I transitioned to Linux a few years ago, which has piqued my partner’s curiosity. She’s been genuinely interested and asks questions about it, but she is so deeply integrated I don’t know where to start. She uses iCloud, an Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad, a Mac desktop, plus whatever default proprietary software. She has a semi-technical background.
I want to help and be encouraging without overselling the ease of transition. There’s always some friction with transitioning technology, and of course Apple makes that intentionally difficult. I came from a Windows ecosystem, so I’m lacking any direct insight for potential challenges.
Any advice or personal experiences on moving from the Apple ecosystem to Linux would be hugely appreciated!
(I can host services on my local server, so transitioning to something like Immich vs iCloud for photos is one option we’ve discussed).
A relative of mine attempted to move from an iphone to an android phone, and generally move to other services on non-apple patforms. Not really self hosted, but I tried to help a bit in that area too, placing them on some of the things I run. The reason was their own, they saw pictures taken by a friend who had a flagship android phone and thought the pictures were amazing in comparison and wanted to try it. They were not even that deeply into the ecosystem, didn’t have watches or anything, just the cloud services.
Sadly what happened was that apple makes you feel so cozy and content in their UI design that anything even slightly different is really disruptive. It didn’t go well, and the experiment lasted about 6 months and then they were back on an iphone again. I would hear constant complaints and cursing about various UI differences. Touching parts of the screen triggered actions they weren’t expecting, and they couldn’t manage to learn the new workflows. It was sad to watch, and I hope things go better for you. In my opinion Apple is really good at attracting people and slowly convincing them that they don’t have to think for themselves anymore, so then when they try, they no longer feel competent enough to do so.
I switched from iPhone to Graphene a couple of years back after almost 15 years of iOS, and yeah, the transition from one to the other was the very steepest learning curve. It’s almost like jumping from Mint to Arch. My partner wants my Pixel when I next upgrade so they can play with it and get used to it before having to make the jump from iOS, but I know it’s going to be a painful transition for them.
I recently put Graphene on my no-longer work phone. I think what makes it extra tough is that it feels familiar and simultaneously alien.
There’s an action centre, and you can edit toggles, but there are no editable sliders for audio and brightness. A lot of the icons feel like buttons but aren’t.
Then there’s the gestures. They feel a little off. The back motion can be done forward too, and there’s no preview of what “back” is. And I loathe the settings pane.
Graphene is nice, but I still dislike Android.
For me the biggest hurdle was finding apps that felt the same as the ones I was used to.
Take Mastodon: I’ve gotten used to Moshidon now, but previously I used Ivory, which is ridiculously polished by comparison. The natures of iOS and Android mean that there are very few Android apps that are as …pretty… as most iOS counterparts.
Also; functionality. I guess because iOS users are more likely to pay for apps, developers are more likely to cram in as many features and polish as they can. If you try to replace an app with 1:1 feature parity, you’re mostly going to be disappointed. Photos on iOS is an incredibly useful, user friendly app which has almost all of the library and editing features most people need. Immich comes close, but not quite close enough for me to be able to confidently say that you could switch from one to the other without really noticing.
It’s not about “thinking for yourself” it’s about good human interface design.
HOWEVER - with this new “Liquid Glass” bullshit, they have completely lost it. The latest iOS is complete garbage. One of the many reasons my next phone will not be Apple. It will be a Linux phone. Period.