Luckily, I’m down to just an iPhone.

I used to use iPad Minis, but I was otherwise more of a Windows guy until 2022.

The only other kind of Apple thing I have is a GPU-accelerated Hackintosh running under KVM, which mostly gets used for adding non-streaming songs to my Apple Music library these days. I do plan to quit Apple Music eventually - I’ve been collecting and ripping CDs by TMBG, which is mostly what I listen to anyway.

The difficult reality is many people, no matter how interested and technically skilled, aren’t going to have the time, money (yes, money, due to hardware), and energy to immediately go with fully self-hosted OSS paired with a LineageOS (or similar) phone.

For one, you have to either acquire the hardware to run a server for self-hosting or get a VPS (admittedly not a huge financial hurdle, but still effort required). Additionally, you then have to take the time to migrate from iCloud to the alternatives. There’s also the fact that it’s a moderately expensive proposition to purchase a new phone capable of running something more libre like LineageOS. Until you switch operating systems, Apple makes using at least a little bit of iCloud difficult; for instance, you’ll probably need to use Find My at least once.

These reasons largely explain why I’m still on iPhone for now. I usually don’t use iCloud for the storage, but I frequently have to use Photos, Mail, and Find My.

I certainly plan to jump ship, but being stuck for now due to personal circumstances, I can’t blame OP.

iCloud web app has a calendar web app, along with others I haven’t listed.

Yeh. Also, Debian tends to hold back packages like that automatically. It’s just a really obnoxious thing to deal with for me, and Flatpak allows me to circumvent that.

Though truth be told, I’m thinking of just staying on Trixie once it hits stable. While Testing certainly has its uses and I rather love it, there’s simply times where I don’t want to deal with the odd system maintenance ordeals, as comparatively rare as they are relative to other rolling release distros. I’ve been rather enjoying Bookworm on my laptop for a year now, which makes me think I would enjoy it on desktop.

This just seems to be the web app in weird packaging, and you would get very little benefit installing it.

Personally, I use an iPhone, and I just resort to the web app, and I can live with it. Not as fancy as on the Mac, but I manage. I’m able to access my Apple e-mails and photos just fine. I eventually just plan to jump the Apple ship, but like you, that’s not possible for me at the moment.

As others have said, rclone might work for you, but I personally don’t use iCloud Drive, so I don’t know enough to speak about it.

What software do you use for RPG campaigns? Is it just PDFs and word processors, or do you use a an online VTT? It should mostly be fine, but I figured I should ask.

Also, what are you doing in terms of the Minecraft Server? While I think most support Linux, there could (not certainly are) be weird caveats depending on the server.

I second Debian Testing. The only issues I have are updates slow down during package freezes and sometimes, a package you are using becomes a victim of a package transition. Both are symptoms of Testing being exactly what it says, so I can’t blame them, but still a valid annoyance.

The worst example was FreeCAD had a dependency being transitioned, so FreeCAD disappeared from Testing for a while, meaning my system wouldn’t update if I wanted to keep FreeCAD. In the end, I just gave up and used the Flatpak. (I probably could have installed from Unstable, but whatever.)

Truth be told, I kind of wish there was a project to keep some new packages flowing to Testing users during freezes. I get why Debian themselves doesn’t do it - it would be a nightmare to maintain - but an outside community project would be amazing. It wouldn’t exactly be easy, but such a project wouldn’t need to necessarily do every package (just desired ones), and they would only need to maintain them a couple months until new versions start flowing into Testing again. I think the biggest difficulty is not going too far ahead of what will end up in Testing post-freeze.

I tried UE5 on Debian Testing and it seemed to work fine.

If it works there, it’ll probably work on almost anything.

Personally, I dislike Ubuntu, but if it’s been working for you, you shouldn’t have problems.

I really like Debian and think it’s not too difficult, but it isn’t for everyone and might not be your thing.

EDIT: Looking at the website for UE5, almost any distro released in the past 3 years should do the trick so long as the distro works on your hardware.

I mostly prefer Detail view, but I enable Icon view in Videos, Photos, and Music folders so I can see previews.

I’m guessing most file managers have similar behavior, but on XFCE Thunar, I’m able to set detail as the default but have it remembery choice per folder.

Did this significantly speed up the font menu? I might have to try that!

While (I think) you can install HWE (hardware enablement) kernels on Mint, you would also have to upgrade Mesa, which is not as easy on Mint.

Personally in this case, for a truly stable distro, I’d install Debian Stable and install a backports kernel and backports Mesa, which are both currently versions that should support RDNA4 GPUs like OPs just fine. This involves two simple steps after installing:

1. Enable the Debian Backports Repo (see https://backports.debian.org/Instructions/). It’s like, one file.
2. Install the packages with something like sudo apt install -t bookworm-backports linux-image-amd64 mesa-va-drivers and reboot.

Before you take these steps, you probably won’t have hardware acceleration, but will still get video output so you can perform the steps and reboot.

This is definitely a weird suggestion, and other people’s suggestions might be less work out of the box. I just like Debian, and stability+backports+testing is part of what makes it possible for it to be my everything distro.

If only Cycles would ever work on AMD Polaris…

Though honestly, I’ll probably get around to a GPU upgrade eventually. Rocm packaging looks to be pretty much done on Debian, although they still seem to need time on the problem of keeping it reasonably up to date in Testing and Sid - momentum will probably pick up after Trixie leaves hard freeze and goes stable.

Honestly, it’d be kind of nice to have a project with a repo that does nothing most of the time except during the Testing freeze, in which it would deliver package updates and keep Testing as a rolling release during that time.

I get why Debian doesn’t do this themselves - they tried and found it hell to both prepare a stable release and package new versions.

Two things:

• What input device(s) are you using? Are you using the built-in laptop keyboard, or a gamepad of sorts. (By Balatro, I’d assume it might even be happening with mouse.)
• Are you running these games on a platform like Steam, or are you running another way? (I’m assuming the answer is yes to Steam, by Balatro and Stardew.)

For Steam, try messing around with Steam input settings and see what happens.

Oh yeh. The font menu is crap. I can’t argue with that.

It’s one of those mysterious annoying things that’s up there with the GTK file picker in some apps taking 10 seconds to load.

But I also don’t change fonts that often. Still, that has much room for improvement.

Debian Stable actually updates Firefox ESR through the typically on by default security channel.

The current ESR version in there is 128, which is about a year old, which replaced the 115 that came with Debian 12 by default.

The newest ESR, 140 just came out 2 weeks ago. 128 still has 2 months of security updates, and 140 has already been packaged for sid. I have no doubts 140 will come before those 2 months are up.

Now the KDE thing actually sounds like it sucks.

As with others, I love Debian Stable.

Most packages have sane defaults, and it’s so stable. It’s true that it sometimes means older software versions, but there’s also something to be said for behavior staying the same for two years at a time.

If hardware support is an issue, using the backports repo is really easy - I’ve been using it on my laptop for almost a year with no problems that don’t exist on other distros. If you really need the shiniest new application, Flatpak isn’t that bad.

It also feels in a nice position - not so corporate as to not give a darn about its community, but with enough funding and backing the important stuff gets maintained.

What do you mean by “window roll-up”?

Also, the settings menu thing is weird - mine takes less than a second to load, and I’m on a machine with a 7 year old processor at this point. I almost worry that if that takes a long time KDE will be more miserable performance-wise, unless you’ve already tried it on here.

By the way, what distro and XFCE version are you running - just for good measure.

The outdated sentiment is probably based, honestly. I think it’s gotten better, but there are rough edges. In the end, do what works for you.

I feel like a lot of your points were true at one point, but are becoming lest relevant.

For one, at least with XFCE, I found myself not really running into DE bugs.

Also, I don’t think two years is as obnoxious anymore. During the era of the GTK 4 transition a couple, it drove me nuts, but now that a lot of APIs like that have stabilized, I really don’t notice much of a difference between Debian Testing and Stable. I installed and daily drove Bookworm late in its lifecycle on my laptop, and in terms of DE and applications, I haven’t noticed anything. I get the feeling Debian’s gotten better at maintenance in the past few years - I especially see this with Firefox ESR. There was a time where the version was several months behind the latest major release of ESR, but usually it now only takes a month or two for a new ESR Firefox to come to Debian Stable, well within the support window of the older release.

Also, I don’t think Flatpaks are a huge dealbreaker anyway - no matter what distro you’re using, you’re probably going to end up with some of them at some point because there’s some application that is the best at what it does and is only distributed as a Flatpak.

Frankly, I probably am a terrible reference for gaming, as I’m a very casual gamer, but I’ve found Steam usually eliminates most of these issues, even on Debian.

Also, the official backports repository has gotten really easy. My laptop had an unsupported Wi-Fi chipset (it was brand new), so I just installed over ethernet, added the repo, and the install went smoothly. There were a few bugs, but none of these were specific to Debian. Stability has been great as ever.

In conclusion, I think right around Bookworm, Debian went from being the stable savant to just being an all-around good distro. I’ll elaborate more on why I actually like Debian in a comment directly replying to the main post.

I might disagree with 99.999% like you - maybe I’d put it in the 50-75% range.

Before you give up on XFCE and/or Chicago95 - have you replaced the default menu with Whisker Menu? For me, Whisker Menu is a must-have for any sane XFCE user. When I used it with Chicago95, I found I could have a Windows 7 style interface with Windows 95 aesthetics.

Honestly, even if Chicago95 is aesthetically not what you want, I’d recommend trying an alternate theme on XFCE - I currently use modified DesktopPal '97 combined with a pack of Haiku-style icons.

Overall, I’d be interested to know more about your qualms with XFCE and see if customization can help you overcome them. A lot of distros have annoying defaults for XFCE, but I changed a few simple settings and have a desktop I rather enjoy using. It is totally fine if it still isn’t the thing for you after any potential discussion, but I just want to make sure you really know what XFCE has to offer before you move on.

I spent 4-6 hours the other day trying to figure out the equivalent of Hello World for a MediaWiki parser function extension.

In theory, they have a quick start guide, but that documentation has so many errors, and I spent ages jumping between PHP and a JSON configuration file I barely understood.

At least it’s working now. Now time to figure out how the heck to properly interact with the MediaWiki database!

(Perhaps once I’m a bit more confident in MediaWiki development, I’ll see if I can tidy up some that documentation.)