Data engineer, Corvid fanatic, and burgeoning privacy and digital sovereignty enthusiast. Less time for gaming these days but I still hop on my PC when I have time.
CAW
Like others here, I use mine as a sort of “kiosk” for smart home stuff by using Guided Access to lock it to a single app. If you have a Mac you could also put it into real single-app mode via Apple Configurator policies, but it’s more time-consuming to set up and if the app stops working there’s no way to fix it short of restarting the entire iPad (whereas you can end Guided Access, restart the app, and start Guided Access again).
You should keep it around, per the Asahi docs themselves, and marcan provides some additional context in a reddit comment which I’ve also quote here:
Can, yes. Should, no. It is not supported right now. You won’t be able to install Asahi if you first remove macOS, and removing it after requires messing with partitions using a USB boot image or similar, and will leave you without the ability to recover from certain problems without outright reinstalling macOS first, plus no firmware updates (which might become required in the future to enable certain features - do you really want to find out you can’t play newer games because you need a GPU firmware update and you have to reinstall macOS for that?).
We’ll have more options for this in the future, but right now we do not support it and if you go this way, you’re on your own.
That all leaves multiple copies of recoveryOS of course, which is a stripped-down version of macOS itself. It is not possible to remove recoveryOS and keep your machine functional at all. It is basically part of your BIOS.
You could try using diskutil apfs resizeContainer <container ID> minimum (I don’t 100% recall if the last argument is actually minimum but using the regular --help should give you the correct one) in macOS to shrink the macOS container to smaller than the Asahi installer typically allows, or use expert mode in the Asahi install script to override the macOS size check, possibly with fewer negative consequences than deleting it outright.
Sorry if you already know all this but I thought I’d add it here just in case!
Just in my personal experience, I use IronFox with Mullvad, which YouTube flags and throws the “Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot” error whereas NewPipe, for example, typically works (I believe they have a workaround similar to yt-dlp that leverages the Android VR API).
Thanks! I think the trouble I had with Bandcamp is that it seemed to be missing some stuff I wanted - some of it was more niche but a good bit of it was pretty popular so I was surprised by that. No reason I couldn’t use more than one source though.
7digital looks promising, thank you!
Are there any good alternatives to Qobuz? I tried it out and was annoyed that they didn’t seem to embed metadata in the files (like album art) unless you use their “downloader” and I think it’s silly that I have to install that to just… download some files. Or maybe I missed something?
Thanks for the writeup! I think bidirectional sync is what I’m used to but very few solutions seem to support it outside of the big tech ones, like you mentioned. Perhaps I need to re-evaluate whether I truly need it; I guess it’s not often I switch between editing a document on my phone to my laptop and need those changes synced instantly, and I did find a way to get Cryptomator to immediately upload any pictures or screenshots I take. I would still like my Obsidian notes files to upload instantly too, though, I think.
Thank you! I did just find in the FolderSync docs that 2-way sync isn’t supported for encrypted files, which is a bit of a bummer. I think Nextcloud on Android had a similar limitation where it would only actually sync at most every 15 minutes. I did find the Cryptomator app on Android does have an “immediate upload” folder, but it’s only for images captured with the camera and screenshots… which I guess for now fulfills most of my needs, so I may stick with that after all.
Thanks for the suggestion! I have a few questions, if you don’t mind: what did you like more about rclone than Cryptomator? Is it suitable for sync, or is it more for backups? I’m ideally looking for near-ish to real-time sync for contacts, notes, files, and pictures. Are there any frontends for Linux you’d recommend, or do you script out the functionality you’re looking to implement?
Did you try Syncthing at all? I ran into the same issues with Nextcloud on Android and I’m trying to decide on Syncthing or FolderSync and I wanted to see what people thought. I’m currently using Cryptomator but it doesn’t do everything I’d like yet.
Yeah I just spent a few days trying to get Nextcloud on Android working and it was a disaster. I ultimately decided to use Cryptomator to handle the sync since I’m already using it on my PCs, but I’m looking at maybe Syncthing or FolderSync (not sure which is better) because Cryptomator lacks some functionality like keeping local copies and making files available to other apps like galleries, music apps, etc.
It’s pretty quick to set up luckily. Depending on your security needs you can set a PIN and prevent access to certain controls and areas of the screen. If you have a need for real security (e.g. an app on a corporate campus) you’d want real single app mode, but for home use it’s more than enough I think.