Daily-driving a Mac, one year later

I don’t know why HiDPI support is still so flakey, especially so with multi-monitor setups. Sometimes apps just work, and other times the UI is comically small or oversized. The only *nix adjacent OS I’ve ever seen address this ChromeOS and MacOS.

Sleeping, hibernation, deep snoozing or whatever the term is — I can’t trust a single Linux distro to not drain a laptop battery dry while the lid is closed. I’ve tried all the tricks and there’s always a catch, usually me opening the laptop to a kernel panic, ironically with 1% battery left and the processor underclocked to Celeron speeds.

Lastly and most certainly not least, the trackpad support. “Synaptics” is a synonym for unpleasant, bumbling, and janky. Granted, Windows laptops usually don’t do much better, but these clueless drivers make large trackpads basically unusable. True palm rejection seems to remain illusive, partially fixed with like dead zones, keypress timeouts, and other bandaids. And please don’t bring up Bill Harding. He’s doing his best, but the fact is that one single person carrying this responsibility speaks volumes for how much the community values this experience.

And yes, I’m aware that these things don’t just happen. I’m just saying what’s wrong. I can only send so many pull requests before giving up and buying a MacBook.

Edit:Two more things. Distros need to pick some better branding. Names like Ubuntu, Pop_OS, Elementary… It’s impossible for regular people to understand these things. And get rid of Tux on the boot screen. A penguin with a gut is unpleasant to look at and makes the whole OS seem like a niche interest for computer nerd tropes of the 90s.

Whether it's Netflix, games, Office/Photoshop, obscure drivers, whatever... I can just run an app and expect it to work, and if it doesn't, it's not my problem. I'll wait a while and someone else will fix it.

I don't have to tweak obscure config files or apply patches or sideload package manager repos.

MacOS, and to a much lesser extent, Windows, mostly stay out of the way and and let my apps and sites take center stage. Linux fails that basic test most of the time, favoring purity of ideology over basic user needs. When I have to jump through hoops to get some trivial device working or an app that takes 3 seconds to install on any other OS, that doesn't say to me "this is a great operating system, I can write my own hack to fix this", it says to me "this still isn't ready, two decades later".

I use Linux at work all the time and it's a great workhorse, but at home, I don't want an operating system whose primary selling point is that it requires even more of my time.