Lately I have been toying with the idea of moving off MacOS more permanently and leaving the Apple ecosystem behind. I mean, yeah, they did just present the most amazing processor the world has ever seen ¹ to the public, but ever since I have started using OpenBSD and ever since I have been using the Small Web more and more, I no longer know what a "fast" computer is. Just today I saw this thread in #OpenBSD on libera.chat where people were debating Linux's vs OpenBSD's boot times. Apparently in some cases OpenBSD is 5 seconds slower. Five. Seconds. Do I really care?!
And the other thing is that most of us do not really use systems or computers as such. My friend Iohannes once pointed out how most people do not use "Linux" but they use "KDE". Similarly I very rarely use "MacOS", I mostly use Pages or Orion web browser or Mail or something. And for these I have found absolutely workable replacements. (I do wish we had more choice for browsers than Firefox and Chrome --and its derivatives-- on OpenBSD).
But there are still some things I have not yet managed to replace. Let's see where things stand, let's do a bit of thinking out loud, do I actually need MacOS still?
Most of this is standard "office work".
However there are more advanced things I have some resources stored in:
Potential difficulty is that I have a lot of stuff in .pages files on the Mac -- templates for funerals, etc. For producing well typeset documents I am uncertain how useful LibreOffice truly is.
What could be done here?
The Catena Aurea is in it; there is a Latin-English Glossary, there's Douay-Rheims, there's an LXX module, the SBL Greek New Testament, there's the Byzantine NT, and the older Hungarian Neovulgate. However there is no ESV, and especialyl no ESV Catholic Edition, which is a problem. And what do I do about the content purchased in OliveTree? E.g. the Ancient Christian Commentary on Sacred Scripture cost me around GBP 300. (How do you even type the "pound" symbol on OpenBSD?!) I think a LOT of .sqlite reverse-engineering would have to happen to get my resources out of OliveTree and into Xiphos.
I still do this every now and then; I like producing things for liturgical use. And so I have purchased over time the Affinity Suite (used to use Adobe until they introduced the subscription model), and I would like to carry on using it because frankly, Gimp and Inkscape and all the rest really do lag behind; and I do not feel like learning entirely new software.
LaTeX could solve SOME issues. But in all honesty, I find LaTeX horrible, coming from a CSS background. I would very much like to see CSS for Print become more widely available, and I am rather confused about why it is that most CSS for Print products are so incredibly expensive. Maybe one day...
I do scan books as well quite often. I have a CZUR book scanner (it's for sale, yo), which has some annoyingly proprietary software. I would love to build my own book scanner at some point, but that's a long way off.
I do the image processing in ScanTailor, which is FOSS, but I don't see it in Ports. It's likely that it can be built and that it would work on OpenBSD. There are of course no build instructions for *BSD. I can only speculate the build process would work.
I don't know whether "popular" PDF viewers would allow more advanced PDF editing like I can do in NitroPDF. Possibly. There are likely good Python libraries as well to do e.g. page renumbering programmatically rather than on a shiny UI.
Overall, this is a huge unknown.
I'm happy with what is on offer; I can even run Signal via a VM -- but now h3artbl33d made Gurk available for SecBSD, and since it can be added via pkg_add on -current, I'm happy enough with these.
For Mastodon toot tui seems to do the job most of the time but it's not great for images etc.
I do quite a bit of my coding on OpenBSD already. While I miss VSCodium I can now mostly work with a tmux session running nvim and ranger and a shell for running python scripts directly. I use OpenBSD for ESP32 development anyway, because installing the USB Serial drivers for MacOS is stupid.
I do wish tho I could figure out how to get a python language server going.
Now this is a thing. For the last few years I have relied on the Apple ecosystem for most of my entertainment needs. I don't watch movies on my laptop -- have an Apple TV for that, or an iPad when travelling -- but I do listen to quite a bit of music on Apple Music while working. I could replace it with an extensive mp3 library, but that would likely mean ripping my own library for local use... Which I don't really want to do.
I have a lot of stuff on iCloud; but ultimately this isn't a huge worry for me, really. I am confident I could spin up a NextCloud instance and possibly put quite a lot of storage behind it for relatively cheap these days. Then there is also the Proton account I have which comes with a very generous amount of storage, and they have e-mail, contacts, calendar, even collaborative docs these days: they are clearly working towards becoming an iCloud "replacement" service.
It seems that OpenBSD would need to remain mostly a development platform for me. I could try to switch over to FreeBSD and then I would likely have a bit more freedom to move laterally and run apps via Wine or via the Linux Compatibility Layer. But in all honesty I don't want to; I really like my OpenBSD setup, and I would really like to learn it at greater depth.
I don't feel I would miss out on the productivity front, but I would likely struggle with the multimedia production stuff. Could I possibly run a Linux VM and X11-forward stuff like I already do with Signal? Perhaps worth contemplating. It would certainly open up new choices.
But for now I would be content I think if I could figure out how to type the pound symbol, I would be quite content.
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