One year later

About a year ago, I bought a used ThinkPad and installed KDE neon on it. That has been my daily driver for about 9 months. I've used my 2020 M1 MacBook Air for some items that weren't well supported on Linux but those went away last month. While I've been pretty happy with my Linux set up, I've grown weary of a few things. I can't update the firmware in Linux due to the partition size being too small. I'm getting a stub error on bootup. The sound isn't great for watching videos. Some of this can be fixed and some can't.

While using Linux more and more, I decided to try an Android phone. Specifically, GrapheneOS on a Pixel 9. I wanted to try this as another break-away from Apple. This was more difficult than switching to a new desktop OS. I had an iPhone 15 Pro with an Apple Watch Ultra 2. For the first two months, I kept using my iPhone with my Apple Watch Series 6 and sold my Ultra 2. I quickly realized that I was ok with the old watch. I missed some things from the Ultra but not enough to justify the cost.

After a couple of months of that, I decided to start using my Pixel as my daily phone. This meant getting a watch. After researching watches with good GadgetBridge support, I decided to buy a Bangle.js 2.It reminded me of the Pebble. It's a basic smartwatch, but it has what I wanted. Notifications, vibrating alarms, step counting, and timers. I had my watch and I had my phone. I kept my main number in my iPhone and got a pre-paid plan for my Pixel. I installed BlueBubbles to access iMessage from my Pixel.

After about two months of using BlueBubbles, I decided to move my main number to my Pixel. BlueBubbles is pretty impressive but there were a couple of points of friction. Short codes wouldn't come through and I didn't get notified of new messages several times. I knew about short codes but didn't understand the pain that would cause. The lack of notifications at times was the thing that pushed me to stop using it. I deregistered iMessage and FaceTime and moved my line. I tried using RCS before this and that was a thing. I've been on my Pixel with my main line for a couple weeks and I'm happy.

This now brings me back to my laptops. BlueBubbles was the last thing I was using my MacBook for. I decided to install Asahi Linux on it. As far as I can tell, it's the only option for running Linux on Apple Silicon systems. I've been using it for about a week and have been pretty happy so far. There are definitely challenges with using an arm64 distro. I'm either going to need to get comfortable with things like building from source or probably give up on this. But I have the main things set up that I use regulary. And videos sound nice!

In the last several years I didn't think that my daily technology wouldn't involve Apple. I still have an iPhone SE gen 2 and an 2021 iPad Pro 11" but I will go several days or longer without using them. My daily kit is very different from a year ago. - Pixel 9 running GrapheneOS - Bangle.js 2 smartwatch - 2020 M1 MacBook Air running Asahi Linux