Personal Technology Resilience checklist - nupatheu

Christian Triantafillou Schade May 16, 2025 This document is continuously updated with recommended solutions for personal and small-business IT resilience. The overall scenario is that we are optimizing for a situation in which service providers in the USA are forced to turn off critical services by their government, leading to significant disruptions in your daily digital life. Remember, these replacements are suggested to protect yourself from random hostile political acts, not to punish or spite the US. You are entitled to a different opinion, of course. I have recommended a replacement for a series of significant services and applications below. Read more details about each criteria in the blog post [[Make your personal technology setup independent from the USA]]. Criteria for the recommended solutions are: - Service provider is outside US jurisdiction. - Hosting is outside the US, preferred EU, EFTA, Europe or Canadian hosting and jurisdiction, in that order. This is also to support overall European digital sovereignty, but primarily your personal digital sovereignty. - Privacy by default - meaning encryption and strong data protection where possible. - Reasonable feature match with the services they replace, or at least a use case outcome that matches. - Available as applications or web services for these operating systems: - Windows, Mac, Linux - Android, IOS - Allows stepwise degradation of utility, meaning if the network is gone, the key features are still available offline. - Cross-platform sync is an option, but not a prerequisite. - Reasonable utility even without cloud services. - The author's personal preference. "A" means do it now, "B" means do it if something bad happens. Please consider [supporting the effort](https://buy.stripe.com/4gM9AU5QH4AObDrc1vd3i01) and cost that goes into researching this work. | Category, tool | Alternative | <center>A</center> | <center>B</center> | Comment | | ----------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------- | ------------------ | ------------------ | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Web Browser: Edge, Chrome | Firefox, (Opera) | <center>X</center> | | No ideal solution exists, in my opinion. The best solution seems to be Firefox, which is a fully-fledged, highly capable, and privacy-focused browser that can trace its roots all the way back to the beginning of the web. It will also remove you from Google's sphere unless you opt in fully to the Google ecosystem. Its only major drawback is that it is owned by a US-based entity, even if it is a non-profit foundation. However, it is open-source and so could continue independently in a contingency, if someone builds a new browser based on it, which could happen quite fast. Opera has been known as the independent alternative, but it is now owned mainly by a Chinese consortium. | | Web search: Google | Mojeek, Qwant, Ecosia (DuckDuckGo) | <center>X</center> | | For Google alternatives, hosted in the US, DuckDuckGo is excellent. But if the condition is non-US hosted, the alternatives are Mojeek, Qwant and Ecosia, in that order. The indexes (websites covered by the search engine) are smaller than Google or Bing, which is the major drawback. This means neither are a full replacement when it comes to usefulness. At the moment, life without a US-American search engine means rolling back a lot of the web for a while, but AI is changing the way we search anyway, as we speak. | | Note taking: Evernote, Ulysses, OneNote | Obsidian (Proton Docs) | <center>X</center> | | Obsidian is a great note-taking app with a slightly steeper initial learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, it is an extremely useful tool. It has a large ecosystem of free community plugins. Obsidian Sync and Publish services are stable and hosted in Canada. Most annoying issue is the lack of a web-based editor, but that is a direct consequence of their on-device principle. If you decide to join the Proton ecosystem, it has a new encrypted Docs app that might be sufficient for you. | | Navigation | | <center>X</center> | | The assumption here is that navigation is something you primarily do on your phone, so PC-based solutions are not in scope for this use case. Some options: Sygic, from Slovakia, is highly acclaimed and has strong privacy. Magic Earth is free, uses the OpenStreetMap database, is hosted in Switzerland, and is privacy-focused. I would have liked to recommend Waze, but even if it is owned outside the US, it is hosted there, is covered by US export controls, and could be disabled as part of a US government embargo. | | Task management MS Planner, Trello | Obsidian with kanban plugin | <center>X</center> | | Excellent competitors exist that are non-US hosted, but most do not have on-device storage and cloud sync. If you can live with that limitation, I recommend Meistertask, Taiga or Appflowy, in that order. For a fully on-device solution where cloud sync is optional, go with Obsidian using the Kanban plugin. No bells and whistles, but it gets the job done. I would really have loved to recommend Trello, but even if the company is in Australia, everything is hosted on AWS and Google infrastructure in the US. | | Gmail, Hotmail, MicroSoft 365 Email | Proton Mail | <center>X</center> | | Proton Mail is the main reason people join the Proton personal app suite. It offers end-to-end encrypted email between Proton accounts, a cloud storage hosted in Switzerland and other great tools such as VPN, a basic document editor, calendar and even a Crypto wallet. Besides being hosted outside US (and even EU) jurisdictions, it is a major step up in individual digital privacy and the apps are easy to use. The extremely high level of security does make a few things a bit more cumbersome, such as having one app for all for all your email accounts, which is doable on a PC/Mac, but not a phone at the moment. | | Outlook | Thunderbird | <center>X</center> | | Many people spend most of their day in the Outlook app. For more than 20 years a free open source email app has existed that provides a replacement for the mail part of the use case. Thunderbird is a great alternative. iPhone IOS) app to arrive in 2025. | | Google Calendar, MS Calendar | Proton Calendar | <center>X</center> | | A major part of the privacy-focused app suite, it has easy calendar sharing. Like the rest of the Proton suite it has few bells and whistles, but does a great job with high security. | | MS Word | LibreOffice | | <center>X</center> | Based on the conditions applied in this analysis, LibreOffice is the best solution. It is free, open-source and privacy-focused. Since there will be a significant loss of integration benefits, I recommend waiting until it becomes necessary. Another serious contender is OnlyOffice. | | Excel | LibreOffice | | <center>X</center> | Also recommending LibreOffice, even if I’d claim that no single tool exists that would be able to replace Excel in its entirety. | | PowerPoint | LibreOffice for most people | | <center>X</center> | Still working on that one, LibreOffice is not enough for my personal needs, since I use some of the power features in PowerPoint, like recording the presentation for training videos. Most people should be satisfied with Libreoffice in this case as well, but I think the presentation module still has a long way to go for my needs. Fortunately many other solutions exist for those niche cases, even if they are typically quite expensive. | | Notion | Obsidian | <center>X</center> | | Obsidian is very close to the value you get from Notion in the offline use case, especially with community plugins. It is a different scenario if you use Notion for a public site (like this one) or a distributed team or project. If you are ready to jump on an early stage platform, Anytype looks extremely promising and much more visually interesting than Obsidian, which is rather minimalist. But be prepared for the usual issues from early open-source projects. Oh, and it is super privacy-focused. | | Dropbox, Onedrive, Google Drive, iCloud | Proton Drive | <center>X</center> | | Fast encrypted storage hosted in Switzerland, easy to use. Not a lot of features, but it works. Different plans are available for individuals, families or companies. Some of the iCloud functionality will be difficult to miss, like face recognition. | | Facebook | Mastodon | <center>X</center> | | No automated migration or friend discovery from Facebook to Mastodon exists. You must manually find or invite friends on Mastodon. Sharing your Mastodon profile on Facebook is the most practical way to reconnect. Choose a server located in the EU, though it is quite difficult to find out. For fully managed hosting of your own network in the EU, consider toot.io Trunks is a good Mastodon client if you're not satisfied with the web version or the mobile apps. Better clients exist, but again, under US jurisdiction. Looking into the whole SoMe thing in another doc later. | | Messengers | Threema, Viber | | <center>X</center> | Very few plausible independent messaging platforms exist that are actual alternatives to the US-owned messengers, be it iMessage, MS Teams, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or Signal. For a EU-hosted solution there is Threema, and if Japanese ownership is OK for you, there’s Viber, which is my recommendation. Viber is not open source, but hey, people are actually using it, and the key to messengers is having someone to talk to. The case for Threema is high security when communicating with a small group of contacts. It is what I’d fall back to if Viber fails on a strategic level. | | Photo editing | Gimp | | <center>X</center> | Gimp can have a step learning curve, but once you have the hang of it, it should meet most of your image editing needs. There are a lot of video guides available on the web. And it is free, even if professional users will feel it is a step down from PhotoShop. I would have recommended Affinity for professionals, except for the fact that it does not run on Linux. It comes highly recommended. | | Drawing | Clip studio Paint, Krita | | <center>X</center> | Clip Studio Paint comes highly recommended by professional digital artists, but it does not support Linux. The free open-source alternative, Krita, is cross-playform and has a large user community, the feature sets are not absolutely comparable, and missing 3D and a less polished workflow is an argument against Krita, but it is still probably the best option for Linux (maybe the only professional one) and praised by many users and you get a lot in a free package. Not relevant for mobile, but might run on your Linux tablet. | | Mindmaps | MindMeister or Mindomo | <center>X</center> | | MindMeister is by far the slickest product, especially when integrated with MeisterTask. Visuals and ease of use are critical in mind mapping. It is hosted in the EU and used by a lot of people around the world. But it still is, after many years, strictly a cloud application; there is no offline mode. It would be my primary recommendation except for that single condition, and if you can live with that, go with MM. In my opinion, the best option is Mindomo, which lives up to **all** key criteria here, but is not as slick a graphic experience as MindMeister. On the other hand, it is blazingly fast to use, works well offline and is slightly less outrageously expensive than MindMeister. Freemind is available, but I think the user interface is a couple of generations behind the curve. | | Video editing | Openshot Shotcut | X | | Several excellent free, open-source options exist for personal video editing, getting close to professional products. The two choices here both support Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Advanced video editing is generally not recommended on mobile platforms due to the hardware requirements. Openshot is a powerful tool aimed at beginners, but it can take you a long way. They focus on creating the easiest video editing software ever. Not recommended for large or complicated projects. Shortcut is an advanced video editing software for intermediate-level users. It should be sufficient for even ambitious private users, but it does assume that you are interested in learning the technical elements of digital video editing. Be aware that open-source software at this level is not always stable in use, and video editing is one of the most demanding tasks you can ask of your computer. Shortcut is known for its stability. | | AI-supported spellchecking, Grammarly | LanguageTool | <center>X</center> | | If you, like me, have been using Grammarly to help cure the Euro-English mistakes, LanguageTool is a plausible EU-hosted replacement candidate. It supports many more languages than Grammarly, so that is actually an improvement, but is less deep in the feature offering. It also plays well with LibreOffice, including on Linux. I am still evaluating it, which will take months, but I think it is a reasonable replacement, particularly if you are after the spellchecking/style checking rather than the "automatic typewriter" AI scenario that does all the work for you. | | Adobe Acrobat, PDF | OlyOffice, Javelin or LibreOffice | | <center>X</center> | The landscape is a bit irregular here. If I must stay true to the criteria, I can't find only one platform to recommend. It is so easy to download the Acrobat Reader that few plausible cross-platform solutions exist. After all, they did invent the PDF format. Many solutions also seem unfinished and not frequently maintained. Cloud-based: OnlyOffice PDF Editor does all the things. But there's the cloud issue. Free PDF Reader across platforms: Javelin PDF. Offline editor: LibreOffice, but the solution can be clunky in practice, PDFSam might be the best solution for that use case. Individual solutions, which are better but specific to different operating systems, exist. | | Operating systems for computers: MacOS, Windows | Ubuntu | | <center>X</center> | The most extreme replacement, assuming you are keeping your hardware, is switching to another operating system (OS) on you PC or Mac. The obvious choice is the free open-source OS Linux, which also comes in commercial packages with different levels of support. In the 35 years since Linus Torvalds launched it, this has become the dominant alternative to the commercial giants and has become the icon of the open-source movement. Today, this is a great way to rediscover individual computing, revitalize older PC's and get out of the claws of Big Tech. But the cost has traditionally been many long nights of tech-grinding, and installing it can be daunting for non-technically minded folks. Sometimes it works like a breeze and you have a brand new computer in half an hour, other times you might run into hardware issues, so do your research first. It is quite a feat for volunteers to build an operating system that can run on a large share of the many different variations of computers, and they don't always cover every corner case combination of hardware. Today, well-produced and easy(ish)- to-use distributions of Linux exist, and it's worth paying for a commercial version. I fully recommend Ubuntu as the most future-proof, feature-rich solution with the best application support and the tech-enthusiast solution. Mint Linux is candidate No. 2, with maybe the highest ease of use but slightly fewer features and apps. | These use cases should cover most of what you need on a daily basis. Please drop me a line at [email protected], if you have any other suggestions, and keep and eye on the [[Nupath blog overview]] for new scenarios.