Consolidating a number of posts I've made in other threads on this matter, I decided to exit any "ecosystem" lock in and migrate to Linux over the last few months. This has been quite a difficult task if I'm honest so I'd like to share why and how I did it so you can look and laugh or at least know what you're getting in to. I will note that I have about 30 years of Linux experience on the server-side and a lot of other Unix experience so I'm not exactly a novice. This will be reflected in what I'm posting.
Firstly why? Well we're not in particularly good times to be honest. I'm in the UK and we have government policy which is starting to encroach on our privacy. "The cloud" as it stands was the first obvious target, which is where big tech companies focused on consolidating all our stuff and dependencies. In retrospect I find this abhorrent and dangerous. On top of that, all of the ecosystems (via cloud) I depended on are sovereign to the US. Without wishing to get into politics, that's not really ideal now. And lastly, everything is a control point. All devices are now registered and remote managed through online accounts otherwise they're not exactly useful. There have been numerous events where totally autonomous systems have destroyed people's lives through shutting their accounts down resulting in making their hardware and software useless. For this pleasure, we have to pay an up front premium and monthly subscription. The big tech companies in question are aggressively pushing further lock in to this model. And I don't want it.
Another trend in the industry is the aggressive push of LLM technology into everything. This is not something I need or want as I'm not technology driven but requirements driven. Nothing I do requires an LLM. Nothing I do benefits from an LLM. Not without dehumanising me in some way which isn't great. The effect also pushes into hardware so hardware supply chains are now compromised, prices are escalating and the only way this is getting paid off is if the companies leverage my previous point about the up front premium and subscription. I have no desire to do that.
Another principal annoyance was it's actually really annoying to get some software working reliably on macOS which I need to use on a daily basis. Particularly Maxima + wxMaxima CAS system. And this is not the software's fault. There's a huge amount of churn of macOS internals so minor OS releases seem to break it regularly. And that's somewhere in the depths of Qt. Even Microsoft don't screw that up as much.
And the final straw was the absolutely hideous pricing that Apple charge for RAM and storage and well, everything really. I really don't give a crap if I have to wait a couple of seconds extra here and there because my RAM isn't on die or my storage isn't bussed directly to the SoC. Realistically the last 6 years of progress does just buy me a couple of seconds here and there. And it doesn't add up to a material gain over the lifespan of the device.
Anyway the obvious option here was to switch to Linux which is entirely free of cloud lock in, vendor tied accounts, store models, LLMs (unless you want them) and the like. And it runs on trash machines, which are still affordable even with the RAM and storage crisis going on.
So a year ago I bought a modest machine and decided that I would cram my workloads into it. I've gone from a fairly high end M4 Pro configuration with studio display to this. Lenovo M720T desktop, i5-9400, 16Gb of RAM, 512Gb NVMe, Dell P2423DE monitor (24" 2560x1440p). And some crappy Creative speakers. Side by side, the display and speakers are as good as each other if I don't have my glasses on. If I do, there isn't £1300 difference. The speakers are better than the Studio display and cost £20. This machine is running Debian stable and Cinnamon desktop. The entire machine and monitor cost less than the AppleCare for the M4 Pro and it functionally isn't really any worse than what I had. This is painful.
Software was inevitably where the problem was so it took a long time to migrate out. Some details:
Pages / Numbers. Proprietary formats which are totally impossible to read anywhere else. These were exported to Excel / Word format and then carefully ported to LibreOffice. I didn't have a lot of documents which needed further edits so I just flattened all the old ones to PDFs.
iCloud email / domain. This was moved to UK provider Mythic Beasts. New client is Thunderbird. Migration was done by connecting both iCloud and the new mailbox to it and just dragging the emails across. I keep my mail box relatively tidy so this was a low effort job.
iCloud drive/Airdrop. These were entirely disabled. Files only exist on my desktop now. If I need to move something to the phone I will use LocalSend between them to explicitly send a file to the phone or back again.
Safari. Firefox + uBlock origin. Such a better experience. It's actually much faster even on a 6 year old machine. I haven't had anything that doesn't work on it yet.
Apple Music / Airpods. Decided I don't want them. Apple Music is utterly painful and laggy if you accidentally hit something that requires network access when the network is dicky. Also there are constant BT problems now with Airpods dropping due to the sheer amount of BT devices. So I've gone back to cabled earphones - some £20 Sony ones and the Apple USB-C/3.5 adapter for the phone for now. Player is VLC both on desktop and phone and I am using FLACs ripped from CDs with abcde or bought from online sources. I am directly supporting the artists and get to keep actual media forever without a subscription cost then. This has been a slog but I feel it was worth it.
Apple Photos. By far the bulk of iCloud was Photos.app. I just "exported originals" into the same folder structure as I had set up in photos app. All good. Disabled iCloud photos. I don't keep photos on my phone. If I want to move stuff back and forth I use LocalSend again.
Lightroom. This was the painful looking one that turned out to be easy in the end. I had an Adobe subscription due in a month so took the emergency option of exporting everything to JPEG 90% quality and just moving those files into the same structure as Lightroom. All RAWs are moved off onto a couple of 2TB removable disks and I'll recover them if I need them. Editing is done with a combination of Darktable (for RAW editing - usually light) and NegPy (to convert film negatives)
Notes. Just exported everything using "Exporter" from the App Store. It creates Markdown files. They are kept on disk and slowly get moved into ODT documents if worth keeping. I keep a paper (!) notebook on me now. It does a better job and there are no distractions!
iCal. I'm leaving this one alive for now but iPhone only as I have to collaborate with some family members that use it.
Reminders. Went into the physical notebook with the notes.
Keychain. Moved to KeepassXC. It was a bit scary how much stuff was tied into iCloud there. I am glad I moved it out. Mostly manually and verifying stuff the first time I logged into it on the Linux box. I now keep keychain on the iPhone out of icloud and only with minimal stuff on it. Also got rid of passkeys and moved everything I could to Yubikey MFA as well.
Time machine. I have two time machine disks, one 2TB HDD and one 2TB SSD. I wiped them both and use rdiff-backup to back up my home directory, minus some of the caches. This is done once a week. The 2TB SSD is encrypted with LUKS/dm-crypt and gets thrown in my bag when I'm away from home. I have an off-site 2TB disk as well with an rsync snapshot of the home directory too, which is done quarterly.
The only issues I've had with Linux were stuttering video playback which was a simple config fix. Everything else just worked.
Anyway this took about 9 months of concerted effort. Was it worth it? Yes definitely, as a friend demonstrated to me not that long ago. She dropped her MacBook and realised she couldn't afford to buy another one thus locking her out of her entire tecnology existence. If this was to happen to me, I just order another desktop computer from ebay, restore stuff and carry on. Well realistically I just grab one of the other junk PCs I have lying around and do the same.
Bar some conveniences lost, I sleep better now. The Apple stuff is going on eBay in the next month and I'm going on holiday with the money.
