Owning Your Digital Life

Originally published on Medium Aug 30, 2025

I bought a secondhand HP Elite book not so long ago to experiment with. It's a nice machine. I like the keyboard but I don't like the trackpad. The screen is not as clear as on the MacBook Pro screens I'm used to. I bought it to experiment with Linux. It was super cheap.

At first I played around with Ubuntu which was the Linux flavour that I was most comfortable with from supporting client's web servers. But never satisfied, I wanted more. I tried a few other options and settled on Fedora 42 with Cosmic desktop environment. I liked the tool they offered to make the USB boot installer. The install process was so easy and smooth. Everything just worked. The hardware it running on is not as good as my MacBook Pro but it's good enough to do all I need for my work. It's great.

Now that Microsoft is mandating on-board NPUs and integrated AI whether you want it or not, it's time for a change. They force you into subscriptions and you become the tenant not the owner of your tools. They push ads on to you and steal your personal data. The machine you have that works perfectly fine will no longer take their updates. It's time for Linux.

At first it will be different and feel strange to a long time Windows user but you will get used to it. If you stick with it long enough you may even experience how much better it is. There are options like Linux Mint with Cinnamon desktop that attempt to minimise the pain of the switch. For most people Linux will work and give them everything they need. There's still a few areas like some games where Windows is better but the gap is much smaller than it was.

Lately I've been looking at ways to self-host some of my own applications like a cloud server and do streaming from my own media collection. I'm getting tired of paying all the big platform subscriptions. It all ads up. Google Cloud for small business, BitBucket, Netflix and other streaming services, Spotify and the list goes on. When you rent you are at the mercy of the landlord who can up the price whenever they like especially if they have you hostage. I tried NextCloud on the shared hosting plan I already have. It was a bit slow.

Next I tried a specific NextCloud managed VPS from a provider in Europe. It was pretty nice and very fast. If you have a small business you could pretty much do everything you need with NextCloud and for way cheaper and way more control and privacy with your data. And with a managed VPS you don't need to worry about maintenance and backups because they do all that for you. It's a great service. But I wanted to go further.

I had an old Mac Mini circa 2012 sitting in a drawer. It was relegated by Apple to the junk heap but to me it was a beautiful little machine that served me well and works just fine so I never could throw it away. I installed Fedora Linux server version on it. There were a few little pains associated with that.

Unlike the HP laptop, the Apple Mac Mini was a bit more fussy. The wi-fi didn't work out of the box but fortunately I had a brand new external wi-fi adaptor sitting unopened in a box in the drawer. I bought it a few years ago with plans to Linux-ise another machine but never got around to it. The external wi-fi adapter worked straight out of the box and was immediately recognised by the Fedora installer.

With wi-fi working I set up ssh and got my remote access going so that I didn't have to sit at the desk and work with a crappy screen and keyboard. Then I set up the file sharing between Linux and my Mac. There was some frustration but I resisted rage quitting and swearing at ChatGPT. It turned out to be that SELinux was enforcing access control policies on Samba that prevented it from accessing directories outside of the standard paths.

With that working I went into the other room, removed the monitor and keyboard and left the Mac Mini on the desk. That caused the GPU driver/firmware to shut off graphics output making the system unreachable. Fortunately, past me had also bought a dummy HDMI device for some other project so after plugging that in and fooling the Mac Mini that it had a monitor connected all was well. The file server runs fast on my local network. It's pretty awesome.

Next I discovered that Fedora server edition had automatically installed an application called Cockpit and it blew my mind. This is a server dashboard with just about everything you need for maintaining the server. It runs in a web browser. I'm handy with the command line but Cockpit makes life easy. So now I have a fully functioning self-hosted file server. I can access all my work and media files from all my machines. No subscriptions, no compromised data.

I decided I don't really need NextCloud. I'm experimenting with LibreOffice seeing as I still need to share between Linux and MacOs. I don't use office tools all that much because I like just writing notes in Markdown but every now and then I need a doc or a spreadsheet. I may set up NextCloud later. I'll probably play and experiment with a few more things but for now it's enough. I own it. I control it. Apart from the electricity it costs me nothing but a bit of time.

So own your digital life. Take back control. Explore options and the world of open-source. Don't be afraid to break stuff. If you can afford it, do a bit of research and buy something like a secondhand HP EliteBook to experiment with. They are very cheap now and take Linux well without any headaches. Figure out ways to self-host. There are so many good tutorials on YouTube for beginners. Curate your own media collection. It's worth it.