A Year Away from Mac OS

I also migrated away from MacOS. I&#x27;m currently running Linux (Slackware). I came to the conclusion that Linux works best for me on desktops, but MacOS works better on laptops. I don&#x27;t use laptops much anymore, I prefer multiple monitors, I don&#x27;t like the way MacOS handles multi-monitors.<p>I ended up buying a couple of used Dell Optiplex 9010&#x27;s for a little more than $100 each. Also picked up a couple of Thinkpad X220&#x27;s also about a $100 each. They all run faster than my Macbook Air.<p>Tried all of the Linux distributions, didn&#x27;t really like any of them (I hated Ubuntu and all the variants). So I installed Slackware, I use a customized FVWM (as in I hacked the source code). Removed things like PulseAudio and NetworkManager. I use a customized version of Gnustep (just the Foundation part) because I need Objective-C. And I wrote a bunch my own UI using Cairo (not a fan of GTK or Qt).<p>I still use MacOS on my Macbook Air, but more as an appliance and not for anything serious. I feel much more comfortable with my computer now (I am no longer dependent on Apple!)

People move around, and that&#x27;s fine. After two decades of mostly using Linux, I just made a leap of faith into the walled garden of Apple, replacing pretty much every Linux and Windows box with either nothing (the best choice!) or a Mac.<p>It&#x27;s just a month in, but I&#x27;m quite happy. Everything works and everything is pretty. I can concentrate on important things, and of course on social media shilling.

&gt; The Dell power connector is a barrel style connector with an LED embedded in it. The LED appears to serve no useful purpose. It’s always on, whether connected or not and doesn’t change colour or turn off when charged.<p>I believe the only use for this LED is to know that the cable is actually plugged to the wall. It&#x27;s probably useless for people who keep their charger plugged all the time, but it&#x27;s very useful for me, a QA engineer with a testing table full of devices and cables, plugged and unplugged :)

I totally understand the shift in thinking that you get when you become immersed in open-source - you realise how it&#x27;s possible for all the elements of your system to play well with each other because it&#x27;s possible for the authors of the software to understand how the kernel&#x2F;OS&#x2F;apis&#x2F;drivers etc. work to a deep level. Once you get used to this, proprietary software starts to take on an appearance of a socially-oblivious actor on your system, needing special attention to keep it fitting-in.<p>You might want to check out the MATE desktop. It&#x27;s a fairly no-nonsense desktop which also looks quite nice (see ubuntuMATE - especially with the arc themes). I keep going back to check out gnome, but while I admire the polish, I find some design decisions to remain a bit grating.

&gt; The thing I dislike about the XPS the most is probably the power connector. I miss the ease of attachment and feedback of MagSafe.<p>Well I still don&#x27;t understand Apple&#x27;s decision to axe MagSafe. It was a huge selling point of MacBooks. While I don&#x27;t miss it sorely, the USB-C plug just gives me no joy.

The gnome JavaScript rant is real. I had to move on to kde plasma because of it. Kde plasma is more powerful but a little cluttered. Gnome has managed to keep things very simplistic. There is a silver lining though, gnome4 has plans to ditch js.

I&#x27;ve been using Gnome for about three days now, and I&#x27;m incredibly irritated with all the minor things.<p>Attempting to drag something from the Activities bar to the desktop results in the whole UI crashing, taking down all applications with it.<p>Trying to set the screen to wait more than 15 minutes to power off required googling up a StackOverflow answer. Why is there not a text input option for this?<p>I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;ll discover something stupid tomorrow.

&gt; but I’ve still seen a couple of the MacBook keyboards fail in their short life. One had a key become sticky and unreliable, the other had its space fall off.<p>The return key on my 2 month old 13&quot; Macbook Pro has already lost its &quot;click&quot;. A couple of times a week I have to reboot it to get sound working again. Plugging external monitors in is a coin toss. I have to carry an external dongle around to use it and the dongle gets noticeably warm when in use: what&#x27;s going on in there?

Wow, I&#x27;m in the exact same situation.<p>Using Xfce and loving it so far, went through every single distro in existence.<p>Cool series!

I&#x27;ve been a UNIX user since 1984, I&#x27;ve been using Apple as my personal hardware since about &#x27;87<p>I jumped from Mac OS due to cost of Apple Hardware, last year. I can&#x27;t justify spending $3K for hardware that if it weighed 1lb more costs $650.<p>I bought a Quad core i7 Gaming laptop, Dual SSD&#x27;s, 1080p display, 32GB of memory for $800, yay Black Friday. My original plan was to make the machine into a hackintosh, but while waiting for the WiFi daughter board to arrive from China I decided to install Linux.<p>I tried a number of Linux variants. I ended up settling on Elementary because it was the only distribution that would consistently &quot;wake up&quot; from hibernation or sleep. Every other distro would cause the machine to hang after hibernation or sleep, I spent a lot of time trying to make other distributions work, but to no avail.<p>I did get the WiFi daughter board and installed it, but I never seem to get around to creating my hackintosh.<p>I&#x27;m completely happy with my Linux laptop. Elementary has a couple of quirks, but nothing that makes me want to switch. The online version of Microsoft office allows me to interact with Office documents, which was always the biggest stumbling block, at least for me when it comes to Linux.

You are crazy —- the good kind of crazy tho —- for moving away from MacOS on your work machine.<p>I’m just a dabbler in all things Linux&#x2F;sysadmin&#x2F;IT who tried going from Windows to Linux as my desktop and did well until it came to dealing with X and graphics drivers for my aging nvidia 660. Sure I got everything up and running just fine with hardly any effort but just basic things like hardware acceleration in browsers and screen recording software were a giant pain in the ass that took entire weekends for me to only half way solve. Still, it taught me a lot more of how Linux has evolved since the dark days of floppy based Slackware and redhat installations. Give the people responsible for Quartz on OS X and the Windows GUI a kiss for me, bless their hearts. The year of Linux on the desktop will come when we can move away from the ancient parts of X and flatpaks are perfected.

&gt; If anyone is interested in a paid project to build an open source command line replacement for my use of MoneyWell in Rust<p>Don&#x27;t know if you&#x27;ve seen this, but as you mentioned a command line accounting system...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ledger-cli.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ledger-cli.org&#x2F;</a><p>It&#x27;s an open source command line accounting system (though it is written in C).

I used Linux (mostly Ubuntu) for somewhere around 10 years on my personal laptops. After using Macs at work for a few years and being frustrated with the music making and photography apps on Linux I made the switch about 3 years ago. There just wasn&#x27;t anything on Linux that had the polish and ease-of-use of Photos.app and GarageBand&#x2F;Logic and when I want to engage in creative hobbies, I want my technology to just work. Has Linux made any progress on alternatives to those?

Consider some alt operating systems. OS&#x2F;2 is still out as econ and Blue Lion. AROS is based on AmigaOS 3.x, Haikuos is a rewrite of Beos, Reactos is a rewrite of Windows XP, and FreeDOS is a 32 bit DOS. You can Google them and try them out.

There&#x27;s something about reading a blog in monospaced font...<p>Enjoyed the article very much. The macOS &#x2F; Linux &#x2F; Windows switcherooney debate has been going on for years with me. The new MBPs make it an easy choice but Linux on the desktop (T470s recently purchased) makes me less productive than macOS on a 2015 MBP.<p>I&#x27;ve switched away from this MBP no less than 4 times to 4 different Linux laptops and each time have come back after roughly 1 month. It sickens me (I work for Red Hat so FOSS is quite deeply ingrained) to work on a Mac every day instead of respecting freedoms but sometimes you just need to get on with it.

I ran FreeBSD on my home and work desktops (and most of my servers) for almost 10 years. I use a Mac these days, but I still have a soft spot for FreeBSD on the desktop.<p>For Dropbox on FreeBSD, I found just installing the CLI (pkg install dropbox-api-command) and then calling &quot;dropbox-api sync&quot; in cron ever 10 minutes was good enough.

This links to an abstract, but I can&#x27;t find the actual blog post.

If only a stable *nix desktop OS could run a webex meeting I&#x27;d switch my devs over. But noooo it&#x27;s a 10 year old java applet.

I&#x27;ve been thinking about doing this too. Great write up.

Wow so much hate for the MacBook