The Digitally Sovereign Software Stack

Introduction

As this week (June 15-21) is Digital Sovereignty week, I came across a Bluesky post by Tuta, one of the pioneers of Private, European solutions (they created Tuta Mail, Tuta Calendar and their Tuta Cloud is in Closed Beta). I highly recommend their softwares (for example Tuta Mail has a native Linux client!), because their solutions eploy zero-knowledge architecture combined with strict GDPR regulations (made in Germany). The reason Tuta products are not featured here is because I’ll do a full post on them later…

The post in question:

I thought this was a great initiative, I even shared the software stack I use to become digitally sovereign:

You might have already read about some of these in my blog, for example I wrote about Ecosia and Librewolf in „European alternatives to Big Tech – Part 2„, or about LibreOffice, KeePassXC and some other software for to-be Linux users in „Transitioning to Linux for the anxious – Part 1„. In this post, I’d like to introduce you to the rest from the list above. Without further ado, let’s get started!

Proton Pass

Proton Pass is the European alternative to Google Authenticator. You can easily migrate your Google Auth codes into their app and just use it like you did before…with the addition of the extra privacy they offer. I believe this is a great application and a hassle-free step towards digital sovereignty. You can copy auth codes and it offer almost every feature you’re used to.

Proton VPN

Also created by Proton A.G. this was one of their first apps. If you need a more secure VPN to access geo-blocked websites for example, I highly recommend checking them out! When you register for a free plan, you get a few days of trial, where you can access all servers and locations, then you can access a set number of free (la bit slower) locations, assigned randomly. Proton VPN comes at a reasonable price of $9.99 /month, or their unlimited plan (with acess to all premium Proton products: VPN, Pass, Mail, Calendar, Drive) for $12.99 /month, even cheaper if paid on a yearly or biennial basis.

DeepL

DeepL is an advanced translator made by the company with the same name, founded in Cologne. They started out with an AI-assisted translation service, but they now also offer a writing assistant and a real-time voice translator. Still, their translator is their most popular service, with a generous free tier of max 500 characters translated once (but be aware: the free translations are used to train their AI models!). Still, I believe DeepL is still better, than the biggest online translator…

VSCodium

The most popular code editor for the past few years is by far Visual Studio Code. But even though the source code itself is open source (MIT-licence), the product available for download is licensed under a not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking. This means, that if you want a „clean” build, you’d have to build the software from source yourself. VSCodium does this for you and disables all telemetry.

Eclipse Theia

According to their team: „The Theia IDE is a modern, AI-native IDE for cloud and desktop built on the Theia Platform.” As the name suggests, Theia IDE is is an Eclipse open source project under the Eclipse Theia project. 

It features a highly customizable developer experience with AI support. The AI-powered Theia IDE includes Theia Coder, an open, adaptable and transparent AI coding assistant, with integration to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and even Claude Code.

Even though it resembles Visual Studio Code -as it incorporates some components of it-, such as the Monaco editor, it is not a fork, but a fully independent software.

If you want to try something not VSCode, but still quite similar, I recommend trying out this great IDE!

Conclusion

These applications are excellent European software, as usable as their Big Tech counterparts. Try some of them and I encourage you to really use them for a while! I believe you can get used to them in a few days, but if more people choose European, sovereign software, the risk of vendor lock-in can be dramatically reduced. Yes, I know there are so many other European apps, and I plan to make a post on a more diversified stack. Stay tuned!