Switching from Apple to Lenovo

I, personally, do not find macOS to be such a huge UI win that I will absolutely not settle for anything a jot or tittle less. Especially now. Work makes me use a Mac, and while the UI is nice, recent macOS is much more full of jank and bugs that ruin the experience.

I grew up on old-school 90s Linux, where part of the fun was deciding which program you wanted to compile from source to accomplish a given task. So I may be biased... but I gave my girlfriend, a long time Apple user, an old laptop off of which I'd scraped Windows and put kubuntu on instead. She loves it.

Oh, and as for build quality, ThinkPad > Mac. Recent x86 Macs are glued-together pieces of shit that are optimized for being thin and light at the cost of all other concerns. They do not have adequate cooling, and when heat accumulates it has a tendency to break down the glue holding the system together.

I haven't evaluated the X1 Carbon, but my T450s is still screwed together. It's plenty thicc, but actually quite light in comparison to its size. It can also take a beating.

I use a mac for my main...but the office has to run some old activex windows program. We managed to snag a few T490s on sale, which wasn't bad. But basically we wiped the drive with a fresh install, and it seems to work ok for people who were working on some decrepit Dells before upgrading. Screen and trackpad setup really sucks. I've gone to keeping the program alive on my NUC desktop and RDP'ing in from my mac...

I've always kept both. For family members, they all use Macbook Airs. For me, I have the 2018 MacBook Pro. I also use a Lenovo Carbon X1 and a Dell XPS15. Apple kills the Dell in build quality. The X1C is a fantastic build quality, and the lightest of the 3. But, it does feel like a laptop from 10 years ago. The black with red highlights makes it feel like an AS/400. I can't knock the machine though. It's a solid performer.

All this said, I have no idea what the Windows experience is on any of these machines. I can't imagine I'd want to try it. ArchLinux with Gnome works well enough for me as a macOS replacement. I do most work in a Terminal and Web browser, so it feels like almost any environment would do.

I have one of each (Windows, Linux, Mac). On the whole, I don't find any dramatically superior.

PC laptops do have a race-to-the-bottom. Even top-of-the-line laptops are luck-of-the-draw. Lenovo is far more scammy than IBM ThinkPads of the golden age. I think the idea is you need to be 5% better than the competition to control the high-end market, and they cut quality until they hit that. Apple quality is much more consistent.

But with PCs, although really good laptops don't exist, you can build a perfectly fine desktop.

Windows has become surprisingly usable with WSL. It's also actually more stable than Linux or MacOS now. MacOS periodically stalls out using all CPU until my mouse pointer locks up, for reasons I can't fathom. Linux runs into oddball issues with complex device setups. Windows just works for me.

On the other hand, Windows is trying to become a SaaS, and seems to collect a ton of data, do hostile updates, and really wants to show me ads. For now, I've disabled all of that, but it's gotten harder to do so. If it goes further that direction, it might stop to be usable.

Linux has been going down the tubes the past few decades, but isn't bad yet. Complexity has grown, and stability has fallen, but it's still simpler than MacOS or Windows. I can understand and tweak the system. I'd never e.g. run a server on MacOS or Windows. Too much stuff going on behind the scenes.

On the whole, I find myself gravitating towards:

* Linux for software engineering, math, servers, or similar -- places where I do things by hand and want a lot of control.

* Windows for video conferencing, video editing, graphic design, and similar (which is odd, since this is Mac's classic strength, but I'm finding Windows to work better now).

* MacOS for general-purpose computing (e.g. writing documents, making a presentation, or browsing the web). It excels at normal things.

so reproducible on the metal or on a VM on the host OS? I have a very little skin in the game but always interested in other peoples takes

(I am trying to relaunch github.com/mikadosoftware/workstation - basically I want to get ssh -X working for wayland on fedora)