Fellow blogger Chris recently wrote about his attempts at “Moving Away from Apple…Again“. Like Chris, I haven’t liked where Apple has been headed for the past couple of years, and since the change of administration in D.C., I am becoming increasingly concerned with any sort of tech corporation, but especially one headed up by a donor (ahem, Tim Cook) to the Trump administration.
My eighth grade English teacher would have said that previous sentence was a run on sentence and then I would have been forced to diagram the sentence. Do they still diagram sentences?
Now, before folks get worked up that I’m picking on Tim Cook, I know that we now live with a government that is basically “pay for play”. I know Tim had to do what he had to do; it still doesn’t make me feel more comfortable about the situation. Plus, Apple has had some less than stellar showings lately, like defaulting Apple Intelligence to “opt out” instead of “opt in”. I don’t like things like this.
I recently wrote up some thoughts around my computing leanings in a quasi-manifesto type format.
I. Computing Platforms
- Lowest friction is always ideal
- Focused applications somewhat avoid ADHD fiddling
- Linux to embrace my privacy concerns, geekiness, and existing hardware. Linux distro of choice is Debian based, and the simplest path for me right now is Linux Mint.
- Mac for creative projects due to existing hardware and financial investment, while researching other options. At this point my video production relies on Final Cut Pro.
- iOS for mobile because I feel it’s more secure than stock Android, and I have new hardware
II. Sharing Platforms
- Meta is absolutely untrustworthy but unfortunately embraced by too many. I maintain an account, though my activity has been drastically reduced. Meta products like Facebook and Instagram shall always be used in a container and through a VPN. “Shallow” personal data only. Access limited to once a day. No promotion of creativity on Meta products. Bring the audience to you through more trusted channels.
- “Deeper” personal data is mine and mine alone. No ad supported platforms allowed. Google Drive, Google Photos absolute no deal. iCloud is mostly untrustworthy and my remaining trust is declining. Anything that is in a corporate cloud will probably have an open backdoor or backend by the end of 2025.
- Twitter is absolutely untrustworthy and is in the same bucket as “truth social”. No use.
- WordPress and Automattic are untrustworthy. Leadership is too unstable. Need to move away from this platform.
- Bluesky is there for some things, especially aviation and storm chasing. Monetary contributions indicate a for-profit status probably in the future
- Mastodon is there for most things. The community is strong and I enjoy maintaining my own instance, as well as pushing blog posts to the Fediverse.
- Instagram is part of Meta and falls into the same privacy/data mining/etc concern.
- Pixelfed is there for most things, though friction is rather high. I’m not pleased with the iOS app at all, opting for Impressia instead. Leadership and the developer of the official Pixelfed client is moderately unstable. Not overly impressed. Just sharing this content on my blog is probably the best way to go.
- YouTube is used for creative output, minimal scholarly consumption, and mindless consumption. It’s Google. Watch Google very, very carefully. Implement plugins to eliminate the cruft.
- ActivityPub wherever possible. Fediverse wherever possible.
- Need to reseach PeerTube
III. Trusted Companies
- Apple is deemed trustworthy to a point, however, it is falling fairly fast on my trust scale. To be fair, Apple, appears to be more trustworthy than the rest of FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google)
- OmniGroup is deemed trusted, but use friction is high and fiddly and data is proprietary locked to a platform. Plus, no Windows client for mandatory Windows 11 work computer. Web interface is lacking critical features. Out of the running.
- Same with CulturedCode and Things. Proprietary locked.
- Obsidian is deemed trusted, available on all platforms. Sync seems solid and mostly safe.
- Bitwarden is deemed trusted, available on all platforms. Sync seems solid and mostly safe.
- Not pleased with Proton’s stance around the Trump administration, looking at other options like Fastmail for email, in concert with self hosting.
- Mullvad seems to be good on most fronts for VPN.
IV. File Storage
- Personal data in stored locally and backed up separately on a nightly basis
- Personal data is backed up locally
- iCloud is for cautious use. Minimal personal data.
- Dropbox is being weeded out of my personal ecosystem, down to a handful of bash scripts
- Dropbox is sandboxed to one internal server in the house and one laptop
- Google Drive is not trusted for use on any machine
- Local NAS solutions are optimal. The WD PR4100s have been bumped up to 16GB RAM
V. Recap
- I’m taking a “must be accessible from the terminal” approach to all of my data
- Proprietary lock-in is avoided, including less than full functionality web interfaces for the data
- End-to-end encryption wherever possible
These are just a few points of where my head is at with my personal computing habits. The rest of the family is mostly on Macs and iOS/iPadOS devices, and compatibility across the board is important. I have no expectations that anyone in the house will move to Linux and that’s fine. I’m comfortable enough with Apple to not fret about it at this time.