So, for pretty much all my life I’ve used Windows computers, and ever since 2016 pretty much used Linux full time. I used Linux as far back as 2011, with Ubuntu 11.10 being my first distro, however 2016 was when I truly hit my Linux stride. Since then, the standard UNIX-y way of doing things has become permanently ingrained in how I work. Before switching to Linux, I used Visual Studio and Code::Blocks, and after I primarily used the command line. I also switched to using debuggers like gdb which I found much easier to script and run batch tests, and also switched to using programs like git for version control, which was always really clunky to use on Windows. Basically, using Linux taught me that Windows is a terrible development environment for basically anyone, and especially if you intend on making cross platform applications.
Fast forward to now. I’ve been using Linux in some capacity for over a decade at this point, and I still really like it. Coming from Ubuntu 11.10, we were still using Sys-V Init back then, can you believe that. And if Wi-Fi worked out of the box, you had basically just won the lottery jackpot. I still very much like Linux, and like the direction Linux is going. But with all of that being said, I decided that the time was right to try out Apple and their MacOS. Soon, I am moving to a new apartment, and one problem with that is I will be forced to severely downsize what I own. One unfortunate reality is I can’t bring my massive computer setup with me, it is just simply too large. I really needed to get a laptop, and while I was looking at buying a thinkpad (like I already own and use for school), I decided to spend the extra $1000 and buy an M1 pro Macbook Pro 14 inch.
My first impressions of the computer were very good. The screen particularly blew me away. Usually I tend to be the kind of person who spouts things like “Screen doesn’t matter” and “If I want a high resolution screen I’d buy a TV”, however, I work a lot with CJK Language, or Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. CJK languages use very fine symbols, which when rendered at lower font resolutions makes them pretty much unreadable, or at the very least heavily pixelated. Thanks to Apple somehow cramming something like a 2k display into a 14 inch laptop, CJK fonts are incredibly clear, and I can already feel myself never being able to go back to even just a 1080p screen for CJK. Along side the screen, everything felt really snappy. Animations lasted just long enough to be known, but not too long to feel sluggish. Everything seemed to run pretty fast. Overall the thing I was most surprised by was the lack of screen tearing and other Linux-y things I come to expect with the UNIX-y base. I unfortunately had to switch from GNOME/Wayland back to MATE/X.org recently as Debian broke the sid GNOME packages. Wayland was really nice, but ever since the breakage, I have been struggling to get MATE to run without screen tearing without making the entire desktop lag horribly (thanks picom). Overall though, from a visual perspective, MacOS blew me away.
Another unexpected win from MacOS was customization. I had pretty much always been told (by people who don’t themselves own Macs or use MacOS) that Apple locks everything down, so you experience the operating system the way they intended. And while this is true of things like the overall application theme, or the general feel of the desktop and OS, this is not the case for the applications included. I was very angry that Finder kept opening the “Recents” menu when I would open it. To open the Home folder, I would have to navigate to the menu and physically click “Go > Home Folder”, which was a massive pain, especially when I would then have to navigate into further folders from my Home folder. I thought this was going to be the moment I became one of those cynical Apple users where I convince myself that my purchase was justified and “I just have to live with these few extra steps”. Didn’t help as well that I could not for the life of me find any way to set Finder to default to the Home folder anywhere on DuckDuckGo, so I thought I was completely out of luck. However after just deciding to check the preferences page, I found not only could I set Finder to open to the Home folder, but I could add the Home folder to the side bar, and even add the hard drive shortcut to the desktop like in OSX of old. To be honest, I had been trained by general consensus that Apple preferences do basically nothing, but to my surprise, I found everything I had wanted. Considering you cant even set this on GNOME (at least without touching dconf), that’s incredible. Along with this as well, I was pleasantly surprised to find I could exclude the terminal from all the security checks that MacOS does to applications running. Normally this would be totally advised against, since it completely undermines security, but for the terminal, I am mostly only running applications I built from source, and thusly audited, so doing this stopped the annoying “Do you trust this application” popups which I also saw non Mac users complaining about.
So, if you have had no experience with Apple, I would say go out to the nearest Apple store and give it a try. Or you can emulate it on Linux using OSX-KVM if you don’t want to go out or buy anything. I was very surprised with how good Mac OS was in my experience, as well as Apple hardware. Does it justify the price? That’s up to everyone to decide. However I am very happy with my purchase at least at this time. I will make sure to update if anything changes with my opinion on it. Also just a side not, Apple gives some pretty great discounts for students, and they can’t really even prove that you are a student, so if you look young you can probably pull one off.
Anyway, I also bought an iPhone SE 2020 recently as well, but that’s an entirely different story for another day. I’ll probably write another blog post about it (once I’m done with my super massive blog project I’ve been working on for a week at this point). So stay tuned for that.