I’m going to just blabber on, lets see how that works. This weekend I ended up getting some free time that I wasn’t expecting. Unfortunately mother nature wanted to change everyone’s outdoor plans so I focused on staying dry and finally doing something I have been threatening to do for a while, I changed my 2 daily driver computers. I have moved from 2 Apple Silicon Macs (Mac Mini and MacBook Pro) to 2 x86_64 machines. One is a mini box running a Ryzen 5500U on my desk and the other is a refurbished Dell Latitude 7400 with an 8th gen i5. One a laptop, the other laptop hardware in a small desktop box. I did this to see if I can run Linux full time.

I have already moved a lot of my services to alternatives that run on everything like personal email to FastMail for the service with SimpleLogin fronting my custom domain addresses and cloud storage to Syncthing with local server and offsite encrypted backups. I have been trying to make these moves for a while but I kept getting sucked back into “the ecosystem” that Apple provides. Until I realized I fell into the trap, yes there is an ecosystem but it’s just designed to look pretty so you don’t see the lock-in with high switching costs. I have known this and was okay with it for a while but seeing how Apple are slowly getting to the enshittification stage of the corporate lifecycle I decided I wanted to see about alternatives. So I went with Linux.

Now of course that sounds so pretentious but it’s at least a workable choice. I have a multitude of choices in distros and what I want to run (for now I ended up on OpenSuse Tumbleweed) and I already heavily leaned towards open source software in the applications I use on a daily basis. I’m so fickle with all of this it may not stick for long but for at least right now, this is where I am going to try my next chapter in personal computing.