You’re lucky there, my experience is the polar opposite and more aligned with “I got nothing to hide” It’s quite frustrating.

After bouncing around a few distros, fedora was the one to make sleep mode work on my laptop

I did this switch last year and went from iCloud to Proton.

Watch out with your contacts, on that front Proton is a mess. You can easily export from iCloud, but Proton has a few issues importing them accurately. Also no dedicated Contacts App, as they are just in the Mail App. Double check things, after a few tries it eventually worked for me using the Proton Mail App on Linux. For safety, I recommend creating some local copies of your contacts as well. If you keep your iPhone then you can keep a local copy there, but I don’t think there is a sync option between Proton and devices yet.

Proton has done some great work in the past year with their Drive App. This is the way to get your pictures from your iPhone to their cloud. To get this working smoothly I had to set iCloud Settings so that full quality pictures were on my phone. There is a toogle called ‘optimise iPhone storage’ or similar.

Ultimately I’m happy with Proton, a few things could be smoother but there has been noticeable progress in the last 12 months. Good luck!

Cheap RAM waiting to be acquired.

That’s good to know, thanks

I’m sure you can find this information in selfosted or other more tech oriented communities. Usually the convenience comes at the cost of privacy. It’s up to you if you want to keep the microphones in your home to turn off the lights and set timers. I used to trust Apple more and had HomePods installed, but everything has been sold on and I bought egg timers for very cheap that work just as well. (Granted Siri was never very capable…)

Please do not buy Ring cameras, Amazons vast surveillance network is a privacy nightmare and is also regularly accessed by ICE and other law enforcement.

Eufy cameras can be used with a home base and stay offline, recording to the SD card in the base. Or if you’re into it, there are many self hosting options that give you much more control and options.

It would be great if people could stop using Meta services and software.

You’re not alone. Used to be the biggest Apple fan, worked there for nearly ten years until 2023.

Last year I made the cut, the new PC I bought was custom built and is running Linux. My MacBook Air is running Asahi Fedora Remix primarily and the iPhone was sold on. Disconnecting from iCloud was a pain, getting pictures off of their system took me three months but it was worth it. Self hosting my stuff now and 2026 is the year to switch my family and friends over as well.