A new episode of my “De Overstap” series has just been published on Computable.nl. In this series, I write about my own attempts to move away from the usual Big Tech ecosystem and see how far you can get with European, open source and more independent alternatives.
Episode 9 became something of a holiday edition. This summer I travelled with my family to the south of France with a tech setup that was almost completely free of the platforms I used to depend on. My laptop was my Slimbook Evo running Linux Mint, while my phone was a Fairphone 6 with Murena’s /e/OS. And yes, for the most part it worked remarkably well.
There was one small adventure on the way. As soon as I crossed the border, my phone suddenly had no mobile internet. Everything seemed to be configured correctly, but eventually I discovered (thank you Mistral Vibefor helping me) that the correct KPN APN setting was simply missing. Once I added it manually, everything worked again.
That experience actually illustrates one of the main points of this new episode. Alternatives to Big Tech increasingly work perfectly well from a technical point of view. But if we really want ordinary users to adopt them, the learning curve still needs to come down. People should not have to know what an APN is just because they choose a different mobile operating system.
And then there was Nextcloud. I happened to wear an old Nextcloud T-shirt on the beach in France. To my surprise, several French people recognised the logo and started talking to me about Nextcloud, digital autonomy and European alternatives. Hardly scientific market research, of course, but still interesting. Open source alternatives such as Nextcloud seem to be slowly moving beyond their traditional technical audience.
The article also includes my latest experiences with Capacities.io for personal knowledge management, plus a few other interesting alternatives I recently came across, including littleFedi, soev.ai and the Dutch Matrix service mtux.nl.
You can read De Overstap 9: Nextcloud op het strand on Computable.nl: https://www.computable.nl/2026/08/17/de-overstap-9-nextcloud-op-het-strand/.