Hey, folks,
My laptop broke the other day, and I need a replacement asap. But here's the rub: I despise windows. I've been a full time fedora user on my main device for a decade now, and I run Ubuntu on my desktop that I rarely touch because it's ooooold. I am not a techy person. At all. I'm an idiot, actually. I use Linux because it's cheaper, it keeps my aging hardware alive longer, and because politically I align pretty well with the idea of FOSS. And because I absolutely hate windows. I don't even like KDE, because it reminds me of windows. Cinnamon? Too much like windows! Lol. I love my workflow in gnome, I love that it's shiny and pretty and looks nice. And for the most part, I'm a browser based user. I rarely have cause to do much outside of the browser, except for sail the seas for some audiobooks. Even my papers for school are written in Google docs.
But also, on my desktop or a secondary device, I don't mind having to fiddle with things and get them working, I enjoy it. It makes me feel like I have actual tech skills when I absolutely do not. But on the device I use for school I just want something that works and I never have to think about. I feel like a traitor to the cause even considering it, but I think I want to get a used m1 air. I've never used a Mac before, though. I used an iPhone once, for about 10-15 minutes, and I hated it. But, like, of course I did. It was completely different, and incapable of doing the thing I wanted it to do.
How painful is the Linux to Mac transition? If I'm using an android phone, an Ubuntu desktop, and a MacBook, how awful is everything going to be to switch between devices? Am I going to regret this purchase, or, worse yet, become an apple fan boy and abandon my glorious FOSS devices forever?
Please assist
I’m a huge fan of both Apple and Linux but what finally helped me to understand the difference was using something closer to UNIX, in my case FreeBSD.
Why? Because I’d always heard that modern macOS is based on UNIX (even partially on old FreeBSD) but the difference between UNIX and Linux never “clicked” until I explored UNIX on its own.
Modern macOS sets its default shell these days to
zshbut I believe still ships an oldbash. Actually, a lot of the userland utilities are going to be old and out of date. You’ll notice quirks with them (compared to Linux) that often comes from its background in UNIX.Personally I use a TON of packages from Linux that have been ported to macOS via Homebrew as do many developers (like me) and users.
All this is to say that under the shiny proprietary Apple GUI there is some familiarity with Linux but at the cost of more UNIX-like behavior (albeit unique even among UNIXes).
MacOS ships many outdated GNU utils intentionally for no actual reason other apple sucks
MacOS may have a POSIX certification but hasn't caught up and never will to new revisions of POSIX that FreeBSD and Liux distros comply with it
Many of GNUism of Linux have inspired changes in POSIX and BSDs, changes that MacOS ignores
Thank you for replying! Sadly, I did not stress the part about me being an idiot enough. I understood some of those words! Mainly in the last paragraph. Haha
I was an MS-DOS -> Unix -> Linux -> windows -> Linux -> windows -> macOS user (who still uses Linux, but only on my Steam deck).
I love macOS and am sad it took me this many years to convert (I got my MacBook Air in 2018) and I always hated when I had to go back to my windows laptop. I was glad when the windows install died and I installed Linux on it for my wife to game.
When I first switched to macOS I still had an android. I would connect it to the air via Bluetooth to send files between the two. Now I would probably use proton drive, or my uGreen NAS.
As had been mentioned control vs cmd takes getting used to. For me it has been harder going back to ctrl on Linux than it was getting into cmd on Mac. My keychron keyboard has physical Mac keys and all of the keys can be remapped, so it is set up to feel close to my MacBook's key placement.
I love my MacBook Pro, but miss my MacBook Air. I think the pro is ~4 times as heavy.