Email

• Proton Mail, (paid) I switched 7 years ago and it’s great, I’ve never looked back. I don’t use the attached services like calendar and contacts because it’s a little bit too walled-off for the integrations I need, but I do use ProtonVPN and Drive.
• Thunderbird (free) on desktop, to access my IMAP or exchange email addresses (work etc) along with Proton Bridge so I never touch the Proton web app. On Android, I use Thunderbird for the IMAP addresses plus the Proton app, which isn’t ideal but not sure what the alternative could be.

Calendar and contacts

• Nextcloud (free) installed on the basic shared hosting for my personal website manages all my contacts
• Etesync (free) is currently syncing my calendars, but I’m planning to swap this soon to the Nextcloud instance just to simplify things.

Notes / Resource management

• Anytype (free) is incredible and I now run my life off of it. Took months to really get the hang of it but it’s worth the effort.

Cloud storage

• Proton Drive (paid) is great, I use it for all my work applications, sending to clients etc and sync my most important files, but only have 500gb storage so
• Synology Drive (free) installed on the NAS I use for backups covers all my personal uses, including photo backups.

Browser

• Firefox (of course), with uBlock Origin (of course)

Search

• DuckDuckGo (free), I ran Kagi for a while but the company seems shady and the price is extremely high for what you get

Passwords

• 1Password (paid), migrated after the LastPass incident and before ProtonPass existed. It would make sense to save the money and switch to Proton but tbh 1Password has been great and I wouldn’t risk the faff.

Documents

• Honestly I don’t have a lot of need for Google Docs replacements but when I do need to work on docs I’ll use LibreOffice. If it needs to be shared I’d probably do a public share on Anytype, or use Proton Docs. More likely, someone else will have invited me to a Google doc and I’ll have to sign in to use it.

Audio

• PocketCasts (paid) is a great service. I also use Spotify (sorry, all my friends use it)

RSS

• FreshRSS also set up on my web hosting so I get all my news/articles/substacks etc through ReadYou and Fluent Reader.

Google products I still use

• Maps
• YouTube (with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock on both desktop and android), I just sadly can’t let go of my carefully crafted algorithm oops

this is speech-to-text! OP is looking for text-to-speech.

For what it’s worth I doubt the add-on is doing any translation or sending the youtube subtitles to any other servers. Youtube auto generates translations for videos in loads of languages and then offers subtitles only in the user’s language, so the add-on will just be accessing those already existing .SRT files off of YouTube’s servers which you can’t normally see and displaying them.

This is an issue if it’s unsupervised, but the transcription models are good enough now that with oversight then they’re usually useful: checking and correcting the AI generated transcription is almost always quicker than transcribing entirely by hand.

If we approach tasks like these assuming that they are error-prone regardless whether they are done by human or machine, and will always need some oversight and verification, then the AI tools can be very helpful in very non-miraculous ways. I think it was Jason Koebler said in a recent 404 podcast that at Vice he used to transcribe every word of every interview he did as a journalist, but now transcribes everything with AI and has saved hundreds of work hours doing so, but he still manually checks every transcript to verify it.

AI saves time. There are few use cases for which AI is qualitatively better, perhaps none at all, but there are a great many use cases for which it is much quicker and even at times more efficient.

I’m sure the efficiency argument is one that could be debated, but it makes sense to me in this way: for production-level outputs AI is rarely good enough, but creates really useful efficiency for rapid, imperfect prototyping. If you have 8 different UX ideas for your app which you’d like to test, then you could rapidly build prototype interfaces with AI. Likely once you’ve picked the best one you’ll rewrite it from scratch to make sure it’s robust, but without AI then building the other 7 would use up too many man-hours to make it worthwhile.

I’m sure others will put forward legitimate arguments about how AI will inevitably creep into production environments etc, but logistically then speed and efficiency are undeniably helpful use cases.

The vast majority of countries in Europe don’t have military service, and it’s no coincidence that the few countries which do, also border Russia.

Good OS-native cloud syncing. The Windows Cloud Sync Engine is so useful and is now adopted by virtually every cloud storage provider, and crucially lets you keep your entire cloud drive visible as unsynced files and pulls them on-demand (ie. what Dropbox call Smart Sync).

Thanks to being freelance and working for different companies I have different files I work on in Dropbox and Onedrive as well as my personal stuff being stored on Proton and my Synology NAS through Drive, and none of these have linux integrations that even come close to their Windows or macOS equivalents. Things like Syncthing and rclone will do selective sync, so you aren’t forced to sync your entire cloud drive on to your laptop’s tiny SSD, but that still means half your files are missing and have to be accessed through janky browser interfaces 🤢

Agreed, and Musicbee is the only bit of software I’ve found which happily keeps a copy of your library as an iTunes library .mtl file, meaning it’s compatible with other applications which want to link up to iTunes/Apple Music (like rekordbox, which is virtually the only software you can reliably use to load up your USBs if you’re a DJ)

Sorry for devil’s advocate here because I agree with you but hypothetically the answer would be verification. ie., Google already has your password, so why would they need to ask you for it when you log in?

Giving up eating meat. Not sure if it was cause or effect, but I got so much more interested in cooking food properly and looking after myself. Food and cooking became one of my favourite hobbies and 7 years later is still my go-to healthy wind-down activity that helps me relax after a long day at work. Knock-on effects have meant I’m happier and healthier than I ever had been in my life.

This is an example of a tab group using Sidebery. If you click links on a page that open in new tabs, it creates a sort of folder from the original tab, with the group of links as children of the parent tab. You can also drag them into these groups manually.

Really like this, except that it breaks the Adaptive Tab Bar Colour extension. I’ve been using FF with edgy-arc-fr userchrome and Sidebery which is nearly perfect in terms of UI but definitely feels slower than Zen. I’d definitely switch to this if it had some native adaptive UI colour, I just think it’s neat.

Is the sidebar here just the same as the new native Firefox vertical sidebar, or is it bespoke?

I just think it’s neat

Search works really well for me. Definitely reveals a less aesthetic side of Thunderbird but it works!

A works to archive messages btw, I’m not sure about a shortcut for labels though.

very fair tbh

I removed the Facebook account containers extension recently, and it seemed it also removed the multi-account containers extension? I still had containers and could use them however, but I discovered something was up when I could no longer use the ctrl+. shortcut to choose a new container tab.

Sure but if you don’t want a worse UI then you can use these models with Heliboard, best of both worlds

Heliboard with FUTO voice is the one

Yeah it’s a big contrast to continental Europe where if you go into any electronics shop they’ll have Kobos on display as prominent as Kindles.

I think it’s only Amazon that does lock screen ads but since they have two-thirds of the market share globally (and a near monopoly in the US where the Verge is based) then whatever they do in the e-reader space is “normal”