I have been searching for a password manager for a while now. These are my reasons for looking for an open source password manager where I decide on where to store my passwords.
Transcript (English)
Hello YouTube, this is Cristian Herrera. I’m going to talk about why I’m moving away from KDE’s KWallet and cloud password managers like Google/LastPass, and why I’m going to try pass.
Cloud services: you don’t control where or how passwords are stored; if the service goes down or gets hacked, you’re stuck. Sometimes passwords are in one file—if it corrupts, you lose everything. If the company turns bad, you have no control. If the service goes down (Google, LastPass, whatever), all your passwords are down. If you don’t have local storage, you’re trusting them blindly. You don’t know how they back up or store things—Google lets you export in clear text.
KWallet/KDE: I’ve used Plasma for years; great integration (Dolphin, Okular), but migrating passwords was a pain. Poor docs, hard to read/export. Browser integration is weak—Firefox/Chrome/Brave each have their own stores, so passwords are scattered. When I switch from Plasma to i3, browser passwords get cleared and I have to retype everything. KWallet doesn’t integrate with everything, so you end up with multiple silos. I don’t want to remember 20–40 passwords or use plaintext; I want different passwords per service, easy access, and to pick where they’re stored.
My setup: multiple laptops (boat, office, a small one in my backpack) syncing via my own NAS/rsync; I avoid cloud sync. I want to choose storage location and move passwords easily between machines without relying on Google/Amazon.
Enter pass: follows Unix philosophy, uses GPG for encryption. The first line is the password; below you can store metadata (username, URL, notes, secret phrases). You can even open unencrypted with GPG, edit, and save. It supports Git for history (I’ll test that), community GUIs, and browser plugins (seen for Firefox/Chrome). There’s a menu/clipboard helper; I need to check how it clears the clipboard (claimed ~45 seconds) and whether it stays in clipmenu history.
Plan: migrate passwords, delete them from KWallet and Google, clean up other stores, then use pass. Maybe script Dolphin to use it or find alternatives—Dolphin is a good file manager, but I’m fine using a text interface for usernames/passwords if needed. I’ll read the man pages, play with it, and make a deeper video on storing usernames/metadata—most videos skip that.
If you have suggestions or questions, leave a comment. If you dislike it, even a thumbs down helps the algorithm; I’m not doing this for money, just documenting. Have a great day!