not sure about ready... sure there's a will

Not even sure there is that much will on politicians side. I hope there is, but they are mostly ignorant (judging from politicians in my country) and wouldn't distinguish between Word and Windows. They might be interested if there are elections and public pushes for it. But once elected then it's another song based on US stick and carrot. Mostly sticks from this administration. But I really do hope we start to move and now is the best time possible. Also recently there was data that German Federal Administration is paying Microsoft something like:

2023: 274.091.361,75 Euro
2024: 347.665.579,71 Euro
2025: 481.369.660,77 Euro

The trend is not encouraging, isn't it, and those are insane numbers - imagine what could we have for that amount with OSS.
There is another neglected area - computer education in elementary school is practically non-existent and tiny-existent in middle school in my country while MS is subsidizing software for government and specially education sector. And so the circle of is closed.

Yeah, a proton blog... Not going to trust that much

Good. Start by introducing a viable smartphone OS, because right now it’s down to Apple and Google, both from the US.

Linux is a great place to start. Android is based on Linux. Even a fork of Android that doesn’t give Google any data would be a good place to start, but relying on AOSP — Google’s open source repository — isn’t ideal.

are those millions? am I reading that right?

Hi ! I'm switching away from US tech. I started using the proton solutions. Do you have something against this company ?
It's a genuine question.

I see a lot of options from European companies and being based in Switzerland and having encryption. Proton seemed to be a good way to start.

Your eyesight is 20/20

The Proton CEO Andy Yen tweeted support for Trump’s Department of Justice pick last year and a shitstorm suddenly appeared.

It was a pretty tone-deaf tweet, but it most certainly doesn’t mean that Proton or its CEO support the Trump regime.

Below is an article analyzing the entire episode, and before that a direct quote from the article if you want to get the basic idea with out reading the entire thing…

“However, being disillusioned with one party on one issue doesn’t mean that all of a sudden Andy Yen changed all of his stances and that now he’s actually pro-Republican or pro-MAGA. All of the evidence gathered suggests the exact opposite.”

https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e

I'd say the priority should be to have hardware that allows changing the os, just like pcs. We already have a lot of functional mobile OSes, but with locked hardware, we're still stuck with google and apple

Thank you for your answer!

Eu might ditch some us software. Highly doubt that it will respect your privacy though, more and more countries here are pushing id-verification for social media and other stuff

"3,000 people across the three countries" are ready to ditch us tech.

Proton Mail is a good idea for the zero-knowledge encryption, but it's a whole lot of vendor lock in as you can't use standard clients (IMAP/STMP/CalDAV/CardDAV) for mail/calendar/contacts. Tuta isn't any better in this regard. If you're looking for ability to use standard open clients, probably mailbox.org would be a good option to check out.

They have really dragged out making a Linux Drive client. The protocol isn't documented for 3rd party implementations, but they're Windows/Mac desktop clients are open source so it's conceivable to reverse engineer the protocol from those, but nobody has done it.

They've delivered a bunch of new apps to their suite like a crypto wallet and an AI agent, rather than addressing popular feature requests for existing software.

To give a bit of technical details, the hardware must have a feature to destroy encryption keys for user data whenever a new OS is installed on it; and you have to be able to install a new OS on it at all.

Like, today, many smartphones have the problem that you can't install a new OS on them at all, because the bootloader doesn't allow it. Meanwhile PCs have a different problem, where they do allow installing new OS, but the user data is typically not encrypted and so you can just boot linux from a USB device and read all contents on the internal disk.

The best solution might be to encrypt all userdata, store the keys in the bootloader on the device, but when a new OS is loaded/installed, the bootloader doesn't give out the keys so the userdata can't be decrypted.

yes, german has a very weird way of writing numbers, where . is replaced by , and , is replaced by .

So, in US numbers, that would be EUR 274,091,361.75

It has confused many people already. It should be made more consistent internationally. I propose all use the US format of 274,091,361.75 because that's already used in programming and so it's widespread.

Start by introducing a viable smartphone OS

Damn funny me thinking about Symbian and the fallen empires of Nokia and Ericsson, now that the ball is in EU's court as enshittification consumes America and the Chinese government likes to have its presence in nearly every device ever made from the Middle Kingdom.

"Very weird way of writing numbers"

You mean like in all of Europe (excluding UK and Ireland) and latin America? It's only english speaking countries and some Asian countries that separate with ,

Proton > US companies

It's not perfect, but no reason to recommend Google, Microsoft or Apple above it.

i stopped reading when i saw that

It's not so much that Europe wants to ditch US tech.

It's more that everyone wants to ditch the current crop of leeching billionaires and their spyware products. It's just they all happen to be in the US which given its current administration is a problem.

However this push to use more open source and locally based alternatives proceeds Donald Trump's first term. It's just his rhetoric has accelerated the process.

You would have the same trouble Microsoft did though. No one wanted to use the Windows mobile because there were no apps for it, and there were no apps for it because no developers wanted to develop for a platform with no users. Chicken and the egg.

It would be nice to have a smartphone that was just web-based and didn't really have apps, but I think that ship has sailed, people are just used to the concept and I think they would think of it as a step backwards if they had a phone that didn't use apps.

Graphene and e/OS exist.

Problem with Graphene is the limitation of hardware to Pixel due to manufacturers.

e/OS is good, but the missing killer app for me is contactless payment. Which brings Europe back to the Visa/MC problem. Digital Euro could fix this.

Just saying that Proton have a vested interest in desprestiging megatech.

I was doubting my own sight yes

Billionaires or no billionaires, I dont want my data in the US