I am currently in the process of doing this to; I have been using raspberry pi’s off and on for years for pihole, I think pihole is always going to be part of my network now that I have fallen down the rabit hole of home labbing. I had practically already given up on MacOS for iOS and was more than happy to SSH, VNC, or use apps WebUI with the raspberry pi’s. I was more than fine with the AppleTV, whatever the subscription service was called, iCloud, and whatever else I was paying for. The services where the first to go, I had pi 5’s with PoE++ NVMe hats with drives in a few of them so I started using Jellyfin for some of my things; than later on I started using the *arr apps to get and follow TV shows and Movies, if buying is not owning pirating is not stealing. I had already had a personal domain but they did not have a wildcard email service so I did the calculations and it was going to be less expensive to get the business plan for unlimited email address (I already had well over 100 apple hide my email addresses) for four years than it was going to be for Apple’s hide my service so I had done that, as I had a formula for creating random email addresses (Service name).(Saskatchewan slang)(3 random numbers)@my domain.ca I was peachy with that but it got frustrating needing to go to the webpage create a new address than sign up (or renew my trial period) for a service. I eventually dropped them and moved to easydns who offered wildcard email addresses, so I could create email addresses on the fly. And they where considerable less expensive.

As I had said I started using the *arr apps after I started using Jellyfin was because my place flooded and my TV was put into storage, I had just been using the channel apps on the AppleTV for them to bring up the shows I was watching but the TV app on my iPad was not nearly as good so off to the high seas I went and found the *arr apps, I had tried coding a script to watch for TV shows but that failed horribly.

The boycott the US movement had also started here in Canada, so me being a good little Canadian girl wanted to limit the amount of US services I was using, so that meant moving away from Apple. I had orignally paid for a hosted version of Nextcloud on a Canadian server, but I quickly fell out of love with Nextcloud, I felt that it tried to do to much and failed at most of it. I thought I would self host it and work out the things that did not work, I ended up forgetting about it and just self hosting seperate services for things like my calendars, contacts, notes, and whatever else. I may go back to it for files though, right now they are just in a smb share.

I had an extra pi 5 just hanging out hosting my blog so I thought I could put it on something else so I got a VPS from easyDNS, more or less to get it off my LAN I thought it was the pi 5 hosting Jellyfin that was making my jellyfin things choppy and the such so I thought hey I have a 2014 mac mini just collecting dust I could install Debian on it and Jellyfin would just magically work on the pi 5 attached to my TV, this could not be further from the truth. My father is going to be replacing his 2018 Mac Mini soon so I am going to be getting it handed down to me so that I can install Debian on it and attach it to my TV, it sadly does not have CSC but I think I will get HA to fix that.

Thinking about HA, I have HAOS running on a pi 4 to replace apple Home and a few other services. I sadly still have two home pod minis but they work with home assistant, I have 2 pi zero 2s that I want to get microphone and speakers for to work with the nabu system.

I use Vaultwarden to replace Apple passwords, I get all the paid for benefits of Bitwarden but it is running on a pi 5, being backed up to my VPS. I use immich for all my photos, again backed up to my VPS.

Because I was bored out of my mind with half my place going through the process of insurance I got a Flint 2 that I could install vanilla openWRT on and get static IP addresses from my ISP my orignal plan was to self host a email server hence 2 IP addresses, but I like my hair and I really did not want to pull it all out! I have a domain so I installed the Caddy docker image on one of my pi 5’s and I can access all my things away from the LAN.

I sadly still have not replaced the homepods, the iphone, the ipad, or the watch. I entend on replacing the homepods soon, the iPhone next year because updates are done, the ipad in a few years when I have the money for a Laptop (as much as I hate it being a US company I will probably replace it with a frame work), and the watch needs replacing but I like apple’s wallet I will need to find an alternative for it once I replace my phone.

Side note I have an old iPad in my kitchen running HA kiosk so I can see a few things.