I 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.

At 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!

Oh 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.

You’re trading shitty keyboards for shitty trackpads, if that matters.

I've got a nice mouse already (Logitech MX Master 3). I don't use a touchpad if I can help it.

The new designs have really good keyboards, better than the pre-butterfly ones IMO.

I 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"

Build quality on non-Apple machines have been rough for me. I burned through both an XPS 15 (caseflex causes restarts with keyboard use) and a Framework (random restarts, never could pin down the hardware issue even with mainboard replacement). The I've settled on a good ThinkPad and, honestly, I set the power settings simple and just keep it in a docked state. Never even think about it!

Yeah I have owned a few thinkpads. I went for a desktop because I am totally fucking done with owning laptops now. I don't need one so I'm not bothering any more.

I'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.

You can convert notes to markdown or html using AppleScript and/or the Shortcuts app

I just spent the evening turning mine into text files. Turns out I don't have any pictures worth keeping in them.

> 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.

The 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.

Mine is entirely sync'ed to my mac. I just literally run iCloud off and I have everything local.

Whenever I try and sync the photos to the mac photos app it crashes to desktop probably because I have like 60gb of unsynced photos.

That’s terrible. My library is 100GB and works fine so may be worth trashing the machine and trying again when freshly installed.

So you have to buy a Mac to get your files?

I 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.

Web ui is broken the downloads always error out for large icloud accounts in my experience.

not 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.

Thanks for the heads up. Have dealt with snap before (and eviserated it)

I 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.

Thanks. 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.

I 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.

What distro would you suggest as a user friendly alternative?

Linux Mint has been a good, reliable option for me.

I'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.

I have consistently good experiences with distros in the redhat family using MATE or other gnome2 style interface.

OpenSUSE 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.

I 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.)

> 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.

this path has been partially trodden, elementaryOS. The first versions were snappy don't know now.