Comment by jen729w | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jen729w | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'll assume from your tone that you're not an Apple user?

Like it or not, being signed in everywhere with iCloud is an amazing experience. I know this because I recently tried a second user account on my Mac that wasn't signed in to my iCloud account. It was jarring.

As an Apple user I take it for granted that my watch unlocks my computer. That text copied to the clipboard on any device is immediately, invisibly available on the others. That all of my contacts and messages are just there. That my Safari history and state synchronises.

You can't 'selfhost' this stuff. You may not like Apple -- I'm not trying to convince you -- but the fact is that there are a ton of benefits that their integrated ecosystem delivers that you just can't emulate yourself.

> You can't 'selfhost' this stuff.

you can,

- kdeconnect can do clipboard & messages sync

- nextcloud (or anything else that does webdav & webcard) does calendar & contact sync

- Firefox (and chrome probably too) can sync browser history and share webpages feom one device to another

i'm not aware of anything that can remotely unlock another device, but that seems like a security risk to me (also quite hard to implement as pam is synchronous :/).

but you certainly don't need a closed ecosystem, building your own out of free components is very much possible.

It’s worth pointing out that the most useful and difficult synchronization is not between desktops, but between mobile device and desktop. Switching to a new machine is hopefully a rare process, but copy and pasting between my iPhone and Mac is a near daily experience. Ditto with sharing open tabs.

Some of the stuff you mentioned seems to cover computer to computer, but isn’t relevant to computer to mobile scenarios.

Actually, all of them (kdeconnect, firefox, nextcloud) have pretty good Android clients

> Some of the stuff you mentioned seems to cover computer to computer, but isn’t relevant to computer to mobile scenarios.

no, the things I listed are how I sync my linux machines with my mobile phone.

I wasn't talking about computer to computer sync, but the methods I listed (maybe except kdeconnect, which is built for computer to phone sync) apply to workstation to laptop sync aswell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com