Introduction: A New World in the $SHELL of the Old
This series of articles is about replacing corporate software and services that are invasive and coercive with Free community-built alternatives. It focuses on moving from macOS and iOS to Linux and de-Googled Android and finding self-hosted alternatvies to cloud services.
I've been using a Mac since 1993. The user experience has slowly decayed, and every update makes it clearer that this is Apple's operating system and not mine. But 30-year-old habits coupled with vendor lock-in makes it very difficult to switch.
I began this transition four years ago. I purchased a Thinkpad P1 and installed KDE Neon, a Linux distribution built on Ubuntu (which is built on Debian) that provides the latest software from KDE. I told one of my clients I no longer had a Mac, and he immediately gave me a 16" MacBook Pro, from his corporate lease. And then rotated it out with a new model each year. It is really hard to leave an operating system and ecosystem you've been using for decades, when a new top-of-the-line MacBook Pro is dropped in your lap every year. Four years later, that client finally hired full-time IT, and my last Macbook Pro is soon headed back.
While enjoying those leased MacBooks, I've also been experimenting with different equipment and OSes over the past few years. (There is not a computer shortage at Applefritter HQ.)
It is remarkably hard to find PC laptops then are competitive with the MacBook in quality. Everything I've tried has fallen short in some way. ThinkPads are the best, without much competition. On the software side, Linux distribution doesn't matter as much as it used to, now that so much software is distributed separately from the distribution. I'm very comfortable with Debian, which I've been running, mostly on servers, since the 90s, but haven't hated any of the distributions I've tried.
On the phone, I experimented with GrapheneOS and CalyxOS on Android phones, and, UBPorts, Plasma Mobile, and Phosh on the Linux Pinephone. I've also been moving to self-hosted services, as I extricate myself from iCloud and similar services.
This series of articles will explore the process of moving to Free, community-built software, from the perspective of someone heavily invested in Apple's ecosystem.