Yo yo!
I’ve been working on making my life more private and need some assistance picking suitable replacement options. Please let me know what you think of my list of if there are any opportunities for improvement! Here’s where I’m at …
Apple Maps -OSMandMaps. Seems like a good option, but it’s not ready out the box. I need to do more tweaking with it. -Magic Earth. Haven’t tested it yet, seems good. But I’m looking for free options first before I dabble with paid stuff.
AI (ChatGPT) -Lumo. Chat is really good. But I understand they are good because they syphon data illegally, so I’m ok “downgrading” when switching AIs. Lump seems pretty good so far. I can tell it’s not as advanced but it will do me fine for what I need. Also, i assume once I pay for lumo pro it will be more “powerful”. -Maple AI. Seems dope, also I like the pay model, pay for what you use over “x” amount of inquiries. Does anyone know how I owledgable/powerful it is? -local AI OR Ollama. These 2 are beyond my knowledge. I don’t understand how I run these on my own server? If you know anything about these please ELI5.
Google Docs -OnlyOffice. Seems like it does everything I want. -cryptpad. Just heard of this today, need to explore more. Seems dope, but it doesn’t have an app? From what I’ve seen definitely a strong contender.
Photo App (I haven’t looked into any of these yet) -Protón Drive. -ente photos. -I’mmich.
Google Drive -protón drive.
If you like OSM but want a more user-friendly interface (disclaimer: I’m an Android user so I have no idea what OSMandMaps looks like), check out CoMaps! It was forked from Organic Maps due to heavy transparency concerns surrounding the former and uses downloadable OSM maps as a backend! It’s available for iOS too!
https://www.comaps.app/download/
I’ve heard OnlyOffice is great, but if you don’t need or want any AI stuff, don’t mind a slightly less-modern UI, and collaboration isn’t a requirement, then LibreOffice is pretty awesome too. Just giving you another option. ;)
https://www.libreoffice.org/
Your like the 4th person to recommend libreoffice. That’s at the top of my list now.
Been using it for ages. It used to have clunky spreadsheets ages ago but I have not noticed any issues in recent years.
LibreOffice is starting to look nice! How an office suite looks shouldn’t matter, but… it does. I have decades of experience with Word and Excel, and while I don’t love them, they are kinda the standard against which I compare others. Before (last time I looked, a few years ago maybe) LO looked like Office 95. Trash. The program was okay, but it irked me it was an all or nothing affair, like you had the LO core and you only saved a few KB by ditching one of the apps in the bundle. These days, that is less of an issue — and LO looks more like Office XP. It’s a good look, especially for Ribbon haters. (I quite like the Ribbon, but I’m also nostalgic for the time before it, so I could take or leave it.)
I’m on a Mac now and we have our own office suite (iWork) and that’s free, private, and it can read/write docx/xlsx files (newer Office files) pretty well. We use Microsoft 365 at work, and I have no problems importing anything made on that to the iWork apps (Pages, Numbers), and/or exporting files from them to the Microsoft formats and using them at work.
I don’t think any spreadsheet program is quite as good as Excel, though. And I really don’t do number crunching with it, I use it more to make forms. What I really like in Microsoft’s suite is Publisher, and Apple doesn’t have an equivalent of that. Not sure if Libre does. I think the other suites want their word processor to do double duty as a publisher, but none of them are quite there IMO. But as far as Word goes? Yeah, I’ll swap that out with Libre Writer or iWork Pages (or even Google Docs if I weren’t concerned with privacy) in a heartbeat. Word is nothing special.
I’ll prolly go with libre then since they have the best options that are private. And i have a PC so those Mac options won’t work for me.