Linux vs. Mac
I&#x27;ve been using Linux as my daily driver for ~15y, have a Windows installation just for non-Steam games.
When I switched jobs 5y ago I was issued a MacBook, and I had to adapt.<p>My workflow is mostly with syseng&#x2F;devops, so I have ~6 applications that I use daily, 3 I use once every couple weeks, the rest I don&#x27;t even know exist.<p>To this day, I&#x27;ve never fully adapted to MacOS UI: the Command key is the center of the universe, and it&#x27;s in a completely unnatural position (double it if you have big hands, not to mention the useless Fn key in place of Ctrl). You can remap it, but then you&#x27;re never sure what you&#x27;re pressing anymore if you attach a new keyboard.
Alt-tabbing is #1 in my grind-my-gears daily list: MacOS uses application tabbing, which doesn&#x27;t make any sense whatsoever to me. I use Witch to solve it, but sometimes the Witch overlay won&#x27;t display, even though it did for the previous 4h (and I&#x27;m 99% sure Witch isn&#x27;t the problem).
Window tiling&#x2F;placement is #2: Windows 7 had magnetic corners already, MacOS seems hell-bent on pushing touchpad gestures, magic corners to activate features and workspaces. I don&#x27;t want to lift my hands from the keyboard and stare at randomly aligned miniatures of windows to understand which one I need to click: I want to easily alt-tab between them! I don&#x27;t want to wait for a couple seconds of animation while you swipe left&#x2F;right the windows across workspaces! And the stupid third green button in the title bar of a window should definitely NOT maximize the window and send it to a separate workspace and hiding the title bar! BetterSnapTool helps with window placement, at least.
I have disabled all gestures, mission control, workspaces and magic corners entirely. The only two gestures that are useful to me are two-finger-scroll (like Windows&#x2F;Linux do it, UNnatural apparently) and two-finger-swipe left&#x2F;right (because they can save a ton of time pressing back&#x2F;forward in the browser, at times).
Focus stealing is #3: if you open an app, and it takes a while to load, you may think you can go back to your business for the 15-30s it takes, right? NOPE! While you&#x27;re right in the middle of entering your password or &lt;important command&gt; in an SSH session, the Notes app you opened earlier will happily steal the focus mid-words!
Oh, I was also one of the unlucky guys to come in right during the period of the Touchbar madness: too late to skip it, too early to take a model without it. I have essentially disabled 90% of the stuff, and it shows FN1-FN12 keys by default for all apps. When I press the Fn key, I get brightness&#x2F;audio&#x2F;backlight control, nothing else. Unfortunately the ESC key stays up there, I simply learnt not to use it too much anymore (yes, I know it can be remapped, but seriously, why should I remap a key so useful in the first place?).
Finder is next-to-useless to me, I try to actively avoid it and tab away in the terminal most of the times. Windows Explorer is _SO_ much more logical: the tree and the content are separate panels, and you can navigate the tree much more easily.<p>The CLI applications seem ok, until you actually try to use them. Some are outdated, some are the BSD-y versions or derivations and lack modern features. Linux ones have evolved slightly since 25y ago and are just more ergonomic, e.g: `find . -name &quot;stuff&quot;` vs `find -name &quot;stuff&quot;`, and other small paper cuts. After a couple weeks, I just prepended the brew-installed coreutils&#x2F;findutils PATH and went on with my life.<p>The graphics department is a joke and suffers from NIH syndrome, if you ever want to do even some light gaming on it. My Linux desktop can run AAA Steam games under Sway better than some compiled-for-Mac games I&#x27;ve tried.<p>I believe they did a good job with the filesystem and security-by-design though, those pretty much just work. Perhaps too much of a good job: I tried installing Linux, and thanks to the T2 chip I just gave up in the end - custom-built kernel, special not-so-stable modules, half of the stuff not working. I simply gave up.
I hope the Asahi Linux project will enable a better experience, because as others have said, the hardware is almost unbeatable for the price-point. But the software... ugh. Just not for me.<p>Lately I&#x27;ve been using Ubuntu as daily driver for servers&#x2F;runners, and toyed with the GUI in VMs. For all the bad things that are usually said about Gnome and Canonical, I&#x27;ve grown to appreciate it. Probably the experience is best on recent and open hardware and drivers (Intel&#x2F;AMD), I learned to stay away from nVidia under linux ~10y ago and never looked back.
I also quite like where Pop!_OS is going (COSMIC, Rust), I&#x27;m pretty sure when they release their new DE I&#x27;ll try it out.