gemini://mederle.de/b/24-on-macos.gmi

ISO certification at my workplace forced me, after 6 happy years on Ubuntu, to either switch to a Mac or a Windows notebook.

I'd been a Mac user since MacOS 10.2 Jaguar. Back then, I switched from Linux to Mac OS and was happy to have a Unix environment with a great GUI. At my Uni, many of the staff were still using NeXTSTEP, and Mac OS X had inherited a lot of NeXT DNA. I'd be using Mac OS for a good 15 years from then on. I think it peaked somewhere between Tiger and Snow Leopard and went down in terms of power user appeal afterwards. Apple's nail in the coffin for me was the elimination of the hardware ESC key on their notebooks, plus the horrible keyboards they introduced. I gave Linux another go, settled for Fedora with KDE spin on my private machine, and was a happy camper.

I maintain that at this point in time, KDE Plasma has both Windows and Mac OS beat in terms of UX. My desktop looks like a mix of both with the best features of each. I got my Unicomp PC122 battleship keyboard to work with all of its keys, many of them bound to special functions that ease my everyday use. My PowerMate of old Apple times works fine as a huge mic mute/speaker volume button. There are apps like Ocenaudio or Transcribe do aid with guitar playing and recording. I can control MIDI devices with Emacs. And, most of all: I've configured this once years ago, and it just works. Fedora updates are simple and solid. And the Framework notebook this all runs on is future-proof and extensible.

Now on to this Macbook I got for work. The numbers are stunning. 32 GB of RAM, 1 TB SSD, 16 inch retina display, 18 CPU and 30 GPU cores, super snappy and doesn't even get warm. 20 hours of battery runtime. The keyboard is nice enough if too light to the touch for my taste. Great trackpad. During the first couple of hours, I was impressed. Then I attached it to my docking station.

The battleship works, but only the main keys und function keys up to 15. On Linux, I used xbindkeys to use F13-18 for getting applications to the foreground, F24 to open a new terminal, Pause to close tabs, Help to open a new tab, I have a working Redo key for Emacs, and so on. With the Mac, I needed to get Karabiner and am looking at many hours of configuration. The PowerMate, originally a product for Apple computers? There's an outdated driver (Rosetta!) that works only half way. Focus follows mouse with sloppy focus? Seems impossible. My external 30 inch non-retina display shows blurry fonts. The Elecom Huge Trackball also needs an app to be configured. On Linux, one xmodmap line was all that was needed to remap the buttons.

VPN connection needs an app from the vendor that currently doesn't work. OpenConnect on Linux I had to configure once to do two-factor, no vendor app needed. The antivirus scanner I'm forced to install doesn't work either. Every non App store app needs several confirmations to be allowed to run. My arm hurts from all the clicking.

On the upside, Emacs 29.1 is running, and I've installed ports rather than brew for my Unix tools and Common Lisp needs. I'll get it to a usable state, but I must say that I'm loathe of all the setup I have to do just to get in the general direction of the workflows I had on Linux. And where, on Linux, configuration mostly requires to read the documentation and add some lines of config, or do a quick installation with one command, on Mac OS I'm once again hunting for apps, many of them with a price tag attached, to simply enable features Linux offers out of the box.

All things combined, I guess I spend about twenty hours setting up the Mac. I have deeply ingrained finger memory and need functionality where I'm used to. And I got there. Karabiner is great, and other than on Linux where I have to execute small scripts to remap the keyboard when unplugging from the docking station, I always have the right keyboard setup now. The Mac also remembers settings and placements very well between undocking/docking. KDE has come a long way there, but Mac OS has it beat. And it must, because I have to unplug the Mac to send it to sleep. It won't when attached.

The PowerMate, which I originally got for a PowerBook, is not very usable anymore, though. The outdated driver of the defunct company works so-so. The open source driver for Linux works great.

And the Mac is unable to adjust the volume of my external speakers, which has me flabbergasted. Apparently I could shell out 80 Euros for an app and create an elaborate MIDI setup (wtf) to get the volume control to work. I placed the Volume control of the speaker system within arm's reach instead.

Emacs works great, even though its one-threadedness shows that single processes on the M2 CPU seem to run more slowly than on Intel. Not a big deal 95% of the time, though.

One of the most important things for the way I work is sloppy focus, such that I can have a Teams session in front and make notes into a partially hidden Emacs frame. It is a super useful way of working with different applications at the same time, and I can do that now with the help of AutoRaise. Does not work quite as well as on Linux, but well enough to be very usable.

StrongBox is slightly superior to KeePassXC, and Royal TSX is better than Remmina, but not as much that I would pay for each of them if the alternatives weren't abysmal. Lots of things one can safely take for granted on Linux require payment on the Mac. I've been donating to various open source projects in the past. Being forced to pay for things that should be standard on a modern operating system does not sit well with me.

Still, I find myself wanting to work with the machine. I'm efficient with it, it is no longer in the way, and it is beautiful.

Ugh, a Mac

Two Weeks Later