> There are some other luxuries I've lost in the transition. For instance, if I want to plug in a USB microphone, headphones, and two displays to my computer all at once, I'll have to do some configuration through the command line to make them work correctly. Even getting the mouse to move the way I intend isn't as easy as Mac and Windows make it. Doing all these things is possible; it's just more work.
Reinstalling everything sounds like a pain if you have to mess around like that to get basic hardware working.
Nothing particularly "integrated" like Sandstorm or NextCloud, but I haven't had the existential need for that level of accessibility.
The QNAP NAS (like Synology) has personal cloud apps, but I don't tend to like doing things the easy way. Going down that path also locks services into a particular hardware dependency. VMs are easily backed up and restorable to ProxMox running on new / different hardware if necessary.
De-coupling the portable device (which, due to its portability, is much more prone to breakage or theft) from the data that it captures or has access to.
My journey to this ideology was close calls with data loss due to both hardware failure and theft. Rather than backing up to a central location, have the data "live" at the central location, then back it up off-site somewhere.
This can also have both negative and positive security implications in the even of a lost or stolen device, but those scenarios are likely not quite as bad as if you've got a whole whack of data on the device as well.
This can be done across platforms too, as far as my experience goes. It's unrelated to the author's transition to Linux / Ubuntu. My stable consists of android phones, iPads, Chromebooks (which don't really count because they embody this ideology already), laptops running both Linux and Windows. Although I'm also most of the way through transitioning away from Windows (but RDP is just so good for controlling a remote GUI).