Mac OS X is getting worse
Update: Liquid Glass is awful, and the number of bugs in all of Apple's platforms is no longer acceptable. My 2017 iMac Pro was working fine for what I needed. Yes, it's old but for what I do (edit C code in vim, play chess online) it was great. But after installing Tahoe it's noticeably slower, buggier, and plaqued with permission popus and "unexpected error" dialogs. My Apple TV is annoying now, there are too many clicks to do anything, it's slower, the remote stopped working correctly. My watch is slower, battery life worse, again with the UI taking more taps to do what I used to be able to do. Hopefully the post-Allan Dye era will be a renaissance for Apple software like the post-Johny Ive era is for hardware.
Apple's hardware is by far the best on the market, but I feel the software has been deteriorating for some time. Gatekeeper is becoming more and more invasive, and the constant permissions dialogs are getting annoying.
For average users It's probably all for the better, but as a developer I no longer want to use a computer I can't make software (freely) for and share with people.
In addition, I feel I've become too reliant on iCloud and some other overpriced Apple services.
I love the Mac. Some of the most important software I've ever written was for Apple OSs. When Mac OS X first came out it seemed like the perfect OS. I was an Apple and Unix geek so it felt magical.
I Love Linux
I was a Linux desktop user for many years before switching to Mac OS X in 2009.
My dad and I installed a Redhat distribution with kernel version 1.1.0 around 1995, and I've been using Linux on and off ever since. As a kid, I was absolutely fascinated by the idea of open source software and the ability to modify and share code freely.
In college I worked at the OSU Open Source Lab, where I was introduced to ion3. I was instantly hooked on tiling window managers and used ion3 for years. This was the ultimate developer experience.
i use arch btw
After a completely unrelated need arose to have a Linux development environment, I decided to dip my toe in the water. I bought a $300 Acer laptop and installed Arch, and Kali (I work in cybersec).
The funniest thing about the whole process is how awful the pre-loaded Windows experience was. Their beloved OOBE experience is a joke. It took me hours to get the system into a usable state, and it was unusably slow.
Anyway, I missed ion3, tried i3 (it's not for me), and then found Hyprland. It's amazing. I can't believe how amazing it is. It is absolutely perfect for me. I can't impress upon you enough how amazing Hyprland is.
Hyprland did take days to setup, but that's what I wanted. Although, you can get up and running in a matter of minutes, tweaking everything to be just how I wanted it took a while. And (hopefully) I'll keep improving it forever. If you don't want that there are plenty of good alternatives (xfce).
The other thing is, this setup is SO FAST. Even on a budget laptop, everything is snappy and responsive.
A non-exhaustive list of things I use
- Hyprland / Wayland (tiling window manager)
- Ghostty (terminal)
- Neovim (for everything)
- hypr*
- hyprpaper
- hypridle
- hyprlock
- Waybar (status bar)
- Rofi (app launcher)
- Thunderbird (email - I can't find anything better)
- aerc was pretty cool but there is way too much html email these days
- Zen (browser)
- Bitwarden (password manager)
- Thunar (file manager)
- A bunch of hacks to get iCloud CardDav and CalDav working
Anyway,
I'm back on Linux full time now, and I couldn't be happier. It's not just for developers anymore. time.Now().Format("2006") is the year of the Linux desktop.