I’ve found myself using MacOS again for work after a couple years of using nothing but Linux, and I’m a bit surprised at how much I don’t mind it.

I’m not sure if MacOS has gotten better since the last time I used it or if being on a Macbook instead of a Mac Mini makes a difference. Probably both.

Good stuff

I know this is hardware, but hear me out. The trackpad is amazing. I actually feel very little need for a mouse for the first time using a laptop, especially with all the touchpad gestures MacOS has and how annoying I found using a mouse the last time I was using MacOS.

I turned on something they’re calling “stage manager”, which shrinks down all your inactive applications and puts them in a column off to the side for an easy overview. It took a little time to get used to but I’ve found that it complements my vertical tab Firefox setup very well. It’s sort of like vertical tabs for the desktop.

While not super common, I found a couple really easy to get to power user settings. I was able to easily rebind my caps lock key to escape and the stupid globe/function key to control since it’s where the left control should be anyway.

Weird stuff

I get the impression that whoever’s designing this OS has a mild hatred for people who use multiple monitors. When full screening a window on one monitor, it completely hides the menu bar on the other for instance.

I also feel like MacOS doesn’t have a very strong vision of how you’re meant to use it. There’s lots of features and workflows that are good on their own, like “stage manager” and “mission control”, but they don’t feel all that tightly integrated into the desktop environment and sometimes have overlapping use cases. It’s almost the same feeling as using Gnome with several different third party extensions on top of it. It’s not bad at all but just doesn’t feel as cohesive as I expected.

So basically exactly what you’d expect from switching OSes

Weird but not bad. Just some new stuff to get used to. I’ll miss some of my Linux tools (luckily a lot of them are easy to use on Mac too) but that’s what my personal computer is for.