Not so long ago, I use to justify to myself that:
* Mac is good hardware and software I can count on. Just pay and focus on your real job.
* Apple cares about privacy very publicly, so they are probably not selling my data or doing anything stupid with it. Although, there is no way for me to know.
* My work is buying the hardware for me. Why bother spending time building one that I need to maintain so much. Get the one that "Just works!"
But, recent weeks of blunders and annoyances in my Mac after updating to High Sierra is making me rethink. I'm going to spend my weekend configuring my Dell XPS with VoidLinux and set it up with open alternatives for most of my use cases.
True, I will miss some niceties like Retina Fisplay and crisp font rendering, but my self-made solution can be comfortably close to it. Although I will sorely miss the "Copy on the phone, Paste on Mac" functionality.
I will setup Tarsnap or something with crown and forget about backups except for restoration testing every year.
I will use Darktable on photo library that is synced to phone via NextCloud. Instead of Apple Photos.
Recent Firefox with Adblocker and Ghostery as a web browser.
Chrome for browsing Facebook and Amazon.
KVM instead of Virtualbox for VM needs. Docker for container needs.
Sublime Text for programming editor.
Clementine as Music player
VLC or MPlayer for media
Will figure out the rest. And put all the install/configure commands on a Ansible playbook and commit it to Github. So that next OS install is completely automated.
If y'all have any tips for including in my setup this weekend, I'll appreciate it very much!