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.

apple makes you feel so cozy and content in their UI design that anything even slightly different is really disruptive

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.

This is sort of the route I was considering, so it’s cool to know that someone has tread the path before me.

Gonna bash Debian on my 2014 Mac mini tomorrow, install Bigscreen and see what’s up.

If it’s Steam Link you want, get dedicated hardware for that. Even a Pi4/5 will do. Use it for Steam Link only, and keep the Apple TV for media.

This is probably the route I’ll ultimately take. Gonna toss KDE Neon on my 2014 Mac mini and see how it rolls.

just pay-for apps that may or may not do what I need.

We use Infuse with Plex and Jellyfin, and yeah, we pay a couple of quid every month to it (for the higher definition codec support), but it’s pretty much spot-on for our needs.

It is, yes. Streaming from my partner’s PC up in their office.

I probably should have laid out my uses in the OP, shouldn’t I?

We primarily watch TV from a friend’s Plex server, or my own Jellyfin. We don’t have Apple TV+/Netflix/Amazon, or anything. Not these days. The only legit streaming service we do occasionally use is BBC iPlayer.

Other than that, it’s a Steam Link / Moonlight machine, plus sometimes playing tunes from Apple Music.

A nicety would be to be able to AirPlay to it, so my wife can show me videos that she’s saved to show me, but I’m not sure how feasible that is outside of Apple devices.

I got a bunch laying about for one reason or another. Sadly, it’s all laptop RAM.

I mean, not sadly for me, as I have a fetish for micro PCs, and guess what…

Keep an eye out for any thin clients that can’t support Win11 that businesses are getting rid of. You might have some luck with them.

I’ve hit a goldmine with my work upgrading all of the PCs.

I now have two Dell Optiplex 7050 and a 3020 micro pcs, all with 8gb of replaceable RAM. Two of them came with 130gb M.2 SSDs, one with a 130gb SATA SSD. All told they cost me nothing, because the company can’t use them (they don’t support Win11), and there’s another 50 machines that can be sold if the boss can be arsed.

None of them will set the world alight, but they’re perfect for little things I want to do at home.

I spent yesterday setting up one of the 7050s with an M.2 NIC, then slapped Proxmox and OpenWRT on it and am now free of the shitty Linksys my ISP gave me.

Next up, I need to whip the two drives out of my 2014 Mac mini Debian server so I can replace it with something that can accept more RAM than the soldered 8gb I’m currently stuck with.

It’s fun!

I have to use Windows at work now, which is ass.

Anyway, I had a question about how to achieve something in Powershell the other day, so I asked it on Mastodon. Got basically nothing in response.

Every time I ask how to do something in Linux I get swamped with responses.

Make of that what you will.