So once again it is basically a premature announcement; since all of those features already available, already exists in the ordinary Proton Business plan ... As none of them are basically Pass specific.
And the difference then between "ordinary" Pass and business "Pass" is zero .... Both have unlimited vaults and 2FA in the more costly plans.
So I spent a little bit time to dig up what Notion is.
This is what I found when searching for it ... https://www.notion.so/about
And I honestly have no idea why Skiff would be interesting for Notion. From what I can grasp the only Notion features overlap are Skiff Pages and perhaps Skiff Calendar. It's so off I struggle to fully grasp this.
First of all, Notion is not a service talking about privacy at all, afaict. And that was one of the main arguments Skiff had.
And then the first thing this merges states is that Skiff services are closing down.
I hate to say this, but Skiff founders couldn't really have cared that much about privacy then, when they chose to close down so quickly and abruptly like that, without a continuation plan on bringing privacy to Notion.
I believe the Skiff founders, if they really cared strongly about privacy, realised their service was not sustainable in a longer run, with too high running cost and too low income. In addition they might have seen that they would need to invest a lot more into further development and that it was too hard to improve their revenue stream. So the alternative was either to go down with a bang (bankruptcy), or they could sell "something" to another company and make it sound nicer.
Right now I just wonder what Skiff managed to actually sell to Notion. Most likely manpower, if I should guess.
Tuta seems to be driven by idealists and privacy activists as well. AFAIK, they also don't have venture capital and their user base of paying users is what keeps them alive. Which is also why it's still a small company.
I don't recall how Tuta got their initial funding to get startet. I don't think they were crowdfunded in the same way Proton did.
But the idealsism goals of both Tuta and Proton is what generally makes it less likely they will sell out.
AFAIR, Skiff was VC funded. The idealism of the founders are easily ignored when the VC backing wants to cash in on their investments. And that's what happened here, in some way or another.
They could even have a Fedora Copr repo, where they push out the updated .spec file and get a proper package build for all Fedora, RHEL/CentOS and more distros. With proper RPM packaging and repository. Push a new build and all users gets an updated package at their next update cycle.
That's a reasonable path to get started with preparing packages to become part of the native yum/dnf repos at least. And that across a lot of distributions and releases in a single go.
@protonmail could start by actually attending various open source conferences. There are several of them only in Europe. #FOSDEM is the largest one (actually happening this weekend), @devconf_cz is another one, with lots of #Linux distribution focus as well.
Sending HR folks and developers to these conferences, having a stand somewhere, meeting people is a solid way to find new hires with a specific skill set.
But Proton also insists on doing the packaging and distribution of it outside the ordinary distribution paths Linux distros uses (apt/yum/dnf repos or flatpak) ... So they waste time and energy on getting stuff working properly across a broader range of Linux distributions.
The end result will therefore most likely be a poorer user experience where some features don't work well on some distros. Depending on how their "package" will manage to integrate on the distro installing it.
That's what really happens when @protonmail insists on doing everything on their own, not even doing the continuous development in the open. They provide source code updates only on stable releases, and even that can be delayed some days until after the release.
That's not how you build a community of users, developers and package maintainers.
Had they instead spent resources getting their Linux packages into the native package streams for the most important distros, they would have solved more bugs earlier with help from the community.
That is probably the most disappointing aspect of Proton. They still don't grasp how to interact with a broader community, to get real help.
They would still need to review contributions, just as I expect they do with changes from their own employees. So it wouldn't reduce the security.
Also, they can't really hide behind the code not being ready to be published; they code is being published in the end.
But they really miss the opportunity to get their packages into the standard Lunux repositories. Which would help resolving all the incompatibility issues they now have with certain Linux distributions.
On top of that, all the needed tooling required already exists. It just need to implemented correctly in their processes.
Just do me a favour, don't follow all the suggestions from random blogs, wikis and such. There are tons of them, the vast majority is rubbish and too often even making things worse or harder to cleanup afterwards. Most of it is even out of date.
@nixCraft is one of the saner ones to pay attention to. Or read the blogs and docs for #Fedora or even Red Hat Enterprise Linux (aka RHEL). The latter one goes through quality checks, often done by tech people knowing their stuff.
Linux Foundation and Red Hat also got some free courses too.
Yeah, some. You need to learn some new tools, like ssh, command line usage and how to keep the system up-to-date. That's the bare minimum. Then it's good to learn a bit of network firewalling, to secure the host better.
Then you need to deploy a VPN server. OpenVPN Access Server is easily installed and can help settings things up reasonably quickly. The unpaid install allows you to have 2 devices connected at the same time.
Alternatively, there is the Cloud Connexa service. That will function a bit more like the Proton VPN Secure Core when fully set up (you can can connect from your devices from a different region from your VPS's location). You run a few commands on your VPS which the Cloud Connexa wizard setup guides you through. The free plan here includes 3 connected devices (in your case VPS + 2 devices).
With both alternatives you can install the OpenVPN Connect app on your devices, provide the username/password/otp for the account you've created in Access Server or Cloud Connexa, and you're basically ready. The Connect app downloads the proper config file and you can connect just as the consumer VPNs.
There are few alternatives to Proton Drive. Filen.io is the closest one in features. But it's a small company, so it development takes time.
Another alternative is Tresorit. Feature wise it is far beyond Proton Drive and Filen, with more advanced sharing possibilities. But it's quite expensive, closed source and uses Azure under the hood on the server side.
Filen and Tresorit are the only ones with Linux apps. Proton Drive can be accessed via rclone, but that is quite slow tbh.
Regarding Proton VPN. That is probably the only consumer VPN service I'm willing to give some trust. But consumer VPNs are in general questionable services. They promise a lot more than they can really deliver.
Since I trust one of the ISPs I use where I live, I host my own VPN server there and use that instead. I would even claim that you probably get a more reliable with the same type of privacy if you just use a VPS host in a trusted country and set it up as a VPN server for only your own stuff.
VPNs do have a purpose, when used correctly and for the problem a VPN was designed to solve. Consumer VPN services generally falls out of that scope.
So I use Proton VPN only when my direct access to my own VPN server is inaccessible. And I use Proton VPN to get through restricted networks, so I can get a connection to my own VPN server (double tunnel/tunnel in tunnel).
I've done the self-hosting of e-mail for over a decade. But it got so annoying and troublesome in the end it was a delight to migrate to Proton (because of all the spammers making this whole e-mail infrastructure a nightmare).
Incoming e-mail is still doable for self-hosting. But outgoing is getting incredibly hard when you're a tiny actor; you get blocked by all these larger mail providers (gmail, hotmail/outlook.com, yahoo) and your just lucky if you're able to get in touch with anyone willing to look into the issues. Most times you get a mail template back claiming a bad IP address/range reputation (despite being able to document it several years back). The worst one even claimed I did aggressive marketing spam (which would be absurd for the handful users I served, used it for private emailing). And then they close the support ticket and ignore you.
Proton is definitely big enough to fight back such abusive behaviours by these large actors.