A Guide for Living on the Cloud

As a random guy(also works for industry professional), how to live without a specific piece of electronics hardware/operating system(OS) in 2021.

1. Preface

Words on Electronics Hardware

• Ultrabook is light-weighted, but most times you cannot manually expand specs on it, and an Ultrabook with high-end specs costs you a lot(while it will still get easily beaten by a gaming laptop that costs 1/3).
• Gaming laptop has enough horsepower as a mobile device, but most of them won’t live for an entire lecture without a power supply, so they are not really portable.
• A workstation is high-performance, robust, and makes you eager to work with it, but you cannot take it with you to visit a friend who lives downstairs.
• iPhone is safe, private, and good-looking, but it’s expensive and closed.
• iPad is great and only great to mock paper and a big iPhone for now.
• Android Phone is what you will have when you don’t want an iPhone. But same as iPhone, you are not supposed to present real productivity on it.

Words on Operation System

• Windows has the best original windows management, but it’s ugly and not consistent in many ways.
• Linux is great for development and it’s all free, but you have to spend a lot of time to get it configured as a great personal tool.
• MacOS is elegant, but you don’t want to play games on it.
• Android is good for mobile, but it’s also designed for mobile platforms, so you don’t expect to have productivity on it.
• iOS is safe, private, and good-looking, but it’s expensive and closed.
• iPadOS(and its upcoming combination with MacOS) is the future, but now it doesn’t have enough accessories support, and like iOS, it is closed.

With these sayings, we can come with a few conclusions

• Different hardware/OSes are designed for different purposes in the first place. Even with years of redesigning efforts and progress to make them general-purpose, they all have different flavors on regular routines(consider their default shortcuts to switch between applications). Because of this, there can be a significant overhead for switching between the same app on different platforms, even they function the same way.
• Since we want to perform different tasks, we will very likely in a state where we’re using different hardware with different OSes at the same time. An example would be that you have a windows laptop and Android phone yourself, while your company gives you a MacBook as a daily driver, and you develop projects on the corporate Linux workstation.
• Different tasks can have different preferred platforms, for example, you have to run a legacy LabView on a Windows machine. However, there are many common tasks that you want to run on every platform, for example, chatting and email applications.

If we can perform most tasks on any hardware/OS platforms in the same way, then we don’t have to worry about compatibility anymore. Just choose the hardware with the best physical human interface(screen, keyboard, microphone, speaker, etc.).

I don’t want myself limited to a piece of hardware that I don’t like to work with just because of the exclusive software. I want myself able to grab any pieces of general-purpose hardware, and it’s ready to go for most of my tasks.

Are you feeling good about your current setup? Ask yourself if you write something on your laptop, what can you do to send it through a chat app on your phone? If you are not using Mac+iPhone under that circumstances, it could be a great pain.

2. Living on the Cloud(LOC), a very brief background

Normally, when you are using the electronic hardware, you(not the device) are doing one(or variant) of the following tasks(remember here task is a real-life task instead of some technical term):

• Create data(writing, taking a photo, coding, etc.)
• Get data(downloading, receiving photos, etc.)
• Share data(chatting, email, file sharing, etc.)
• Process data(image processing, code building, compression/decompression, etc.)
• Consume data(watch photos/videos, listen to music, play games, etc.)

When you have multiple devices at the same time, all these categories need to be cooperating. For example, you want to write an essay from two different machines at the same time, so that you can enjoy the scissor keyboard on a Mac while using your mechanical keyboard to remind your roommates that you are working.

LOC means that, you have a multi-hardware setup where you can create/get/share/process/consume the common data on any general-purpose hardware. This is mostly achieved via integrating cloud services into your current setup.

3. What is a good LOC setup?

This setup should have the following properties among several attributes.

User Experience(Direct feeling requirements)

• Seamless: You are feeling like interacting with data locally everywhere, which also means that the setup should have low-latency.
• Easy to setup: This multi-hardware setup should be easy(quick, straight-forward, and no need to tweak frequently) on every pieces of hardware. You are also likely to keep your setting after system upgrading and rebooting.
• Consistent: The experience for performing the same task on different devices should remain as close as possible so that you don’t need to transform your used practice much.
• Universe: Your setup should support as many of hardware/OS platforms as possible.

Hidden Requirements

• Robustness: Your data are safe in terms of being hard to lose, and single(or even most) hardware failure won’t affect your data and living.
• Cost-efficient: Yeah I want to save money.
• TODO

Potential Benefits

• TODO

These bullets points also show my metrics for determining whether a service or setup is good or not, so they will be used to grade the services that I will discuss in the following sections.

4. Data

Because my narrative for describing the human activity on the electronics hardware as a type of manipulation on data(create, get, share, process, and consume), keeping the same data available to all platforms is the centric idea of LOC. Here I will review my recommendation of cloud services that can achieve this goal.

5. Workspace

6. Workflow

7. Platform Tweaking

8. Accessory Sharing

This part may be a little different from “living on the cloud” since most of its contents happen in the local network(or not go through the network). I have it here because it still contribute to our vice purpose, “how to live without a specific piece of hardware”. It helps solve this problem by making you seamlessly working on multiple OSes with one set of accessories, which mean you may not have to move your hands between different keyboards just to reply to a Wechat message when you are on a Linux workstation and you don’t want to use its web version which lacks the feature of messages history data synchronization.

9. If I only have one daily driver, does it help?

Yes.

10. Postscript

I very much like consumer electronics, and I am lucky enough to witness the society evolution brought by the mobile Internet during the 2010s. The beginning of my journey for choosing my computation hardware starts from a VAIO laptop back in 2009, on which I try to download StarCraft2 from a 200Kbps network. At that time, as a teenager, I don’t have the freedom to get access to the device whenever I want, so I got up at around 2 AM every night to reach the place where my parents hide my computer, powered on the machine, and continue the downloading jobs. It takes me a month to get this done.

StarCraft 2 was a great game.

As most of you would feel at the first time when you reach a multi-touch capacitive screen, having new playable hardware is exciting(My Hardware Review). My hardware selection criteria had changed during the last decade like this:

• Buy an iPhone.
• Buy something not that popular but has great specs for the money.
• Buy something that has great specs for the money, and is unique in some way(appearance, system, or a feature).
• Buy something that has the best specs for the price that is a little out of my budget.
• Buy something great looking and light-weight.
• Buy something robust and industrial feeling.
• Buy a machine dedicated to a task(recreation, creation, development, etc.).
• Buy a Mac. At this point I was using several different machines, and normally I would like to just grab one that is closest to my hand and simply start using it. This is the point when you want to move your workspace to the cloud as possible as you could.
• Stop buying new machines, sticking to your existing ones as long as they perform well in regular browsing and system graphics navigation. Use cloud services