“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”
- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations
Luckily, I’m down to just an iPhone.
I used to use iPad Minis, but I was otherwise more of a Windows guy until 2022.
The only other kind of Apple thing I have is a GPU-accelerated Hackintosh running under KVM, which mostly gets used for adding non-streaming songs to my Apple Music library these days. I do plan to quit Apple Music eventually - I’ve been collecting and ripping CDs by TMBG, which is mostly what I listen to anyway.
The difficult reality is many people, no matter how interested and technically skilled, aren’t going to have the time, money (yes, money, due to hardware), and energy to immediately go with fully self-hosted OSS paired with a LineageOS (or similar) phone.
For one, you have to either acquire the hardware to run a server for self-hosting or get a VPS (admittedly not a huge financial hurdle, but still effort required). Additionally, you then have to take the time to migrate from iCloud to the alternatives. There’s also the fact that it’s a moderately expensive proposition to purchase a new phone capable of running something more libre like LineageOS. Until you switch operating systems, Apple makes using at least a little bit of iCloud difficult; for instance, you’ll probably need to use Find My at least once.
These reasons largely explain why I’m still on iPhone for now. I usually don’t use iCloud for the storage, but I frequently have to use Photos, Mail, and Find My.
I certainly plan to jump ship, but being stuck for now due to personal circumstances, I can’t blame OP.
iCloud web app has a calendar web app, along with others I haven’t listed.
Yeh. Also, Debian tends to hold back packages like that automatically. It’s just a really obnoxious thing to deal with for me, and Flatpak allows me to circumvent that.
Though truth be told, I’m thinking of just staying on Trixie once it hits stable. While Testing certainly has its uses and I rather love it, there’s simply times where I don’t want to deal with the odd system maintenance ordeals, as comparatively rare as they are relative to other rolling release distros. I’ve been rather enjoying Bookworm on my laptop for a year now, which makes me think I would enjoy it on desktop.
This just seems to be the web app in weird packaging, and you would get very little benefit installing it.
Personally, I use an iPhone, and I just resort to the web app, and I can live with it. Not as fancy as on the Mac, but I manage. I’m able to access my Apple e-mails and photos just fine. I eventually just plan to jump the Apple ship, but like you, that’s not possible for me at the moment.
As others have said, rclone might work for you, but I personally don’t use iCloud Drive, so I don’t know enough to speak about it.
What software do you use for RPG campaigns? Is it just PDFs and word processors, or do you use a an online VTT? It should mostly be fine, but I figured I should ask.
Also, what are you doing in terms of the Minecraft Server? While I think most support Linux, there could (not certainly are) be weird caveats depending on the server.
While certainly a weird idea, a TOS continuation series might not be so bad done right. I might love another episode where Uhura takes command, except it isn’t just because all the men on the ship are under the influence of space sirens.
Overall, the idea kind of reminds me of when they considered reusing the assets of the cancelled Secret of Vulcan Fury to make a CGI TOS continuation, though it didn’t work out for several reasons, I’m guessing in part because of the death of DeForest Kelley.
But honestly, I can see the sentiment of not wanting it - I think we do need a purely new Trek era, something like the mid 25th century or sometime in the 26th century.
I second Debian Testing. The only issues I have are updates slow down during package freezes and sometimes, a package you are using becomes a victim of a package transition. Both are symptoms of Testing being exactly what it says, so I can’t blame them, but still a valid annoyance.
The worst example was FreeCAD had a dependency being transitioned, so FreeCAD disappeared from Testing for a while, meaning my system wouldn’t update if I wanted to keep FreeCAD. In the end, I just gave up and used the Flatpak. (I probably could have installed from Unstable, but whatever.)
Truth be told, I kind of wish there was a project to keep some new packages flowing to Testing users during freezes. I get why Debian themselves doesn’t do it - it would be a nightmare to maintain - but an outside community project would be amazing. It wouldn’t exactly be easy, but such a project wouldn’t need to necessarily do every package (just desired ones), and they would only need to maintain them a couple months until new versions start flowing into Testing again. I think the biggest difficulty is not going too far ahead of what will end up in Testing post-freeze.
I tried UE5 on Debian Testing and it seemed to work fine.
If it works there, it’ll probably work on almost anything.
Personally, I dislike Ubuntu, but if it’s been working for you, you shouldn’t have problems.
I really like Debian and think it’s not too difficult, but it isn’t for everyone and might not be your thing.
EDIT: Looking at the website for UE5, almost any distro released in the past 3 years should do the trick so long as the distro works on your hardware.
I mostly prefer Detail view, but I enable Icon view in Videos, Photos, and Music folders so I can see previews.
I’m guessing most file managers have similar behavior, but on XFCE Thunar, I’m able to set detail as the default but have it remembery choice per folder.
What the heck! I might have to go for this one!
Some of them aren’t that interesting to me - I own a lot of these, but some of these I’ve wanted really bad.
Sucks there’s not the Who crossover on here, but nuts anyway.
Did this significantly speed up the font menu? I might have to try that!
While (I think) you can install HWE (hardware enablement) kernels on Mint, you would also have to upgrade Mesa, which is not as easy on Mint.
Personally in this case, for a truly stable distro, I’d install Debian Stable and install a backports kernel and backports Mesa, which are both currently versions that should support RDNA4 GPUs like OPs just fine. This involves two simple steps after installing:
sudo apt install -t bookworm-backports linux-image-amd64 mesa-va-drivers and reboot.Before you take these steps, you probably won’t have hardware acceleration, but will still get video output so you can perform the steps and reboot.
This is definitely a weird suggestion, and other people’s suggestions might be less work out of the box. I just like Debian, and stability+backports+testing is part of what makes it possible for it to be my everything distro.
At least they have two whole seasons to wrap stuff up and know about the end ahead of time, unlike Lower Decks, which got the memo in the middle of season development.
If only Cycles would ever work on AMD Polaris…
Though honestly, I’ll probably get around to a GPU upgrade eventually. Rocm packaging looks to be pretty much done on Debian, although they still seem to need time on the problem of keeping it reasonably up to date in Testing and Sid - momentum will probably pick up after Trixie leaves hard freeze and goes stable.
Honestly, it’d be kind of nice to have a project with a repo that does nothing most of the time except during the Testing freeze, in which it would deliver package updates and keep Testing as a rolling release during that time.
I get why Debian doesn’t do this themselves - they tried and found it hell to both prepare a stable release and package new versions.
Two things:
For Steam, try messing around with Steam input settings and see what happens.
Oh yeh. The font menu is crap. I can’t argue with that.
It’s one of those mysterious annoying things that’s up there with the GTK file picker in some apps taking 10 seconds to load.
But I also don’t change fonts that often. Still, that has much room for improvement.
Debian Stable actually updates Firefox ESR through the typically on by default security channel.
The current ESR version in there is 128, which is about a year old, which replaced the 115 that came with Debian 12 by default.
The newest ESR, 140 just came out 2 weeks ago. 128 still has 2 months of security updates, and 140 has already been packaged for sid. I have no doubts 140 will come before those 2 months are up.
Now the KDE thing actually sounds like it sucks.
As with others, I love Debian Stable.
Most packages have sane defaults, and it’s so stable. It’s true that it sometimes means older software versions, but there’s also something to be said for behavior staying the same for two years at a time.
If hardware support is an issue, using the backports repo is really easy - I’ve been using it on my laptop for almost a year with no problems that don’t exist on other distros. If you really need the shiniest new application, Flatpak isn’t that bad.
It also feels in a nice position - not so corporate as to not give a darn about its community, but with enough funding and backing the important stuff gets maintained.
If I’m paying five figures, that Miranda better have explosives in it for true authenticity!