Chris WiegmanI’m trying to extract myself from the Apple ecosystem once again. I’ve setup my Framework laptop with Ubuntu as a start but without my data it’s almost unusable. I need a plan for the rest.
Separating my identity from Apple
My first move is going to be signing up for a different email and calendar account, probably from Fastmail. Instead of keeping my long-time email primarily on my .com domain I’ll finally use the .org version and make this the first step to move to it. That means I’ll have 2 email accounts for a while but there are worse things.
Working on my files
The next step will be migrating files to something more usable on Linux. Everything I have is currently in iCloud and I am just not comfortable with that. I’m looking at either going back to Nextcloud or trying out Syncthing for this. The key will be figuring out what will work on my iOS devices, at least for now, as well as what will work well with Joy. In either case I think we’ll be moving our data back to a home NAS as well, though I’m not sure what model yet.
As all my docs are in Mac-only apps (Quicken, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc) I’ll have to migrate them back to LibreOffice and, probably, GnuCash. I’m not completely sure on GnuCash yet as I do a lot of receipt entry from my phone currently.
All our services
Finally I’ll need to think about moving all our services to something more usable on Linux. This includes, maps, music, reminders, notes and so much more which are all currently in iCloud or other Apple services.
This one is tricky. Photos are difficult in anything but Google and Apple and I’ve stuck with Apple Music as it lets me upload my own music when needed as well. I’m not sure what I’m going to go to for all of this yet.
I’ve got to start somewhere
The thing is, whether I know what I’m going to or not I need to start somewhere. That somewhere is going to be services and files.
It’s the journey, right?