Corvus Cornix

Ah, that’s a bit trickier then. To be honest, I haven’t found a replacement for this that’s as “easy” as Apple’s suite (Pages, Numbers, etc.) that just syncs. It looks like Euro Office, a fork of Only Office (available through Nextcloud as Nextcloud Office), finally launched a few months ago so that might be worth looking into.

You’re welcome - I tried to keep things succinct and highlight just the salient points that mattered to me when “de-Appling” so if you start down the road and run into any specific questions, just reach out and I’ll see if I can help!

Also, what helped is me realising I don’t need that tight integration between the phone / tablet and laptop / desktop. They’re different devices: to consume content vs to create it. This was a key realization for me, too. I thought that I’d really miss all the Handoff and Continuity features but I rarely actually needed to be able to, for example, edit documents on my phone from my laptop and vice-versa.

So I’ve been working through this myself recently. I was pretty deep into the ecosystem and frankly there’s not a replacement for everything, but most of it’s close enough for me. Much of this will depend on what you’re really wanting to accomplish.

For Mac you didn’t mention whether it’s an Apple Silicon or Intel device, so this is going to all be specific to my experience which is with Asahi Fedora Remix on an M1 MacBook:
I use the GNOME version since I think the UX has some Apple familiarity and works well for laptops but Plasma is probably a better choice for a desktop.
It’s generally very stable but it doesn’t really have anything yet to easily translate x64 apps to ARM - there’s muvm, but if what you’re trying to run isn’t covered by the included libraries (e.g. Electron apps) you’re going to have to build an overlay filesystem image containing the dependencies you need; it doesn’t “just work” like Rosetta (or in the Windows world, Prism).
You will also lose some of the stuff like Touch ID because reverse engineering the SEP and sepOS are still in progress. Battery life also isn’t as good.
Lastly, Linux desktop security simply isn’t comparable to any modern build of macOS. TCC on macOS provides incredibly robust protections for user data and device access that Windows and Linux simply don’t offer (yet). On the bright side with Asahi, you do still get some decent protection against low-level compromise because each OS (“container”) on Apple Silicon has its own verified boot chain and recoveryOS, which is largely immutable, can in theory be used to nuke an infected install.

I replaced my iPhone with a Graphene Pixel, but I mostly just use it for web browsing and email and I was an Android user for a long time prior so I can’t speak to whether this would be an easy transition or not.

My replacements for Apple services so far are:

• iCloud Drive: Nextcloud with a Managed Service Provider with Cryptomator to approximate the end-to-end encryption offered by the Advanced Data Protection option.
• iCloud Private Relay: Mullvad, though any trustworthy VPN should do. Note that it’s not an exact replacement because iCloud Private Relay traffic originates from Apple IP ranges which tend to have a much better reputation than VPNs and thus run into anti-bot measures less frequently.
• iCloud Mail, Calendar, Contacts: Tuta mail + Addy.io for the “Hide my Email” aliasing component.
• iCloud Keychain: Proton Pass, though whether you’d want to trust Proton at this point is another topic of discussion that’s out of scope here.
• iCloud Photos: I’ve recently tried out Zeitkapsl and have been extremely pleased with it. Their desktop app originally didn’t have an ARM Linux build so I reached out to see if one might eventually happen and within a day or two their team had one ready.
• iCloud Notes: This one is tough to replicate. It’s so simple, yet it’s probably one of the most valuable products for me in the ENTIRE Apple ecosystem and one of the few utilities I actually found value in having synced between all my devices. I’ve been using Obsidian with the .md files synced in a Cryptomator vault to replace it, though I may end up subscribing to their sync service just for ease-of-use.

There are other viable options for most or all of these; I had a pretty specific set of requirements in mind when making my choices: no documented data collection or sharing beyond what’s absolutely strictly necessary, no Google analytics or push notifications, European owned and hosted, end-to-end encrypted where possible, no advertising, no profiling, etc.

If you have any questions let me know, hope this helps though!

It’s pretty quick to set up luckily. Depending on your security needs you can set a PIN and prevent access to certain controls and areas of the screen. If you have a need for real security (e.g. an app on a corporate campus) you’d want real single app mode, but for home use it’s more than enough I think.

Like others here, I use mine as a sort of “kiosk” for smart home stuff by using Guided Access to lock it to a single app. If you have a Mac you could also put it into real single-app mode via Apple Configurator policies, but it’s more time-consuming to set up and if the app stops working there’s no way to fix it short of restarting the entire iPad (whereas you can end Guided Access, restart the app, and start Guided Access again).

Just in my personal experience, I use IronFox with Mullvad, which YouTube flags and throws the “Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot” error whereas NewPipe, for example, typically works (I believe they have a workaround similar to yt-dlp that leverages the Android VR API).

Thanks! I think the trouble I had with Bandcamp is that it seemed to be missing some stuff I wanted - some of it was more niche but a good bit of it was pretty popular so I was surprised by that. No reason I couldn’t use more than one source though.

7digital looks promising, thank you!

Are there any good alternatives to Qobuz? I tried it out and was annoyed that they didn’t seem to embed metadata in the files (like album art) unless you use their “downloader” and I think it’s silly that I have to install that to just… download some files. Or maybe I missed something?

Thanks for the writeup! I think bidirectional sync is what I’m used to but very few solutions seem to support it outside of the big tech ones, like you mentioned. Perhaps I need to re-evaluate whether I truly need it; I guess it’s not often I switch between editing a document on my phone to my laptop and need those changes synced instantly, and I did find a way to get Cryptomator to immediately upload any pictures or screenshots I take. I would still like my Obsidian notes files to upload instantly too, though, I think.

Thank you! I did just find in the FolderSync docs that 2-way sync isn’t supported for encrypted files, which is a bit of a bummer. I think Nextcloud on Android had a similar limitation where it would only actually sync at most every 15 minutes. I did find the Cryptomator app on Android does have an “immediate upload” folder, but it’s only for images captured with the camera and screenshots… which I guess for now fulfills most of my needs, so I may stick with that after all.

Thanks for the suggestion! I have a few questions, if you don’t mind: what did you like more about rclone than Cryptomator? Is it suitable for sync, or is it more for backups? I’m ideally looking for near-ish to real-time sync for contacts, notes, files, and pictures. Are there any frontends for Linux you’d recommend, or do you script out the functionality you’re looking to implement?

Did you try Syncthing at all? I ran into the same issues with Nextcloud on Android and I’m trying to decide on Syncthing or FolderSync and I wanted to see what people thought. I’m currently using Cryptomator but it doesn’t do everything I’d like yet.

Yeah I just spent a few days trying to get Nextcloud on Android working and it was a disaster. I ultimately decided to use Cryptomator to handle the sync since I’m already using it on my PCs, but I’m looking at maybe Syncthing or FolderSync (not sure which is better) because Cryptomator lacks some functionality like keeping local copies and making files available to other apps like galleries, music apps, etc.