Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop

Didn't know them, thanks for the link!

This reminds me of the h3h3 video of a student dropping out of college because they couldn't install their Verizon CD on Ubuntu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRWrmT0ovPE

Hello, author here.

I knew that if this got posted to HN I'd need to explain myself more :)

To address some of the top comments:

- I clarified now in the article that the "Linux Laptop" is a Dell XPS 13" Developer Edition, which is marketed indeed as a Linux laptop, and the Ubuntu is marketed as "Ubuntu Dell".

However, this is missing the forest for the trees, because only a couple of the issues I mentioned were related to hardware. The main point of the article is software polish, not hardware compatibility. On the previous article where I decide which laptop to use I already mention that it's not an issue nowadays: https://cfenollosa.com/blog/how-i-moved-my-setup-from-a-mac-...

- What is a power user? Indeed, the core point of the article. I tried to be as detailed as possible with my requirements. Saying it is "a bunch of custom keyboard shortcuts" is a straw man.

- apt-get vs other package managers. I've used rpm/yum, emerge, pkg_add, brew, and port. I found that apt-get is very fast and reliable. brew is embarrassingly slow and doesn't apply important changes to config files, just drops you a notice asking the user to do it.

- The Mac also sucks. Yes indeed! That is why I ditched it for six months!

- What about Windows? Well, I install Windows 10 regularly for other members of my team. I hate it. Not only you have to work around the software, you have to actively fight AGAINST the system and its dark patterns. Preinstalled crap, "fake" requiring a Live.com user for a local account, constant and unexpected reboots, telemetry... sorry, it's not for me.

- Do you use Linux on your servers? Yes, indeed. Debian as base, then containers with Void.

- Didn't you expect you'd need to change your workflow? Sure, that is why I stayed with Linux for six months and not two weeks. I gave myself time.

By the way I have been using Linux non-stop since 1999, and 7 years as my only system. I know the Linux-isms

- Just do [the opposite of my requirements]. I wish!

- How can you like Nautilus? I just said it's better than the Finder.

- This is an article aimed at Mac users who are considering a migration to Linux in hope of a more polished system. If you've never used a Mac, you probably can't relate because you don't know what you're missing (happened to me before I tried a Mac!)

I'll hang around to answer more questions, thanks for all your feedback!

I'll be the devil's advocate even though I agree with you partially and I personally prefer Linux, both for practical and philosophical reasons. However, I use a Linux laptop privately and macOS for work, so I think by now I understand both systems a little bit.

For automating tasks on macOS you can look at something like hammerspoon which is really cool (though I mostly use it to modify some of the macOS keybindings which I find ridiculous) [1].

Finder is crap, I agree. But then again, I'm mostly in the terminal, so I don't care much. I would however complain that the default terminal on macOS is really not very good and I always install iTerm2... most Linux distros seem to have a better terminal pre-installed.

Package manager is better on Linux for system packages, applications, etc. (in fact, such a thing doesn't really exist on macOS, save for maybe homebrew cask, but that has problems). However, dev packages are tricky on Linux, too. Generally, for dev packages I might want to have a) a very specific (and often the latest) version of something, and b) often multiple versions installed separately. Additionally, on most Linux distros you can't install without root. On a Linux machine, I mostly have to install such tools in addition to my package managed libraries and apps, on macOS I can typically just "brew install rbenv" or so (though homebrew has its own share of problems).

In general I would say that macOS makes it slightly easier to do things sort-of reasonably well for default flows but can break down quickly once you want something more custom. With Linux, while it has become a lot (!) better in the last 15 years or so, I still occasionally need to debug some audio problem or so. The upside is that problems on Linux are generally solvable (although, in some instances it can be hard to figure out exactly how). If your macOS does something that is weird or buggy (e.g.: before the update to big sur I had the annoying issue that my system would go into DND mode after every restart, which is really not good if you don't want to miss notifications), then you're out of luck and there's nothing you can do.

[1]: https://www.hammerspoon.org/

Ahh interesting point. Somebody needs to make their next 20% project a gmail labs extension that gives a simple annotate option to images in mail. It would probably be a sleeper hit that gets more use than 90% of other gmail features.