Yeah, I shouldn’t have been lazy, and might write that ‘if you need to and files from one device to another, you may use LocalSend, which is similar to AirDrop, but does work only when you’re on the same network’ or something like that.
I won’t call it a bad advice, because I’ve been struggling without LocalDrop, as there’s no similar thing for Linux world. AirDrop is surely works better, you can send files just being on the street, connected to no WiFi. However, I had a number of issues with it for family usage, while LocalSend just works seamlessly between my Linux computers and iOS devices.
Yep, Syncthing is great, and I use it heavily. What I meant is that AirDrop is for sending files you select, from one device to another, so LocalSend just closer to that. As the sibling comment pointed out, AirDrop is more robust.
Hardly agree here. I’d try not even replace a MacBook, but provide an alternative calm laptop to, say, browse the internet at home. (For that, iPad often beats any laptop, however. Say, my wife doesn’t even have a laptop of her own, but she uses iPad all the time, and I don’t see how to change that.)
We migrated to Immich this summer, and I’m mostly happy with the transition. (We migrated off Google Photos, which we were using since day one. So that wasn’t an iCloud migration.)
Some things, like passwords: she uses the integrated one, that comes with iOS. I’m just having duplicates in my vault. (I use pass.) So, overall it’s not an easy fight, but I consider us a Linux household, since the primary devices — servers and desktops with laptops — are all Linux, with no macOS (so far), and iOS. We don’t have Apple Watches right now, but I think we may try them. I think you won’t be able to replace them with Androids. To me, Android phones are just unreliable (hardware wise), and software is just an ugly mess. I haven’t tried GrapheneOS yet, and Lineage OS was good the last time I tried, but it’s still a toy device in comparison to iOS, reliability wise, not feature wise. I don’t see them as a replacement to an iPhone, they’re just a different league. For myself, I see Android phone (with Lineage OS) as a second phone only: and only till the moment a true Linux phone would replace it.
AirDrop = LocalSend
I’m the one who migrated off macOS, but I’m still heavily on iOS. All of my family is with iPhones, and we have a bunch of iPads. I’m having MacBooks, and they all run Linux (they’re old Intel models, and work perfectly well on Linux). Our home computer is on Fedora too.
As for the migration, I’d suggest making an attempt at migration with some old laptop: ThinkPad or even older Intel MacBook, the Retina 2012…2015 line up works really well for me. That way she’d have an opportunity to slowly learn and compare.
Apple’s ecosystem wasn’t bad when I migrated, and I was somewhat scared to switch fully. I did that only when I realised I haven’t touched my macOS MacBook for years! (We’ve been watching TV series off it, to keep the battery functioning more or so.)
Also, what helped is me realising I don’t need that tight integration between the phone / tablet and laptop / desktop. They’re different devices: to consume content vs to create it. So, it helped. But, I’m still learning the new apps. Particularly the design ones are awful on Linux. Figma is mostly the same, but Inkscape is just miserable, but I’m trying to keep using it, even despite the interface being terrible. Gimp turned out to be okay, more or so. Krita was mostly good too, so I don’t miss Photoshop. But I do miss video editing software. I hope Blender might help some things I miss, but I’m yet to learn it.
Interface wise, I think Gnome is perfectly fine for a macOS refugee (just search for the solution to keep cmd + v behaviour, there’s the project for that, I forgot the name: Toshy something; I use my own shortcuts now). However, you can make KDE behave very similar to macOS, to ease the transition.
The primary pain point is the apps. They’re different, and usually worse. Sometimes they’re better, if you strive for simplicity. So, it’s a mixed bag. Myself, I don’t see myself going back. I may use a MacBook with macOS, but my primary system at home would be Linux. As I have too many tiny little things now that are Linux exclusive.
I did similar task recently, but used my old MacBook Pro 2011 (15 inch, with a faulty GPU). I chose DietPi, which I can recommend as a start distro for a newcomer. I chose it since I have some experience with it from my Raspberry Pi and I plan to give the laptop to a friend, who isn’t familiar with Linux. (For him to run Immich.)
I have a similar MacBook Pro for myself, with Arch Linux installed (my old laptop with a few keys now broken). It’s on WiFi, not Ethernet, and where the signal isn’t very good. Yet, I’m mostly happy with the result.
So far, being somewhat experienced with Linux, I think I’d choose DietPi for most server setups. I really love it, a good work done by maintainers. I can recommend going with it for your first self-hosted adventures.
I had an entry level GPU (Radeon RX580 4GB) which I bought from a friend for €150 circa 2018, when its price was about twice more (won’t recall, from €200 to €250 maybe), he just did not need it and the card was overkill for my ‘just render the interface and occasional Photoshop-like kind of task’ workload. I thought I needed it, but it turned out I never utilised it. I don’t play games, that was for my Hackintosh to get a native support (which worked). I needed to upgrade the PSU alongside the GPU. I saw almost no difference in day to day life, since most of my work was some office-like stuff.
We entered some crazy times with GPUs a bit later, 2019 or ’20, another friend who was buying and selling these cards, told me I should sell it for €150 to €180 (basically returning my money back), and while I agreed with him at the time, I did not sell it. I didn’t want to spend my efforts on that, and then spend my efforts on buying something else (I thought I’d still need some GPU).
I regret that slightly. Not much, since €150 isn’t much to lose, and I did not have much resources to spend on this task. But if it was today, I think I’d do that.
I believe RAM prices would fall significantly at some point (would take years), I did buy +16 GB of DDR3 RAM right before the Rampocalypse, but I don’t see DDR3 being too expensive today. I don’t really utilise 32 GB vs 16 GB, but there’s not much point to sell it for what I’ve bought (€30 or so).
DDR5, on the other hand, may sell for a very good price, so if you don’t utilise it fully, why not then? You may buy a much better memory in some years. Keep in mind though that this crisis may take longer than we all hope. May take it not a year or two, but, say, five or ten.
Me, I’m ready for this. I run Linux, which works ideally with even just 8 GB of DDR3 RAM (my current laptop), so I’m pretty confident I’d survive till the prices drop. I’m not even sure I need it being newer and faster. Only if the hardware upgrade price would be insignificant to notice. I’ve got my current laptop from work for free, so that’s even better than I expected. But that’s just a different story.
Ah, yes, it’s the same thing (or a similar one), but reversed. You’re a proprietary product, which is free if you’re willing to host it yourself.
Not sure I’ve got the idea properly, but if so, I agree. I think offering help with self-hosting may generate decent income for a developer. Plus, give them insight into their users.
E.g. I have this idea to develop a set of neat Immich servers for friends (for free, but they buy needed hardware, say, Mac mini or something similar). As an extension of this idea, sell pre-made Immich-ready servers for general public, with the initial setup and extra support being paid. Including the donation to the original project off the money, if their licence allows selling the support. I expect it is, but haven’t investigated that further. Treat this as an example of the idea.
Obviously, this model would work for your own software. Perhaps, that’s not the fuck-you-money you can get with this, but still that may be more than open source projects get via the shallow donations that they usually get.
I have some ideas for some for-me software, which can live on any computer. So I think of deploying a fleet of SBC (Raspberry / Orange Pi or alike) servers to gift to friends, with bunch of neat services there, like Pi-Hole, etc. Plus some of made by me software, if I think the particular friend may have a use for it. The extension of this idea might be the broader audience. Won’t likely to be millions of users, but still. And who knows, one day … perhaps.
Hey, I solved the issue with the media by writing a custom app (it’s a bit more advanced than just a script) that copies the media to my server and inserts the links right into my posts. I’m at the stage of testing it, but so far it works. That allows me to host my blog on Cloudflare, plus have all my media on my own bare metal server, with as much storage as I need. Which is incredibly cheap. So far, I pay only for the domain name, and electricity to run my servers. But since they’re very energy efficient, that’s negligible.
I wrote you a long comment from my mobile, and it looks like it was lost.
Can you elaborate on that topic? I use ydotool for this, I’m on Sway.
I would be worried about the battery, as many others pointed out too. I had a somewhat similar project with old MacBooks. I thought taking the battery off would make its fan to spin at 100%, yet turned out it does not. Right now one of my servers is MacBook Pro from 2011, and it kicks. It has no battery installed, and it looks like a pretty good server to me. It starts automatically when there’s a power loss, which is ideal for a server. Can totally recommend.
Not in perpetuity though
Unfortunately, where I am, prices aren’t that generous, but I have an unusual interest in very old hardware, so most of my servers can be bought for like $20 or less. Most of them are junk hardware nobody needs. They’re very useful for many cases, especially if we talk self-hosting / personal servers. I bet you can easily serve a small community with a $20 computer. Recently, I started being very picky about power consumption (we have massive blackouts here in Ukraine, due to the Nazi terrorist state, Russia, shelling our civilian infrastructure; but not just that: power efficient hardware is better for the planet), but one thing that isn’t obvious: you can keep the hardware off when unused. It’s trivial to turn it on, or wake up, depending on the use case.
So, if anyone new reading this, I urge you to try this with any spare computer you can find. You may be surprised how good it may work with Linux (server or even desktop).
I may need to do a proper write up on that one, as it’s quite a long story actually. The main thing is, though: it’s hard to believe how actually good modern hardware is. You can do a lot with a Raspberry Pi, not to say Mac mini. Over the decades, I accumulated some old hardware which serves till it would break. And then I’d replace it with similar hardware, I guess. E.g. I have a media server, which is a simple lighttpd web server running on an obsolete Intel Atom computer. It’s slow, but it does its job at serving files. I have old MacBook Pro hosting my Immich library.
All that is rather a self-hosted territory, but I’m pretty confident I can host a production grade stuff off my own hardware. I have been using the cheapest options at DO/Hetzner, so I definitely can host off a maxed out Mac mini or similar.
All that lives at home, or in the office (I am allowed to have some hardware there). I think the main restriction is the gigabit internet… but hey! That’s plenty too!
If I’d ever come to some serious level of hosting, yes, I think I’d co-locate at some data centre. I see very little need in cloud services, as all I need can be done with the bare metal. And it’s so much fun! Feels like magic, seeing an old laptop you’d throw out otherwise, serving as what would be a full-blown server just two decades ago.
Hetzner was good for me, but I went all-in on bare metal, with no looking back.
My bet is that the tech bros hang in the same bar, and they’re just doing that for fun, and they don’t really care about the plebes not getting it.
Glad I left Digital Ocean like almost a decade ago, yet it still feels I’ve been with them for too long.
Well, not exactly the proper replacement, but you can try. I would be curious to learn how it went for you. For me, that worked (I barely touch iPad), for my wife didn’t, she uses iPad mostly.