No. I'm too focused on my work to care much.
I used to waffle back and forth, being a dwm super-nerd or hacking on my own tooling for whatever in macOS. Then I got a job where there was simply no time to spend on that it at all. At the end of the day I'm mentally exhausted and I don't look at a computer. Wake up excited to work on hard problems. I haven't thought about a window manager, editor, complex startup scripts, writing my own news aggregator, hacking on display drivers or whatever.
Too busy working, happily.
I don't need full customization or tens of forks of some window manager, or "ricing", or "independence".
All I need is a stable environment for work, media etc. It should be convenient without me spending hours configuring the OS. It should have pleasant UI\UX. It must have seemless integration with my mobile devices.
In my experince linux distros are good in case you only need it for one task and you are okay with constant changes (that will take your time). I'm not okay with this anymore. I want to spent my free time with my family or my hobby. Not trying to investigate why app X stopped working and how should I configure a new fork of this app created due to some drama.
Sorry if this is too emotional.
PS: do we have fractional scaling for Gnome under wayland yet?
At work I'll have to use macOS anyway, but I could migrate away from Windows on my desktop, had Linux desktop distributions a better HiDPI support with my hardware.
I've been running on Void Linux for about 2 years now, on desktop and laptop. These days I really can do everything I used to need Windows and sometimes macOS for. Some great stuff I use regularly on Linux:
Firefox, Thunderbird, Proton Bridge (a protonmail.com bridge), Signal Desktop, IRCCloud Desktop, ARES Commander (a cad program), Blender, Calibre, Discord, Dolphin (the emulator), DOSBox-X, dotnet, elixir, erlang, Ghidra, Godot Engine, ImHex, JetBrains Toolbox (I use a lot of JetBrains IDEs), MatterMost Desktop, Moonlight Streaming Client (and Sunshine Streaming Host, think hardware accelerated remote desktop ala Parsec, but for almost any kind of host instead of Windows/macOS host-only), Postman, PowerShell Core, Retroarch, ScummVM, SoapUI, Softimage XSI, Microsoft Teams, TVPaint, VSCode, Mathematica and Zoom!
My next big project is obsoleting my Windows box (used mostly for gaming). About 75% of my rather huge gaming collection will already work on linux thanks to Steam's Photon efforts (wine-like compat on steroids for windows games on linux).
I think that most negative linux responses here are from people that haven't used linux on desktop seriously for a significant amount of time.
Btw, my fave distros are: Void Linux, Gentoo and recently Chimera Linux (FreeBSD userland on Linux kernel, amazing project). Huge respect for Pop!_OS too, my goto recommendation for Linux-newbies.
While I can recognize the improvements Linux on the desktop has made over the decades it's still not in a place where I'd want to use it every day in that role.
1. I can't actually get keyboard shortcuts to act consistently on Linux between different applications and the desktop. Windows has developed a similar problem over the years. I have work to get done (or want to relax after working), the extra cognitive load of remembering if copy in the current application is Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Shift+C is maddening to me.
2. The same issue exists with gestures. Even if I somehow get a trackpad working sanely in Linux I can't get gestures to be consistent between apps. Between keyboard shortcuts and gestures I can do a significant amount of navigation of the system with one hand without thinking too hard about it.
3. Neither the macOS nor Finder's UX is perfect but it's largely self consistent. Third party applications almost always have a base level of consistency. I don't have to go hunt for application menus and I can use the window title at to drag windows around. It's the rare app that shits on those conventions on macOS where it seems every graphical app on Linux has wildly different UX. Looks are not the end-all of UX, too many apps/DEs on Linux focus on looking friendly without the underlying consistency to make for a good feel.
4. I've never had a laptop running Linux where I felt I could trust sleep. I'm sure I could buy the perfect system that had great Linux support. I don't even have to think about sleeping a Mac (desktop or laptop). It's been truly exceptional times where sleep hasn't worked correctly.
While I definitely have a bias towards macOS from using it so long, my main issue is I don't want to have to think about using my computer. It's a tool I use to do things. Linux as a desktop requires too high a cognitive load for me to be comfortable. I can use it and mostly configure it how I want but I don't want to do any of that.
- My family all use iMessage so I'd immensely miss Messages.app.
- I'm a photographer (hobbyist), and rely on Adobe Lightroom and Premiere Pro
- Having several other Apple products, the horizontal integration is just /too nice and convenient/ to give up. I spend at least 8 hours a day writing/looking at code and the rest of my day is being a dad. I don't have the time nor the energy to always be tinkering with my devices to get them exactly how I want them to look/feel/behave.
- As a developer, I have no major issues with my workflow using macOS. Also, the M1 is excellent. Show me another laptop that's as light and can literally go a full work day on battery.
* keybinds - why is it impossible to remap anything with their special meta key? * task switching - alt-tab/cmd-tab/whatever treats full-screen apps different than non-fs apps, unless you find and install an app to fix just this one thing * WM - I'm a tiling wm fan, and nothing came close to the usability of i3 * docker - x86 docker hosts are defacto standard and it's a pain to double/multi build every container for M1 as well as x86
I'd complain about the keyboard but I mostly use an external one so no big deal.
Linux support on the latest Dell hasn't been all roses; the wifi is still only about 80-90% stable after long (12+) hours of inactivity, and the touchpad driver spammed interrupts or something enough to crash the kernel (but the touchscreen driver is pretty stable, so I just disabled the touchpad).
Still, I can get a lot more done when I'm in control.
You can control linux more but you also have to babysit it more as it is so sensitive and fragile.
I tried to use a mac as a desktop about 15 years ago. I was burned out from working 12-14 hours a day, had a new baby, and didn't want to deal with managing a FreeBSD or Linux desktop. I managed to find 3rd party hacks for most of my hot-key WM things, but I was never able to make focus follows mouse work in any sane way. My strategy at the time was to ignore mac apps as much as possible, and run XDarwin with traditional *nix apps and a WM that supported FFM. But using a web browser that was native and not Xdarwin based meant that focus didn't always follow the mouse, and that was enough to cause me inordinate amounts of frustration. I finally gave the machine to my inlaws at the time, and built a new white-box *nix machine.
Oddly, I don't have much of a problem with non-ffm on laptops, just because the experience is so vastly different. So I have a macbook, but I use it mostly for meetings / web browsing and as a terminal onto my FreeBSD desktop when traveling.*
I posted a day or so ago about wanting to migrate from Windows to Linux[1] after the incredibly positive experience I've had using NixOS on WSL2.
I've spent the last week or so exploring both X11 and Wayland options for DEs and WMs to hold me over until I can port my tiling window manager[2] to work with either X11 or Wayland, however, there is just so much table-stakes-level stuff missing, like setting per-monitor scaling, rotations and positioning in a way that doesn't require cracking open a dotfile.
I keep oscillating between wanting to port my twm to Linux so I can just go full NixOS and developing an idea I have[3] for Windows to be able to quickly and reliably configure settings for a new Windows machine.
Honestly, if NixOS supports Windows in the future (and the ability to configure it in a similar way to nix-darwin's ability to configure macOS), that would be perfect.
Who knows, maybe SerenityOS will be running rings around all other OS-es on hardware by then and have a "nix-serenity" module set to allow for sane declarative configuration management.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33946559
And did I mention it is fun?
I don't miss them enough to move off macOS though. I'm deep in the Apple ecosystem largely because the integration is miles better than any of the alternatives, I can bounce audio around the house with Airplay, I can start watching some TV on an iPad in the kitchen, then when I've finished cooking throw it over to the TV. If my phone rings I can pick it up on whatever device is closest to me. Apple's integration between devices is about as close to the sci-fi future we were promised as you can get at the moment, and there's no way I want to go and try to replicate a half-arsed alternative on Linux.
But I am not a developer, I used creative tools from Adobe (Macromedia even) for almost 20 years.
Pop_OS! (on Wayland) helped a lot, and it has been a worthy transition. The replacements have been long and somewhat painful to find, but it all worked out.
I was simply too tired of the increased babysitting by macOS and the opaque telemetry and limitations.
I built a fanless AMD desktop loosely inspired by Joshua Stein's (here is a pic of my setup, but I now use 3 displays: https://mobile.twitter.com/Salis/status/1490739423981486082)
It made using my own devices fun again, even though I miss some of the convenience :)
Install this https://www.hammerspoon.org/
brew install —cask hammerspoon
Then follow the instructions here to install this:
https://github.com/miromannino/miro-windows-manager
Absolutely awesome. I’ve been using BetterTouchTool for windows management for years but I just started using Jump Desktop on my iPad for remote connection to my Mac and it wouldn’t work at all. Decided to try out hammerspoon today after hearing good things and it is amazing. Works with Jump perfectly. Never going back to BTT for windows management.
I sometimes miss Windows, not due to Windows itself (Windows 11 looks like a horror show), but because of all the apps, especially games.
Come on in! The water's fine.
A few years ago, I took a job in an all-mac shop and I figured it out. It never stopped feeling clunky, but that was certainly a matter of personal preference. Eventually, I got all the docker things working well enough in linux that I installed ubuntu on the mac and it was a really nice experience. I dig their hardware.
I think it comes down to what you're good at and used to.
With that said, as a python developer and system maintainer, I found the whole brew thing in macos awkward and extremely finicky, though I was always able to get things working eventually. I did drop macos within a few months, but I am sometimes made aware of the polished software and device integrations that just aren't available to me on the platform.
I think my few months of experience with the mac echoes what others have said about Linux. I might have enjoyed all the work to figure out how to make it usable when I was younger and had more time, but, at the end of the day, I just needed it to work and it only sort of did. I much prefer linux (ubuntu, gnomeshell, x11).
Fiddle with hacky drivers and graphics systems like fglrx and qt? No thanks.
I feel like I'm right on some edge with MacOS. I go about my daily work and don't think about it too much but it comes up from time to time.
For example, I very recently bought a macbook, and it drove me nuts that there's things like stock and chess apps that are hard-coded into a separate read-only partition, as if they're essential to the OS, that requires layers of steps to get to. I appreciate the security but I feel like stuff like that is really testing some limits of control or something. I could change all of it but it's not worth the trouble.
On the other hand, one of the reasons I appreciate Asahi linux is that I know at some level there's some safety valve, that if I really got upset, I could install an alternative. It might not work quite as well in terms of energy efficiency and so forth right now, but it's something and they're improving things at such a quick pace it might not matter by the time it became an issue, if ever.
I looked hard at linux laptops and although there were some really nice options I vacillated about, none of them had quite the combination of hardware features as a macbook. If there had been something closer I probably would have gone that route.
My favorite GUI/OS setup is Kubuntu, by far. If I could put any OS on any hardware it would probably be something with KDE+deb. I think it's too easy to lose track of windows and other things in MacOS, and I don't like the sense that Apple is flirting with who's in control of the OS. On the other hand, I'd probably prefer linux or MacOS to Windows at this point, only because it's what I'm most used to. This happened organically over time due to work-related systems, and wasn't a big conscious choice or something.
This isn't to say that Linux can't work for some people. I'm at a point where I find life to be way too short to configure a Linux setup to temporarily work the way I want before an update inevitably breaks things or features are removed because someone didn't feel like supporting them. So far, my Mac has managed to do everything I've wanted without any deal breakers, and I have no reason to move away from it yet.
My employer used to use RHEL Linux on ThinkPad T14 which worked for me. I configured GNOME with keyboard shortcuts I use daily on my FreeBSD ThinkPad W520 and was quite happy with it - especially with several additional GNOME extensions.
Unfortunately my employer decided that it will ditch Linux from admins laptops and forces migration to Windows ... but its also possible to get Apple Macbook.
I am sick an tired of being sick and tired by Winblows bullshit so I decided to get Apple Macbook straight away.
I got the M1 version of Macbook Air. Its nice light device ... but the keyboard is TERRIBLE to say the least - when you are used to the AWESOME W520 keyboard.
But that is just the 'tip of the iceberg' of problems.
The keyboards shortcuts are quite limited. You can use some external apps for that. Same for windows tiling. I wrote my own window tiler for X11/openbox. I needed to install Rectangle for that - and it works really well for that.
... but ZERO luck with free apps/solutions for MIDDLE CLICK copy/paste. I have tried free MiddleClick ... but seems it does not support Ventura yet.
Generally after two decades with computers I fell like with two left hands at macOS. Both on software and hardware (keyboard) side.
The interface is looking nice ... but you are also VERY limited to how small the interface or fonts can be. I prefer to have rather small fonts and/or interface as large fonts/interface takes too much screen space.
Here is what I use daily:
- https://vermaden.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/freebsd-desktop...
Not sure how that helps - but that are my $0.02 on that topic.
Regards.
I installed Ubuntu Server (which is halfway between Debian and Ubuntu Desktop) with i3 and spent a number of hours customizing it. I don't enjoy the time spent to get a custom setup (e.g. figuring out how to make the system not hang on boot because of wifi, and what packages to download so that the terminal will display emojis), but I do enjoy how fast the UI is, how all unimportant elements are removed.
But I'll play my music from either my iPhone or my MacBook.
If I'm charging my car, I'll work from the MacBook, because it doesn't use much battery when idle, its battery lasts a long time, and it is actually comfortable to have in your lap.
If I'm playing games, I'll use the MacBook.
If I'm doing accounting, I'll use the MacBook.
If I'm stitching together PDF documents, I'll use the MacBook.
Linux is only best for software development. But that's a pretty big part of every day for me.
Between MacPorts packages, Yabai[1], and skhd [2] I've found myself able to achieve a close enough setup in terms of tiling WM + system keybindings to make the desktop experience close enough to what I have using i3 or whatever else on Linux.
I still don't love using MacOS and would probably never buy a Macbook for personal use, but it's not really that bad and sure beats using Windows + WSL for development since at least MacOS is a UNIX
[1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai [2] https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd
Switching focus between multiple windows with keyboard shortcuts is painful, but GNOME is also bad on this front. Now I use Amethyst without tiling, which makes things better but is sometimes buggy :( Nevertheless, I like that it is possible to split the screen in fullscreen so I can have a fullscreen emacs frame on one monitor and another shared with a terminal on the other.
I miss the simplicity I had on the Linux installing applications with simple `apt-get` commands. On macOS, it feels like Ubuntu, where snaps have taken over all applications, and you can't figure out how things are organised and struggle to add a text editor to the path.
The default terminal experience was also painful. moving from zsh to bash was more difficult than anticipated as the bash is outdated on macOS (is it really so difficult to update it, apple?). Not being able to use tab completion in my git commands is also something I miss, and adding it again puts me into hours of searching in google for how it can be done for this macOS version.
Nevertheless, there are big benefits which come with using macOS. The ability to authenticate through webpages by scanning your fingerprint is a godsend. Grouping tabs by categories in safari also makes my browsing more organised. The ability to use Grammarly system-wide is a game-changing experience (although it does not work within emacs :( ), and the app ecosystem overall is much better and more polished. Email client, which does not need to be reauthenticated now and then with google, is one of the things I really appreciate (which was the only gripe about Geary).
In the end, the benefits outweight the shortcomings of macOS. It is at least a Unix in the end.
It's the same as a hammer in my shop: Of course there might be a better hammer out there for the current job. But I would have to browse catalogs, pay money, familiarise with the new toy. Lots of time and effort without gained productivity. No, that 10+ year old set of hammers I own does the job fairly well, thank you very much.
I do not know far it has strayed from UN*X in recent years, but from what I have read, macOS is getting more and more locked down.
Also, seems many Linux distros is slowly straying away. The rare few that stays close to the UN*X roots are having a tough time staying that way.
I wonder how hard it is these days to install free third party software on macOS. Or do you need to go through the "MAC Store" to install anything ? If so, that is reason enough for me not to use macOS.
The first thing I do on any Linux machine is turn off X windows, Wayland, whatever it is these days. I love logging in through ssh and using bash, but the UI is a dumpster fire. Granted Windows is always trying to spam me with spamifications about spam software and when I plug in a monitor the layouts blow up for a moment but in Linux they don’t care if font metrics match the space text is in, so the normal condition on Linux is like Windows when it is settling down after changing the video.
Stuff like Syncthing for files and Obsidian for notes, help ease moving between them.
Mac has its own quirks however I find that it is a decent middle ground right now for the intersection of entertainment and work. As for gaming, I have a PS5 which is more than enough so I have no need for a PC.
The reality is that I just prefer to complete my tasks and log off at 5PM with no hassle and willing to pay premium for the hardware and ecosystem.
Personally I don’t care much about that kind of customization and I’m happy to just learn to use the tools that are available in the most effective way. So Mac OS works better for me.
But if you are someone who needs everything to be just so, and who doesn’t mind putting the work in to maintain it, Linux is the clear winner.
We run a stack with a bunch of microservices, and there is just no graceful way to develop it on the mac. Everything on Linux is an order of magnitude faster.
I still like the mac for some things, but I would only ever use it as a secondary box in its current state.
I have Linux servers available to me that provides the Linux I need and macOS works out of the box with Photoshop and Office and some games, so it's good enough.
It requires about a half-dozen third party apps to be usable. And there is a culture around MacOS where this appears to just be accepted. There are hundreds of YouTube videos on using this app or that app to "boost your productivity". And no one ever seems to question why any of this is necessary.
The Finder is the worst file explorer application that I've ever used. I will die on this hill. When you have a file or folder selected then pressing Enter should open it. IMO, Enter should always be mapped to the most common action in a given context so having the enter key mapped to rename just feel incredibly stupid. It is not initiative at all and AFAIK there is so way to change its behavior at all. There is probably is some third party app that will fix it though but for now I just avoid it completely and use the terminal.
The app based window management is just completely unintuitive to my brain. Closing an app (like actually closing it) is just a chore and so my desktop always has a gazillion apps open. Their "task bar" for minimized windows uses a screenshot thumbnail of the open window which makes it impossible to distinguish between minimized windows of the same app without hovering over it to see the window title. That creates enough friction for me that I avoid minimizing windows so more desktop clutter.
I basically run all of my main windows at full screen and ctrl-arrow through workspaces to multi-task because doing it any other way makes me want to go full office space on this macbook. BTW, would it be so hard to let me to jump to a workspace with a keyboard shortcut like every reasonable window manager does? No? Okay, guess I'll try to cobble some hack together with Keyboard Maestro.
So yes, dreaming of the day that I can use a linux desktop for work is what keeps me going.
Unfortunately, to develop for the iOS and macOS I need a macOS.
I have tried to use uBar but it’s buggy. Does anyone know of good alternatives?
I wish a BYOD policy for workplaces was more acceptable.
Linux works just fine for me, on a lot of different devices. Use KDE and be happy forever with your setup. No issue no nothing, just works.
Linux just feels different to be able to get any software easily. The fact that I can change anything, makes me feel safe to test anything. And on mac, there just feels like it's more work.
I miss it, but I'm so much more productive when it comes to handling the business side of the business on mac, and the M series is the only cpu I will accept after it's release. Power and battery life unmatched.
#Asahi on it's way!
It's a relief.
I control my own OS, my own data, and don't have to worry about making compromises that I'm forced to make because there are no alternatives.
I still use an iPhone but I rarely use it. I'm probably switching to a libre phone as soon as it's feasible.