My own setup from the top of my head would be:
- Browser: Mullvad with Mullvad VPN, LibreWolf for stuff that breaks. Brave if I really have no other choice.
- Phone: Pixel with Graphene, main profile is Google-less, second profile with Sandboxed GServices for apps that don’t work without it but I need them, downloaded through fresh gmail profile. Third profile linked to my old gmail with credit card for the two apps I bought and sometimes need to use.
- Mail: I use Protonmail, with my own domain that sounds vaguely corporate. I have a catch-all address, and generate random name.surename@mycorpdomain.com addresses for each service.
- File storage: I have a NAS, that I use for most file sharing I need.
- Music: Jellyfin server with Headphones and redacted.ch account, and I also make sure to support artists every month by spending what would be my Spotify subscription price on Bandcamp albums
- Desktop: I run Nobara, too lazy to run QubesOS - plus I game a lot, so it would be infeasible. I mostly try to get stuff on GoG and back it up on my own NAS. I have a ZeroTier network set up for streaming through Sunshine/Moonlight when I need to game from a laptop.
- VPN: I use Mullvad paid for with Monero, because it plays nicely with the Mullvad Browser fingerprint.
- Home automation: I have a few basic stuff made for Home Assistant that is running on RockPI I have at home, everything local and without any cloud, mostly through ESP32s.
- Messaging: This is the one I hate the most - most of the groups I’m working with or volunteering for use Messenger, so I have a Matrix server hosted that bridges it and Discord. It’s not ideal, but better than having anything Meta on my phone.
- Payments: This one is the one I’m struggling with the most. I pay by card almost everywhere, because cash is so much effort. I’ve tried looking into crypto or prepaid cards, but it’s really hard to find anything without KYC in Europe, so I’ve given up. I’m looking for advice regarding this, but I’m afraid that aside from switching to cash I’m out of luck.
- Passwords: I just use Bitwarden with YubiKey setup, same as using YubiKey for every important MFA I can. I have two backup keys stored at home, so I don’t need to use other recovery methods that would render it useless.
I’m not sure about other countries, but here in Czech we actually have a mandatory subscription, that’s absolutely bullshit.
So far, the law is that if you own any TV or radio, you have to pay monthly fee for public service broadcasters (national Czech TV). It’s bullshit, the channels are full of ads anyway, and the shows they run and create is insultingly bad. Sure, it is important to have public service broadcasters that are not dependent on the state (because state-owned TV is reeaallly bad idea), but FFS can they just reduce costs and stick to news, instead of doing another stupid series, and stop forcing us to pay for something I don’t care about or use?
You could just not pay the fee, if you state you don’t have a TV capable of receiving it (which I don’t). But now, they are changing the law that everyone who has any kind of internet-capable device has to pay the monthly fee, while also rising prices to something like 6 EUR per month. Fuck that and fuck them.