Leaving Big Tech, Part 5 of 3

[scottp]

I'm not sure where to start with this.

The beginning of this journey was exactly one year ago today (depending on how you define "start"), watching the roiling sea crash along the rocky shore just below the balcony of our little vacation flat. Beer in hand and blistered feet from several days shuffling through Disneyland, the will to finish the single book I packed waned and the urge to take on some less sleepy tasks from my personal backlog overtook me. The first item on that list?

De-Google my life.

Sorry, this post isn't about that process, because it was long and boring and full of bad words, but after months of work I can finally look back and realize that anything is possible, so long as you have the time, the will, and the right bad words.

So here I am, exactly three hundred and sixty five days later, not on the beach and not holding a beer but with a taste for the impossible and ready to undertake another fool-hardy task from my backlog.

De-Apple my life.

That, admittedly, has much less of a ring to it and is also, admittedly, a much smaller task for a person who has been squarely in Camp Google since before the days the behemoth stopped aiming for "Don't Be Evil." For this particular task, there was really only one goal -- turn my aging MacBook Pro M1 into a Linux powerhouse. I wouldn't normally buy a Mac, mostly because of the price point, but my work sold me one for under $100 so -- you guessed it -- I have a Mac now.

This post isn't going to be a rant against Apple -- I've been using Apple hardware on and off since before we all knew what Y2K was -- so my reasons for this switch are my own. Honestly, maybe one of the biggest reasons for the switch is because Apple doesn't want me to, and something about that really appeals to me. I suspect I was a difficult child, but that's for another post.

Here's the easy part of this entire process -- picking a Linux distribution. In truth, there's really just one currently, Asahi Linux.

This is going to likely be a bit of a letdown, but the process is all extraordinarily well documented and one of the easiest Linux installs I've ever done, and honestly the state of hardware support is better than when I first installed Linux on Apple hardware -- an old (even at the time) Bondi-Blue G3 iMac.

The golden era of hardware.

I am by no means a Distro Hopper (a person who regularly bounces between Linux Distributions) but I've been around the block a few times -- Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, Mandrake, and a half dozen more. Asahi is based on Fedora, a distro I last used exactly twenty years ago (man I really miss the theming on Fedora Core 4). Switching from Debian after so long is proving to be a challenge, but it's fun to be back. Getting up and going with basic tasks, like writing this very blog post, was minutes of work, at most.

Seriously, Fedora Core 4 was so good.

So where does this leave us? What's even the point of this post? Is this meant to be an inspiration that you, too, can make this journey? Maybe. More than anything, I think of this as a jumping-off point, a launch pad for more posts about moving from Google to Nextcloud, from GMail to self-hosted, from Mac OS to Linux, from Android to Lineage, from sane to somewhere just adjacent to sane.

Wherever I end up with all of this, I hope you come along for the ride.