i posted this on reddit before but i wanted to get your opinion on this

i use my familys google drive/photo thing (i cant really change) and i obviously want us to switch, but my mom (who take care of this whole thing) says that she likes the ecosystem that google has. Like she uses her calendar and stuff. The closest ive found is proton, which is fine, but it doesnt really have the best rep. Any alternatives?

BTW: im not gonna self-host since im not comfortable hosting such a big thing like this

  • theherk
    16·
    3 days ago

    Sort of, but it isn’t in my view very well deserved. There is certainly quite a bit of FUD here in the fediverse, but sometimes it feels manufactured.

    The CEO has made, and partially walked back, some statements favoring right wing groups, but it was mostly antitrust stuff, so I think it is mostly rich person doing rich person things.

    But they claim to be politically neutral, and they are a Swiss company which already puts it in a tier above anything hosted in many other western countries.

    The services themselves are technically very well done, and the applications for using them are also very good. They have a new drive cli which is good. The password manager is great. VPN is good too. The mail bridge they provide is also very good if you want to use third party mail apps but with the benefit of their encryption.

    There are other services that compete strongly on each of those and more, but I don’t think any do when considering the full suite.

    • kuiskaaja@lemmy.ml
      5·
      3 days ago

      yeah i was looking for a vpn inside the eu/efta and couldn’t find a better alternative so i went with proton and have been very satisfied so far

      bought the 2 year package, no regrets. at least not yet. if they sponsor another far right influencer i might have to switch to something else after my subscription ends

      for e-mail im gonna do something different tho, dont wanna have all my eggs in one basket. but it’s completely fine if some prefer that for the convenience :)

      edit: e-mail, not mail

    • Lytia @lemmy.todayEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      I’ll start this by saying I do like and use proton, but their insistence to provide a hundred different services (and force you to pay for every single one in your subscription) really hurts the service. For example:

      The 2FA had an issue that leaked every single service you used by connecting to their icon server over insecure http, for a month I believe and then downplaying the severity. This wouldn’t have happened if they focused on being an email provider and pointed users to existing services like Ente Auth, instead of pushing poorly tested software to production as fast as possible. You should never store 2FA with your password manager anyways, even if it’s stored in seperate apps, so I think their choice to make a 2FA app is quite silly.

      They continue to prioritize building new services such as meet and lumo over compatibility with Linux (drive sucks, and only 9 years later do they support a buggy CLI. The VPN client is buggy as hell, and if you’re not careful could leak your VPN when it crashes for the hundredth time (crashes are less common on Gnome, which is technically the only DE it’s built for, but that doesn’t change the fact that it lacks critical features that exist exclusively on MacOS and Windows) (the killswitch works as far as I can tell, but with how poorly made the client is, you should bind it in the OS itself as well)).

      They require the use of Google Play services, arguing that they don’t want to waste people’s battery by running websocket based notifications. It’s a stupid defense as people who don’t have Google play services wouldn’t mind the extra battery usage for notifications. Not to mention, they can use unified push since they already encrypt their notifications anyways (Proton says they don’t need to add unified push, the users just need to use Google Play because the notification are encrypted, completely disregarding the invasiveness of Google Play and the metadata leakage from using them for push notifs).

      The UI for simplelogin has not changed since acquisition from what I can tell, and continues to look like it’s from 2014. Rather than adding features to simplelogin, as you would when you purchase an entire company, they almost exclusively add features to their password manager and email client instead.

      They basically force their crappy photo storage down your throat on mobile, despite being offered to join an alliance with privacy services (including Ente, an amazing photo storage service) and rejecting the offer. That’s actually a whole issue on its own. For what reason, other than greed, would a privacy company choose not to join an alliance with very respected privacy services? Is it because Tuta joined? That would be dumb and petty.

      Overall, I like and use many proton services, and I think a lot of the political controversies people like to throw at proton are FUD and/or blown out of proportion. That said, if a company could do what proton does for email (tuta is nowhere close to proton imo) and exclusively does email (fun fact, tuta is exploring the cloud drive space, because I guess people never learn) I would switch in a heartbeat. If proton separated their plans so you only pay for what you need, and let me use notifications on my phone, that would be basically all my gripes in my day to day dealt with.