Impressions of MacOS after Linux

<2021-10-20 Wed>

<-Back

In October 2022 I was convinced to buy a mac. Back then I thought why not, and decided to give it a shot after a year of using Arch + dwm. After the purchase I decided to note the things I've stumbled upon during my first days of usage, and I hope this list might be helpful for someone who's been using budget linux-powered laptops before.

1. Impressions

  • wow, super nice sound system, I have never heard anything like this. The sound is loud and clear. It's 2x times better than on my previous dell laptop.

  • you cannot do "SUPER+1/2/3/4/5" in MacOS in order to switch windows. do not see how this could be implemented.

    UPD: you can. Preferences → Keyboard → Shortcuts → Mission Control → Switch to Desktop

  • shortcut keybinding does not work for me. it just plays strange clicky sound, each time I press the binding. Also it seems that ti would not even work, because the signal often gets handled by a current app.

    noaction.png

    UPD: I managed to add Cmd+Enter shortcut via `Shortcuts` application. It's quity handy when it comes to simple scripts in MacOS + it allows to keybind them.

  • (Super + d) does not work for qutebrowser. it does not close a window. Super + q works as intended, it closes all qutebrowser windows. This reproduces with qtbrowser only.
  • how to delete file from desktop using 'Delete' key? UPD: Cmd+Delete

  • workman (custom keyboard layout) is unavailable when I type password in a locked laptop.

    UPD: using it system-wide should've helped, but as per 1 Sep '22 I'm not aware of any working solution, though I tried many. Only because of this I have one extra English layout. Only for typing password.

  • macos allows to use only limited range of predefined actions for hot corners, no custom app launch, no script, no shortcuts, only garbage…

    nohotcorners.png

  • my eyes… I achived this via Rectangle's "Left half" & "Right half". I'm not aware of the other ways of splitting windows except using custom apps.

    windowsoverlay.png

  • cannot make mpv a default utility for opening mkv files. mac simply allows to use only files located within Applications, Library, Systems, Users directories. mpv is installed in opt/homebrew… and after I copied the binary to the home directory it turned out that I cannot make a regular binary default application… why?

    UPD: it can be fixed by creating an application-wrapper around it, but I'm lazy for this, as it's easy if you don't know what you're doing.

    nodefapp.png

  • dictionary is an outstanding thing, I need to come up with a way how to call it and pass first 50 symbols of buffer to dict. UPD: there's a deep click! it's a killer-feature IMO
  • built-in translation is also great, but I need to choose the languages everytime, e.g. I cannot default to use English + Ukrainian, let's say. UPD: I can, you can reorder dictionaries
  • there is no 'float on top' window mode. it exists, but only in some apps. I guess it's a feature which developers need to implement themselves.
  • in macos you cannot do swapoff -a && swapon -a or sync && echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches. Swap in macOS is not something that regular user is eligible to touch.
  • when you boot macOS, it immediately allocates 2.7GB of RAM, ~17% of all in my laptop. so in fact in my case it is not 16, but rather 13GB of RAM available for personal use. and there is no alternative such as other WM or DE, take it or go away. for comparing purposes when my arch setup boots it consumes around 130MB, which is 3% of 8GB I had on my other Dell laptop.
  • I wanted to install a binary to /usr/local/netdata, run sudo ./installer.sh and after a minute of compilation out of nowhere poped up macos's "Terminal wants access to all your computer" or something like that. Obviously I don't allow such things immediately, so I pressed "no" and after checking what script commands failed I decided that they are fine. And now I realize that I can't find where to enable that permission, because the script just fails and macos doesn't pop up a new request. In "Privacy & Security" I enabled everything I could for Terminal, but it's still the same. "sudo" simply doesn't exist for macos, it's nearly useless, it's just a placeholder for people who think they can do anything using terminal.

1.2. Side notes

  • MacOS is not linux, if though they have a lot of common. "You can do whatever you want with my OS/machine" is not about mac, no you cannot.

  • The best editor is emacs+vim, the best laptop is mac m1+linux. I will switch to Asahi as soon as 1.0.0 version is out.

    UPD: 1.0.0 alpha released! but I need a bit more comfort in my life, so I'm waiting for the perifery (camera, mic, bluetooth) drivers are released.