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I want to leave the apple ecosystem as well, and appreciate this post, but there’s an inherent limitation to “just switched” posts like this. To wit: they don’t

I want to leave the apple ecosystem as well, and appreciate this post, but there’s an inherent limitation to “just switched” posts like this. To wit: they don’t capture the cost and benefit over time. Switching to Arch & rsync takes “just a month,” but then you upgrade something and drivers break, you have an issue on your remote machine you’re syncing to and have to debug it, your backups stop working and you urgently need to address the issue, etc etc. Either one of these can be showstopping issues. That said, Macs screw up on updates as well at times. The general point is that “just switched” narratives like this paint an incomplete picture because one big benefit of, say, iCloud photos is that I pay a monthly fee then I never have to think about it. Not so rsync.

beebeepka 5y ago
Comparing two opposite extremes - Arch to Apple - has its merits but it's hardly useful. Justike this blog post I certainly didn't have to sacrifice much of anything by moving from Windows 8 (the best one) to Ubuntu and Manjaro. I've even moved old people to Ubuntu back in the gnome 2 days. Worked great
dotancohen 5y ago
With Arch you might get breakages. If you're worried about that, then go with Kubuntu. Seriously, it has been ages since I've seen hardware compatibility issues with Kubuntu, maybe eight years or longer across literally dozens of install on my own and other peoples' hardware.
- SamuelAdams 5y ago
  I’ve been running Debian on a laptop using rsync to back up my files. This has been my setup for at least three years. Not sure why OP thinks it breaks all that often.
christophilus 5y ago
I've been running Fedora for the better part of a year. The switching costs for me were negligible. What I like about Fedora is that it is really stable while still being pretty bleeding edge. Vanilla Fedora (running unmodified Gnome) is really an excellent OS. So far, I haven't had any major issues. The biggest thing I missed was the Macbook trackpad. The Dell XPS's trackpad is janky by comparison. That said, I won't be confident in recommending this setup until I've been through another year or so of upgrade cycles.
freetime2 5y ago
> one big benefit of, say, iCloud photos is that I pay a monthly fee then I never have to think about it Just to offer up a real-world counter-example, I once ran into a syncing issue with iCloud Photos where my family members stopped receiving any new photos that I posted to a shared album. I tried a few different things to get it to sync properly again, like logging out and back into icloud on my device, etc. It was basically impossible to debug because the whole syncing process is completely opaque to the user in Apple Photos. After about a month I was very nearly on the verge of ditching iCloud for photo sharing completely, and then one day it started working again just as mysteriously as it stopped. I agree with your broader point that iCloud generally requires less effort to set up and manage than rsync. But in this particular case I would have really loved to be running rsync, because I could have easily debugged it.

beebeepka 5y ago

Comparing two opposite extremes - Arch to Apple - has its merits but it's hardly useful. Justike this blog post I certainly didn't have to sacrifice much of anything by moving from Windows 8 (the best one) to Ubuntu and Manjaro. I've even moved old people to Ubuntu back in the gnome 2 days. Worked great

dotancohen 5y ago

With Arch you might get breakages. If you're worried about that, then go with Kubuntu. Seriously, it has been ages since I've seen hardware compatibility issues with Kubuntu, maybe eight years or longer across literally dozens of install on my own and other peoples' hardware.

SamuelAdams 5y ago
I’ve been running Debian on a laptop using rsync to back up my files. This has been my setup for at least three years. Not sure why OP thinks it breaks all that often.

christophilus 5y ago

I've been running Fedora for the better part of a year. The switching costs for me were negligible. What I like about Fedora is that it is really stable while still being pretty bleeding edge. Vanilla Fedora (running unmodified Gnome) is really an excellent OS. So far, I haven't had any major issues. The biggest thing I missed was the Macbook trackpad. The Dell XPS's trackpad is janky by comparison. That said, I won't be confident in recommending this setup until I've been through another year or so of upgrade cycles.

freetime2 5y ago

> one big benefit of, say, iCloud photos is that I pay a monthly fee then I never have to think about it Just to offer up a real-world counter-example, I once ran into a syncing issue with iCloud Photos where my family members stopped receiving any new photos that I posted to a shared album. I tried a few different things to get it to sync properly again, like logging out and back into icloud on my device, etc. It was basically impossible to debug because the whole syncing process is completely opaque to the user in Apple Photos. After about a month I was very nearly on the verge of ditching iCloud for photo sharing completely, and then one day it started working again just as mysteriously as it stopped. I agree with your broader point that iCloud generally requires less effort to set up and manage than rsync. But in this particular case I would have really loved to be running rsync, because I could have easily debugged it.