I have been doing the same thing for some time, and I don't understand why people will pay the Apple premium if you buy into the cloud concept. It simply makes

I have been doing the same thing for some time, and I don't understand why people will pay the Apple premium if you buy into the cloud concept. It simply makes no sense. I've got myself, my wife, my mother, step-father and sister all running Ubuntu 11.04 on rather cheap (as in price) but still good Lenovo hardware. Everything just works (and well) and since Chrome runs great on Linux, they have the exact setup in the article and they have near zero need for anything more. I don't get paying 10-20% more for shiny. Anyway, that point aside, I absolutely love the setup. As I've said, I pretty much run this myself. My local file system is actually a huge Ubuntu One disk (cheaper than dropbox plus I get music streaming to my Android phone) so I don't even worry about backups (even so, I still have backups....call me old fashioned) and all my code is in github or bitbucket (depending on project). It has really been working quite well for me for about 1.5 years or so. The big thing I noticed when setting up non-technical family members (all those listed above are teachers, FYI) is that you just have to create some bookmarks to Google docs and the like, and maybe create a desktop shortcut to them. I take my workflow for granted sometimes, and I've realized they are used to clicking on something to open it so creating a bookmark in the toolbar or a shortcut on the desktop makes it feel like an app to them. Other than that, no real adjustment.