We Don’t Need No Stinking Ecosystem
An index of the articles documenting my move from Apple’s ecosystem to self-hosted alternatives
Long before I began writing about leaving Apple, I was writing about privacy, cryptography, and technological independence. More than that, I spent much of my life building the tools used to protect those things. As someone who came out of the OG cypherpunk tradition, I have always believed that privacy is not a privilege to be granted. It is a preexisting right, and the primary purpose of our institutions is to secure such rights, not to dispense them.
That principle applies to every fundamental right. The right to keep and bear arms appears immediately after the protections of speech, religion, assembly, and petition in the Bill of Rights for a reason: liberty cannot be preserved through complacency. Rights survive only when people remain vigilant and are willing to defend them against erosion, whether that erosion comes from government, corporations, or institutions claiming to act in the public interest.
Strong encryption, open systems, and code are simply the modern tools we use to defend what was already ours.
That same concern eventually shaped how I looked at the technology I used every day. What pushed me away from Apple was not merely constant platform churn, but a growing distrust of a technology culture increasingly comfortable with centralized identity, surveillance, and institutional control.
That is why we built tools that made individuals harder to control. The newer tech-bro instinct seems more interested in making it easier for institutions to control us by deciding what is best for everyone else, a familiar strain of Progressivism dressed up as Effective Altruism, trust and safety, or responsible innovation.
That path is little more than a way station to tyranny. It rejects the self-evident truth that our rights are inherent, replacing liberty with permissions granted by institutions claiming to act for our own good.
“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
— Thomas Sowell (“Wake Up, Parents!”)
The articles collected here document my effort to move in the opposite direction: away from dependency, centralization, and institutional control, and toward cross-platform tools, self-hosted services, and systems I can understand, maintain, and control myself.
Part 1 — Leaving the Apple Ecosystem: Why I began moving away from Apple and started exploring Linux as my primary computing platform.
Part 2 — Continuing the Move: My early experience setting up Ubuntu and adjusting to daily life outside macOS.
Part 3 — Replacing the Applications: The software and cross-platform tools I chose to replace the applications and services I had used inside Apple’s ecosystem.
Part 4 — Moving Beyond the iPhone: My search for a practical mobile-phone alternative that reduced my dependence on Apple.
Part 5 — Privacy and Independent Services: A closer look at privacy-focused services and taking greater control of my data and communications.
Part 6 — Nine Months Later: An honest follow-up on what worked, what did not, and how life outside the Apple ecosystem turned out.
We Have Always Been at War with Cryptography: Why government-mandated backdoors and weakened encryption threaten the privacy and security of everyone.
I’m a Pushover for Self Hosting: Adding remote notifications without Apple’s infrastructure.
In the works -
Taking Back the Infrastructure: Self-Hosting the Services I Use Every Day
A look at how PhotoPrism, Paperless, Forgejo, Jellyfin, Navidrome, Radicale, and other self-hosted services helped me replace cloud dependencies with systems I control myself.
Funny story: I was using GPT for grammar and spelling edits, and it became absolutely twitterpated over the Thomas Sowell quote above.
A fitting reminder that the tech bros, and systems they build to act on their behalf, cannot be trusted to decide what the rest of us are allowed to say, read, or think.
That question of who gets to decide runs through much of what I write, whether the subject is electronics, software, baking, perfume or motorcycles. The subject may change without warning, but the underlying questions are usually the same: How was this made? Why was it built this way? And who gets to control it?
Hitting like and sharing helps real people find the work. The algorithm can go pound sand.