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Yeah this one has pissed me off generally. I'm slowly working out how the hell I get out of the ecosystem but I realise I'm heavily locked in and it's difficult
by gw98 4y ago
Yeah this one has pissed me off generally. I'm slowly working out how the hell I get out of the ecosystem but I realise I'm heavily locked in and it's difficult so I'm going to have to do it very slowly and methodically.
Edit: just bought a desktop PC off ebay which I will install Ubuntu on and see how I get on.
- cowtools 4y agonot trying to start a distro war, but I would advise against using ubuntu for the time being as their custodian has been somewhat incompetent in recent years, and they have been forcing users to use their "snap" system. It may give you a bad first experience.
- ksidudwbw 4y agothis path has been partially trodden, elementaryOS. The first versions were snappy don't know now.
- gw98 4y agoThanks for the heads up. Have dealt with snap before (and eviserated it)
- adra 4y agoI haven't tried it, but I've heard Pop_OS! is a pretty popular distro these days. If you want something really lean and unobtrusive (though you may need more up front setup), you may want to look at an XFCE based distro (my personal favorite). Just remember, most distros have live usb stick distros so you can always try out a bunch before you decide on the right one for yourself.
- gw98 4y agoThanks. Pop_OS! is a candidate for testing here already if Ubuntu doesn't work out. I picked Ubuntu as a first point because I grabbed a Lenovo Neo 50s desktop and that supports it out of the box. That will set expectation for hardware compatibility and issues for other distributions or variants.
- jzb 4y agoI like Fedora and Pop_OS! I'd recommend Pop_OS! first for newcomers but Fedora is great for a work desktop if you're reasonably technical and don't mind upgrading at least once a year. Pop_OS! offers an LTS edition so you can stay with a release for several years.
- beckingz 4y agoWhat distro would you suggest as a user friendly alternative?
- Ruthalas 4y agoLinux Mint has been a good, reliable option for me.
- viridian 4y agoI'd second mint for anyone who wants a "it just werks (TM)" experience with minimal configuration to throw on anything except a server. For servers, these days I'd recommend Alpine on ARM architecture for a very good mix of high performance and having sane defaults set up so you can easily set up a reverse proxy, web server, etc.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoOpenSUSE is nice. It has btrfs/snapper configured by default, which makes upgrades low-stress (if anything ever goes wrong, just reboot into the snapshot automatically created before every upgrade.) It also has a decent GUI (YaST) for system administration tasks.
- behnamoh 4y agoI love OpenSUSE (esp. Tumbleweed), but every time I see a tutorial about ML stuff, they are using Ubuntu. I wonder if there's any inherent advantage to Ubuntu that other distros don't have (e.g., having some libraries preinstalled, sane default configs, etc.)
- quesera 4y ago> I wonder if there's any inherent advantage to Ubuntu No advantage, but Ubuntu is the most popular distro for regular users / tutorial customers. Ubuntu also has the widest availability of support resources, even though the information is often not Ubuntu-specific. If you use a non-Ubuntu (or non-Debian-derived) distro, you'll need to do a little bit of package-name mapping to get the prerequisites installed. This is annoying but only has to be done once (take notes!). The bigger problem I've had with ML libs is that they're very picky about version compatibilities. Once you settle on a set of working/compatible versions (libs, python, python pkgs), make some effort to preserve your sources. Package versions can get deleted from the official repos, be prepared to build from source, etc.
- tomrod 4y agoAt least when I de-appled in 2016, the local info database was accessible for things like MP3 ID info, but it required mapping w/ Python. Moving over to local PC storage was simple through USB (Ubuntu or Fedora as OS at that point, no doubt). I don't know if it is as simple or if they have data checkout options. Good luck with it!
- gw98 4y agoOh I'm screwed. I'm fully in on Apple Photos, Music, Calendars, Notes, the lot. I will pull things out carefully one service at a time over the space of a few months or I'll get pissed off and give up. One thing I am looking forward to is a keyboard that isn't shit.
- gopher_space 4y agoYou’re trading shitty keyboards for shitty trackpads, if that matters.
- gw98 4y agoI've got a nice mouse already (Logitech MX Master 3). I don't use a touchpad if I can help it.
- dividedbyzero 4y agoThe new designs have really good keyboards, better than the pre-butterfly ones IMO.
- gw98 4y agoI have a 14" M1 MacBook Pro. The keyboard is "ok" but not great. It occasionally misses keypresses when I'm typing fast or hit the edge of a key. Also I never really got on with the keyboard layout. Some things are just better on other platforms like position of hash, usage of meta-keys and discoverability. I find, despite rarely using it, that I can navigate around windows 10 better on a keyboard than I can on a mac. I mostly use my mac in "desktop mode" with an Apple studio display (that's the most difficult thing to give up) and a TKL Durgod K320 cherry MX red mechanical keyboard so I will reuse the keyboard for "the other platform"
- MichaelCollins 4y ago> I'm heavily locked in You should be able to download the music you bought from iTunes DRM free. For the movies/etc, just pirate them. You already "bought" them so morally you're in the clear. For the software/etc, walk away from it. Sunk costs.
- gw98 4y agoI have little software investment (mostly pixelmator) but I am using Apple Music subscription. I've paid for it for over 3 years so I think I've paid enough anyway...
- kjkjadksj 4y agoThe hard part is if you have a lot of content on icloud. Ive yet to find a reliable way to pull content from icloud locally. Apples first party download service doesnt really work for large icloud accounts, the downloads just fail to complete and you have tens or hundreds of gb to download. Ive tried third party command line tools and they silently crash after a couple dozen files, as in they will just hang until I notice they have failed so I cant just automate something to restart the script after fail. I’m actually at a loss here how to migrate from icloud.
- gw98 4y agoMine is entirely sync'ed to my mac. I just literally run iCloud off and I have everything local.
- withinboredom 4y agoSo you have to buy a Mac to get your files?
- gw98 4y agoI already have a Mac. I'm trying to get rid of it. You can download icloud for windows as well. And slowly download shit off the web UI.
- kornhole 4y agoI sympathize. It is probably the most difficult ecosystem to get out of. Nextcloud was one of the most important pieces of software for some I know who got off of Apple. You can setup your own private cloud or use a community server you trust to replace pretty much everything on Icloud: Files, photos, music, notes, tasks, contacts, calendar, passwords, bookmarks, facetime, and many more. Migrate everything there, and then you can switch to any operating systems you want.
- jxramos 4y agoI've been passively looking for a means to get my Notes in some offline format. So far I've just been exporting them to PDF which isn't ideal for me, but at least captures the note more or less.