Will be permanently switching from the Mac world to Fedora here shortly… My family all have been in the Apple ecosystem for a long time… We all have iPhones, that will not be changing, and we all use the iCloud system for Calendar and Contacts.
Has anyone done this switchover and do you have any recommendations?
I have a few questions for anyone who can answer:
Will the built in KDE Calendar/Contacts/Email work well with iCloud or should I use Thunderbird (w/ Provider and TbSync plugins)?
What to do with iTunes (not Apple Music)?
I have Plex running on a server, so I can use PlexAmp, or is there a better player for music?
iPhone/iPad sync?
How do you add/manage music and Movies to your iPhone/iPad devices?
There is iCloud for Windows, is there something like that for Linux?
Although I’m still on the Mac platform and not switching completely, I have my Gaming PC running on Fedora 38 and would like to give you some feedback:
While I’m running GNOME Desktop, you basically have to set up an application password for your Apple ID and then you’re able to add E-Mail (IMAP), Calendars (calDAV) and your Contacts (cardDAV) to the PIM Suite of your choice. Just remember to write down the application password, because I didn’t find a way to review it again after setting it up.
I copied my iTunes library over from the Mac, exported my playlists as .m3u files and then used the editor of my choice to correct the path names accordingly before importing them to Rhythmbox. Since I still have a Mac Mini running on my network as an iTunes server, I have no experience with Plex or other server software.
As far as I know there is no possibility to integrate iCloud Drive. There is libimobiledevice which should allow you to copy photos etc. from / to the iPhone’s storage and also allows USB tethering with your mobile device.
Then there is also KDE Connect which is a software that allows you to copy files from your Apple Device to your desktop machine and vice versa. I don’t have any experience with that, because im using the GNOME implementation, which is called GSConnect, but the software on the Apple side is the same (you can find that App on the Apple AppStore).
All in all, the walled garden of Apple is a little bit of a challange, moving to Linux. There are some things which make the switch a bit easier (e.g. when iTunes Match was a thing, I used that to download all my purchased songs without DRM copy protection, which now makes it easy to play those files using free open source software), for other things like E-Mail, Calendar and Contacts you have to setup things first and some things just won’t work (although you can always use the web interface of iCloud, of course).
I’m, in the middle of switching. I come from (still am on) macbook air m1 and bought a second hand thinkpad, because thinkpads have great fedora support and drivers. I want to be able to use Adobe software also and run games, so I created a dualboot laptop with Win11, defaulting boot to Fedora 40. I will keep my iPhone and Apple Watch though.
Some positives:
Fedora / Linux has almost all software or alternatives I used on mac.
I switched fro Apple passwords to Bitwarden, which feels a lot more user friendly.
I switched Apple Notes for Joplin and am very happy with it.
I setup a thread on Reddit and did the post install suggestions in the various links: Reddit - Dive into anything
Fedora feels stable and has many updates in a week, so keeps improving
i moved my agendas from apple to google and have them on both iphone and fedora
I can read apple mail with an app password (icloud) so no problem there
I use terminal very often and I can install almost all cmds on mac, but some cmds were different, or not available. On linux, terminal is heaven
Everything about Fedora is customizable. Not only appearance, but also functionality, automation, everything. Love that.
Some negatives
vscode is less stable and crashes sometimes. It also feels more cluncky and not so reactive as on the mac, using insiders build now
I don’t know which nvidia driver to use for my RTX Quadro 3000. I now have the driver by nvidia and I don’t know if e.g. vscode crashes because of the video driver or other cause
I can’t get used to new keyboard shortcuts, I don’t want to change them to the same on mac, because I want to learn the linux ones, but it’s slow
my laptop is way bigger and weighs a ton compared to my macbook air
I’m used to Chrome and Chrome has no connection on almost every startup. A restart of Chrome and problem is gone, but still have to do this after restart of laptop
Overall, I’m not sure yet if I want to keep using Fedora, because it still feels less stable and is not so reactive and fast as the mac.
