Alternatives certainly exist - I've been moving myself rapidly in that direction after my nearly 20 years of Apple use has come to an end (at a remarkably low s

Alternatives certainly exist - I've been moving myself rapidly in that direction after my nearly 20 years of Apple use has come to an end (at a remarkably low sysadmin-hours-per-year level, that's going to go up substantially). Unfortunately, most of them aren't quite ready for standard daily driver use. I've been daily driving a PineBook Pro, and despite some custom kernel hacking I've done, I still don't have reliably sound after sleep... unless I don't have sleep enabled properly, at which point it won't last the night on battery. Pick your poison. Or do more kernel hacking. It's something related to device sleep/resume on the audio chip, which I eventually found some NDA'd datasheets for. Fortunately, I can use 2.4GHz wifi out where I live, because 5GHz is also weirdly broken unless you perform the right incantations after power cycle. At this point, I think "those who can" move away from the core ecosystems have an obligation to do so, and try to pave the road in front of us. Right now, it's cobblestones at best (if you ignore the potholes), and a lot of people simply won't go that way. As long as the alternatives start with "Well, as long as you don't mind..." and then a list of features people consider important... they're going to remain alternatives. But, at the same time, I find myself considering how much hassle is worth it to "remain in the ecosystems." Yes. I can do a lot of work to smooth out rough edges, write my own kernel modules to work around hardware quirks (I really should upstream the sleep changes), figure out alternatives to things that don't work, do Matrix bridges, and... At what point is it simply not worth it? At what point is trying to keep up with modern consumer tech, to de-fang it, and make it work for me instead against of me just more hassle than it's worth? If anything mainstream is eventually going to get updates that turn it against me (which I consider updates like this to be), then... why bother? The benefits are great, but if the downsides and workarounds and time cost are too much, then I should consider if I actually want to be part of that. I've already done this with cell phones. Apple pissed me off with on-device CSAM scanning enough (well, that was the final straw) that I've gone back to a flip phone. I could go Pixel, Graphene, etc, but I've decided to experiment with what I actually miss out on, going back to a flip phone. I've de-fanged my previous phone a lot, so it's less of a change than for a lot of people, but... a few weeks in, I actually haven't missed a smartphone that much. I object strongly to the whole "You pay for the tech which then collects data and makes money on the backend optimizing the advertising feed to your pair of eyeballs" model that is more and more a part of consumer tech, so perhaps the right answer is to simply opt out of it. It's a recent addition to life. We can go back to what worked before.