The article doesn't address what for me are the major sticking points: iTunes and iPhoto. I have years of music & photos stored in both, and to switch to linux I'd need an relatively painless migration strategy. Anyone have any suggestions?
For iTunes, Google Music provided a pretty darn seamless transition. You download their client software, it scans your iTunes library, and registers the songs you have with Google Play. Songs it doesn't recognize, it uploads.
This is a double-feature because Google Music is both platform-agnostic, and integrates with Android.
Google Music itself is not necessarily the most amazing user experience, and someone with a bajillion music files may be upset with it, but for me the high quality (all purchased & "recognized" music is 320kbps) and general platform- and client-agnostic nature trumps music management "power".
Ah, yes. iTunes. I just did this a few days ago---switched from iTunes to a Linux alternative. This was hard. I've never bought anything through iTunes, but I love the program for managing my music library. It looks nice, which is important for me while listening to music, and it's very powerful, with smart playlists and the play queue. I eventually settled for Banshee and imported my library with a lot of manual support. It wasn't easy or fun to switch, but it only took a couple hours to get right, and now I'm quite pleased with the result.
iPhoto, however, has always been shit. Mostly because it's slow. I haven't moved my photos to Linux yet, but I think Darktable is supposed to be good.
