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).


I admittly have not been able to shake the Apple out of my LAN fully yet. And I was having difficulties with my iphone, ipad, and linux devices syncing with Nextcloud. That was when it was hosted elsewhere. So I I stopped trying that as I was still whenning myself off of icloud, I later tried selfhosting Nextcloud and same problem plus it was not syncing contacts. I was almost ready to throw in the towel and call Nextcloud useless and started just using smb and fiddled with syncthing I recently went onto my Nextcloud webui to find my halloween counter and decided I may still use it as a file server, syncthing may still be running somewhere on my LAN no idea! lol
I needed something to sync my calendars so I went searching, I remember checking out a few things (some of which may still be running on my homelab but Baikal is what I use) and Baikal won out just because it was dumb simple and only did calendars and contacts it did not try to do more, the moment it tries to do more I will be looking for a new service.
It could also be that I use caddy with https and my devices did not like using nextcloud with https for calendars and contacts, but Baikal works fine with the https. I get the ssl certificate from my web host, easydns hosts my VNC and email.
Fun side note: I originally was going to host my blog out of my place but decided to use a VPS instead, I had already moved my domain name and email to easydns so I got a VPS instead.