings the price down to just $36 a year, instead of the usual $50 that you'd get if you signed up with a generic link. At just $3 a month, that's a pretty big discount, so be sure to use my link go.nebula.tv.techaltar, or scan the QR code on screen to sign up, and if you absolutely hate ongoing subscriptions, there's also a lifetime option using that link. And once you have a subscription, you can even share that with a friend using our Guest Passes feature, so you can actually show your favourite Nebula Originals to them, too. Nice! So check out the link below, and I'll see you in the bonus video.