Yeah, I think I've realized just because me and most of my friends do it, and my family all does it (and of course they do because I give all of them a new iMac

Yeah, I think I've realized just because me and most of my friends do it, and my family all does it (and of course they do because I give all of them a new iMac for Christmas every 5 years or so and set it up for them), probably not as many people do this as I think. (Strong disagree that it's a bad idea though; it's super handy, all your windows are just where you left them and your email is already there before you sit down at the computer. iMac machines in particular are highly reliable and will happily run continuously for many years beyond the time frame you'd still want to use them. Seconds matter.) But anyway, the main point of this reply is to say that with Syncthing you never need to sync immediately, or manually at all, in this scenario. If I take my laptop out and work at a cafe or something, it syncs continuously and flawlessly, and when I get back home my iMac Pro is already totally up-to-date. It's only when you do some work with huge files on an airplane with no connectivity, or something like that, where you might need to make sure you turn it on again when you land and make sure it is on and connected to the internet to make sure all the changes get synced back to all the other machines. If you have at least one always-on machine, Syncthing is just as convenient, but objectively superior (security and price being the biggest two). If you don't want to or can't have one always-on machine, then that might be a reasonable use case for Dropbox for file sync.