gemini://shit.cx/tech/devenv/2020-11-01-a-macos-linux-hybrid-part-1/

For a few years, I've been increasingly working from home. My work computer, a 2015 15" MacBook Pro has always been too big to travel with, so most of its life has been spent on my desk in the office and I've used my own computer when working from home.

Around mid 2019, I bought a X201 Thinkpad[1] as a replacement for a 2016 12" MacBook that I had been using. The MacBook was too slow and as expected, the X201 was also too slow but it was cheap and provided me the chance to re-evaluate Linux on the desktop after a 10 year absence.

After 6 months using this setup, I realised that I preferred it over my MacBook that was in the office. Returning to Fluxbox[2] was what I loved most about it. I hadn't quite realised how, by using Karabiner, Hammerspoon and TotalSpaces, what I was really doing was turning macOS into Fluxbox. Considering how long I'd been using Fluxbox (and Blackbox before it), it really isn't surprising how much it has shaped my work flow.

In March 2020, work had scheduled my 2015 MacBook Pro for replacement and asked me which Mac I wanted to upgrade to — and yep, they would only buy me a Mac.

I'd grown tired of maintaining two laptops. My dotfiles were kept in in Git, but I still had a bunch of duplication caused by running both X and macOS.

If I were to get another laptop, it needed to be my only machine. It had to be small enough to commute with, yet powerful enough to be able to do my work.

At the time, the 16" MacBook had the scissor-switch keyboard, and 13" still had the butterfly-switch keyboard. I wasn't enthusiastic about owning another butterfly keyboard, but after some reflection, since I almost exclusively use my computer with an external keyboard, trackpad and screen it probably wouldn't matter much if the keyboard sucked. But a less portable machine than my 2015 MacBook would not do.

I settled on a 13" with an i7 and 16GB of RAM and considered the job done, only I couldn't quite shake the feeling that despite preferring Linux, I was giving up on it.

I wondered whether I could forget that macOS was there. Boot straight into a Linux VM running Fluxbox. There were many reasons I didn't like that plan, but the clincher was realising that the VM would have to deal with varying pixel densities when flipping between internal and external screens. I didn't expect that to work well.

I have an acceptable solution for Mac to accept my Fluxbox workflow. Mostly I work within a terminal and 95% of the time I'm only running three apps; iTerm, Firefox and Slack. To shift my terminal apps into a VM would mean that I'm mostly running Linux for what really matters to me. Firefox and Slack are perhaps better on macOS than Linux — I at least wouldn't have to deal with the mess that is fontconfig. But for it to work well, it was crucial that the VM has seamless integration with the host. There needed to be transparent file and clipboard syncing with the host and a way to easily open images and PDF files. I also didn't want to loose the disk speed. I fairly often analyse large (tens of GB) sets of logs for patterns. Slow disks would make that unbearable.

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A Macos/linux Hybrid Laptop - Part 1