Zimeng Xiong's WeblogEvery day I shuffle between a 15" MacBook Air for school, a Linux workstation at my desk, and a 5080 server for anything that might make my laptop break a sweat.
Google Drive: Since Google still refuses to ship a Linux desktop client in the year of our lord 2025, I keep an M1 Air running headless in my garage. Its sole purpose in life is to sync files.
File Sync: Syncthing keeps my Documents and Downloads folders in harmony across machines, tunneled through WireGuard when I'm away from home.
Clipboard: KDE Connect handles clipboard sharing with my phone, when it feels like cooperating.
Input Devices: A KVM switch handles keyboard and mouse duties between machines. It breaks constantly. I have restarted it mid-sentence more times than I can count.
And because moderation is for the weak, I dual-boot Hyprland on the MacBook Air. Chrome won't run on ARM Linux (naturally), so bookmarks flow through Floccus while I constantly babysit the battery.
The cherry on top? My school has apparently never heard of Linux. WiFi certificates? macOS, Windows, or iPadOS only. Thanks, IT.
The whole setup is fragile. One wrong mv and my Google Drive gets deleted (this has happened multiple times)—my syncing is too responsive. One flatpak error or one KVM hiccup and I'm debugging instead of working.
Death by a Thousand Shortcuts
The worst part isn't the big stuff.
Is it Ctrl+C or Cmd+C? Depends which machine I'm on. I've spent hours remapping shortcuts across systems just to achieve some fragile consistency—and it never quite works. My brain has to context-switch every time I glance at a different screen.
I've lost entire Saturdays configuring screenshots on Linux. Screenshots. A solved problem since 1995, and yet here I am, choosing between grim, slurp, flameshot, and whatever Hyprland wants me to use, wiring them to keybinds, making sure they save to the right folder, making sure that folder syncs...
This is not productive.
Why Do I Do This to Myself?
Because my MacBook Air throttles the moment I ask it to think. So I reach for the 9950X in my desktop. And when I need more parallel compute than a Maxwell-era GTX 970 can offer, I spin up a tmux session on the 5080 machine and pretend this is fine.
Meanwhile, my homelab is a graveyard from Raspberry Pis waiting to be unified into a k8s cluster, Docker containers scattered across machines.
The Phone Situation
Oh, and my iPhone? Dead. I scratched the screen badly enough that Face ID and the front camera gave up. So I switched to a Pixel, which meant adding another ecosystem to the pile. Beeper kept iMessage along, and I kept a dedicated iPhone around just to use my Apple Watch.
The Uncomfortable Truth
In 2025, Linux on the desktop is still a second-class citizen. Sharing files, copying text, installing apps—simple tasks become rabbit holes. And when you're hopelessly addicted to OmniFocus, the friction adds up fast.
It's time to accept reality: the best way to use Linux is through ssh. Tiling window managers are cool. Customizable lock screens are fun. But I'm tired of spending weekends on problems that shouldn't exist.
The Solution (Surrender?)
I bought another laptop. And another phone.
A 16-inch M4 Max MacBook Pro—48GB of RAM, 1TB of storage and an iPhone 15 Pro Max.
I already regret not getting more RAM. The storage will need an desolder and upgrade soon, I have over 0.5T in models alone.
But maybe—maybe—this is endgame. I can finally embrace the Apple Ecosystem™ without irony. No more Beeper server. No more zombie iPhone. No more KVM roulette. No more wondering if it's Ctrl or Cmd.
One machine. One phone. One set of shortcuts.
We'll see how long that lasts. In the meantime, its finally nice to have 120hz and actual fans, even if it comes with coil whine :)