I tried VanillaOS for a bit but not for long enough to really get into it. One challenge I had was limited Linux experience, and Vanilla wrote their own everything. I found it to be a bit too much for the light experimenting I like to do.

Haven’t tried any others yet.

I was looking at Proton for mail and calendar right around the time the Andy thing kicked off. I hadn’t yet pulled the trigger on Proton due to their fairly high pricing. I ultimately decided on Tuta for mail and calendar, and I have no issues using their native/desktop apps. I am still forwarding everything from my Gmail account as I slowly work through changing my email on key services. So far so good.

The one issue I had with Tuta is no ability to import mail unless you are at the highest priced tier. I’m on the middle one so no import. What I did instead was just download a copy of my Gmail to an MBOX file, and I have that on my desktop and access it with Thunderbird (read only) as needed. This was fine for me as I don’t have much mail of significance.

Switching was a small action, but one that made me feel immediately better, like I did something concrete in opposition to the rapidly enshittifying tech universe.

Like others here, I dumped Reddit and moved here (and to Mastodon) full time. I also moved to Linux full time on my home laptop and haven’t missed Windows one little bit. I’m looking forward to experimenting more with a couple of other distros of interest (currently Pop_OS) and am having actual fun using my computer again. Heavy emphasis on adopting as many FOSS alternatives as possible in ‘24, and starting to separate myself from the big G.