[spangry]

Oh darn, I thought they'd gotten Arch running on an M1 but they actually switched to a ThinkBook.

I somewhat regret my expensive switch from Linux to MacOS. MacOS is just so weird, it doesn't make any sense to me. For the first time in my life I feel like some tech-illiterate grandpa trying to figure out how to make his blasted computer do stuff.

[0xfaded]

Same, I have a Mac at work and can suffer the horrible window management by just having more physical monitors (3 + the built in screen).

I bought one for home use because I liked the hardware and the idea of running local llms. Long story short I'm still using my 6 year old Thinkpad running arch.

[adastra22]

I think it is just us getting old. I used Linux since high school in the 90's, through all the way to the late 00's. I switched to OS X (long before it was macOS) because that's where all the and coming developer tools were, and I got tired of being sysadmin to my own Linux install as things break.

Now I'm the opposite of you. I WANT to run Linux, and I have both a recent Framework and Lenovo laptop at home that I bought for this purpose. But I have some issue with Nvidia drivers, or just stuck down a rabbit hole trying to configure a GUI the way I want, or whatever, and I give up and go back to macOS where everything is familiar and works out of the box. I'm too old and/or busy to deal with that shit, but it probably reflects my age more than it does macOS vs Linux.

[wkat4242]

Yes but multi monitor in a Windows Centric office can also be troublesome because Apple continues to fail to support display port multi stream technology (MST) which means most docks will just give you one external display even if they have several. I've never understood why they're so bone-headed about this. It's not even a hard standard to support. It's just not invented here.

Only thunderbolt docks work properly but they cost a lot more so an office with 95% windows will not bother buying them.

I used to work on Mac management but the constant middle finger to enterprise needs got me to look for something else. For example, can you finally have apple federated IDs without having your email and UPN the same in the directory? This has been broken for years since they introduced federated IDs and I wouldn't be surprised if it's still broken.

[piskov]

For mac try moom: easily best keyboard-based windows management.

As for spaces: just create a few (important), then go to system settings and map alt 1-5 to switch between those

[solardev]

As someone who grew up on DOS, Windows, OS/2 and Linux, macOS definitely took some getting used to (and I still have many gripes with it, especially the window management). Rectangle makes it better: https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle

That said, though, Macbooks are far and away the best laptop hardware you can get right now, and the combination of a POSIX/unix-like CLI environment and the ability to run common general-user desktop apps (Adobe/Microsoft/entertainment/etc) is very nice. On Linux you'd have to emulate some of the desktop apps, and on Windows you'd have to use WSL or Docker or such to gain a good *nix shell. And you'd have to put up with all the Windows ad spam and copilot spam.

But I do wish Apple would allow other operating systems on their laptops, and properly support them. I'd love to be able to properly BootCamp into Asahi or Windows for Arm with all the required drivers, etc.

[raffraffraff]

It took me two weeks of farting about with Rectangle, alttab, hammerspoon and karabiner to make MacOS not give me face cancer every time I had to use it.

I still kinda hate it because I can't get keyboard shortcuts to just fucking work. On the work MacBook I use the mouse more than I'd like because I can't reliably do stuff that I have done fluidly on windows and Linux for decades, mostly around keyboard cursor control, selection, jumping in blocks of words and paragraphs, sane use of home / end, page up/down etc. Just when I think I have it cracked, I try to select the next two words, or from cursor to end of line, and it's like "no sir, in this fucking app it does something completely different, good luck finding out why it how to fix it"

I agree about the hardware though. Since the early 2010s MacBook Pro has been the best hardware. Before the M series I had a MBP13 2015, and in fact, it's still the "kitchen laptop", running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

[samgranieri]

You can run Asahi Linux nicely on Apple Silicon

[afiori]

I never have MacOS a chance, I have only used it for some quick safari debugging sessions, but in the last decade+ whenever I see a UI trend that really bothers me, makes things worse and harder to use invariably after some time I discover that they were copying Apple's UI/UX.

So I suspect I would not like using apple devices

[herbst]

Same experience here. I wanted to like it, after all it appears to be exactly what I want. An professional, stable Unix system with enterprise support.

I was and am still surprised that I found nothing of that and even Ubuntu or fedora community look more "enterprise ready" to me these days.

[skydhash]

macOS is actively trying to hide everything unix these days and almost all the good features require building an app to access them (or buying one).

[mbrochh]

Isn't that totally normal?

When I have to touch Android or Windows, I feel absolutely awful because I am used to MacOS and iOS.

Likewise, Android and Windows users will feel awful when having to use MacOS and iOS.

It's simply a matter of habit and experience.

Having used Windows and Android for 10+ years before switching to the Apple ecosystem, I can say with confidence though that MacOS is not weird at all. It makes far more sense than the insanity that is Windows/Android.

[entrepy123]

> regret my expensive switch from Linux to MacOS. MacOS is just so weird, it doesn't make any sense to me.

When picking up macOS, two things really help:

1. Having some macOS techies in your circle (co-workers or friends) to whom you can fearlessly ask random newbie questions, since there's a good chance there's a way that works well, which you are not discovering, and one or more people in your Mac User Friends group will have a good suggestion. (Maybe an LLM or Reddit can solve this, but real people are good, too.)

2. Leaning into whatever the macOS way to do the thing is. Don't try to do it the Windows or Linux way. Fall into the Apple paradigm. Don't fight it.

[wkat4242]

The main problem I had was that apple is a really closed system. I'm not a one OS guy, i always need my stuff to work on windows, Linux, android etc. I don't even use iOS anymore because it's too limited.

Most of the things Apple offers in terms of cloud sync don't work on everything so it's a pretty but useless walled garden to me.

It's a shame because I was a long standing mac user. Because it was a good and fairly open Unix with a good UI. But since iOS became popular macOS has moved into a direction that didn't work for me anymore. They care more about locking users into their ecosystem now than anything else.

[ahepp]

It was not super difficult to get Gentoo running on an m1 MacBook with the (unsupported) instructions some of the Asahi folks left around. I guess Arch might be a bit more difficult in some ways, given the weird status of arm64 being a different project from core Arch?

[freehorse]

Asahi was originally arch based. Not sure how it is faring now, though

[mrtksn]

Considering that macOS is popular among even actual tech-illiterates, it is safe to say that their system is probably pretty logical and easy but since you are a power user on something else you will have to unlearn you previous ways of doing things. At some point it will click and you'll be fine.

[j4coh]

Or, alternatively, non-illiterates have different needs.

[carlosjobim]

Sell it and buy a PC.

[f311a]

You can actually do that, there is asahi-alarm

[rogerrogerr]

Curious, what is it that doesn’t make sense?

[abdullahkhalids]

I can't figure out how to set a shortcut that moves the current window to my other monitor. Always have to go into the toolbar to do it.

Edit: And oh! Why do I constantly have to (painfully manually) maximize windows. Preview is constantly choosing a different size, for example. Why is this not remembered.

I can't recall the last time an application in linux forgot its size after restarting.

[dghf]

The difficulty in navigating to arbitrary locations in file open/save dialogs.

I wanted to attach a build log to a Teams post (maybe we shouldn't be using Teams on Mac, but it's a corporate decision that's out of my hands), and I could not for the life of me figure how to get the file-selection dialog to look at the relevant folder (which was somewhere under /private/). In the end, I had to use iTerm to copy the file to somewhere the dialog could find.

[sarmasamosarma]

What’s so hard about it?