Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu (2020)

I quit using Macs a long time ago because I find I have to spend way too much time configuring them and adapting to the workflow, but between Windows and Linux I find devices work pretty much the same. If anything Linux has a better success rate, things "just work." On Windows it seems like every single time I plug in a mouse Windows starts "installing drivers." Even though it has the drivers. Usually "installing drivers" seems like it's a nothing but sometimes it actually seems to be downloading things and installing them while the PnP mouse already should work.

Definitely, as a rule plugging things into Windows it can take 10-15 seconds to pick up while Linux works much faster on average.

* BetterSnapTool for window snapping and maximization (although I prefer Moom for better control).

* Afloat to force a particular window to always be on top.

* TinkerTool to mess with various other settings.

Sure, these may not be “built-in” as first party capabilities, but Apple has a history of slowly bringing such capabilities into the OS over time. Flux (for altering screen tint at night time) became standard. So did TextExpander (for auto-expanding abbreviations).

No, it doesn't. We seem to have forgotten that there are more general ways to think about software and engineering and math and the world.

You can just design a system that is guaranteed to work fine:

- regardless of where widget X is positioned

- regardless of what font and font size (from an interval) and color is selected by the user for a certain UI components

- ...and you can have all UI on all apps on the whole computer be customizable in the same way without having to write any (zero!) extra lines of code by just inheriting functionality for some common components

- etc.

You don't have to just dumbly test all scenarios to guarantee sane global behaviors of systems.

And you don't get the burden of maintaining the "test cases for all possible scenarios" because you just don't write those tests in the beginning, they are useless in a well behaved system that follows LAWS and properly preserves INVARIANTS and just burn money through their tests-maintainance costs! (Like lots/some of pre-web systems actually were!)

We've now built for ourselves a crazy computing world where there are no longer stable (across years and decades) contracts, laws and invariants in software, so we have to defensively code and over-test everything! We could've had-the-cake-and-eaten-it too if we would've just put the effort of building more solid software foundations for ourselves, but instead we're torturing ourselves building Electron web apps on desktops in languages with lacking or handicaped type systems and run them on operating systems that offer no sane components with contractually guaranteed interfaces...

...imagine if physics worked like that, you'd have to re-test the laws of physics every time you wanted to build a house because the laws could vary by neighbourhood and not even basic invariants like the conservation of energy were guaranteed to hold. Oh, you can't just ask for more than a 1-room rectangular uncostumizable house of standard size, because properly testing anything else doesn't crash on you in our universe with non-uniform physics is just too expensive! Just get used with you sensible defaults citizen, stop questioning the party and the world!

Oh yeah I just plugged a mouse into a work Mac recently and was super confused at this. Yes I’ve gotten used to natural scrolling on touchpads by now, but no that doesn’t mean I want it on a scroll wheel!

Things I can do on macOS that I can't do on Ubuntu:

- Buy a laptop, plug it in to my corporate network, and get to work in fifteen minutes.

- Buy a laptop, hand it to a non-programmer, and rest easy knowing they will never ever ever need to open the terminal

- use a CAC

- get more than eight hours of battery life on a laptop