Digital sovereignty

Digital sovereignty is a hot topic in the media at the moment.

In fact, I am currently working on this professionally.

I'm always very much in favor of being as close to the user as possible - that's why I followed the "eat your own dog food" and became "digitally independent".

Instead of the Mac, I now use Ubuntu - I've had several attempts over the decades - and this time I've actually switched. The Mac stays, of course, because it runs programs that don't run on Ubuntu.

Result: Everything is ok, I usually work with web programs, so everything is fine.

Instead of Dropbox, I use Nextcloud, self-hosted.

Result: No difference, the files are synchronized in the same way as with DropBox, Google & Co.

I now use Proton Mail instead of Gmail. The emails were easy to import and the Proton web interface is ok. However, I use the calendar from NextCloud.

Result: Everything is running, no problems.

Instead of the GitLab service, I now use Gitea, self-hosted.

Result: No negative experiences so far. I still have to take care of build automation.

I now use Matermost instead of Slack. For the things I did with Slack, it works very well. The choice between Rocket Chat and Matermost wasn't easy for me.

Instead of DigitalOcean, I now use a server from Hetzner. It's actually much cheaper and so far there have been no problems.

Office packages: I never really liked them. But if I have to, I use Libre Office - the suffering is very comparable.

Conclusion: It works. The effort wasn't that great and productivity doesn't suffer.