The "hardware as commodity" is an ideology that I've been playing with for a while. I have my personal cloud that I can access via VPN, including a Windows desktop running in a VM, personal photos and home videos sync'd to a NAS using SyncThing.
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).
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).