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Comment by gigatexal | Hacker News Reader

I did this: installed Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and i3 (specifically regolith’s take on i3 using their PPA). (Regolith-Linux.org)

I’m never going back to MacOS for work but will buy an ARM Mac for personal as I’m still very much in the ecosystem.

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Any thoughts on what you love and miss about the switch? I haven't tried out i3 yet (I need to get a little more comfortable with my backups before I swing window managers around - I've been burned before!)

I think I'll definitely buy an ARM Mac (or an iPad) for media and other things, and will still recommend it to friends and family once they're done with the transition, if all goes well. The polish around the Mac ecosystem is still unmatched, if you color within the lines.

There’s definitely something to be said about the it-just-works nature of macOS. But I primarily use docker and Linux and while I love brew I want an OS with a first party package manager (and honestly what is a Linux distribution without a package manager?). I also hate that in the Mac docker requires a VM and running docker on my Mac causes my laptop to turn into a rocket ship. And honestly I just love a true tiling manager. Basically it’s just a tool for me that I seem to gravitate to and for productivity I’m all in on Linux.

That's one of the biggest reasons I left - docker. Windows is inching closer with WSL and Windows Terminal, so I might check it out in a year or so once it's stabilized. But needing to run a VM with impossible image build times (forget about running minikube) is definitely something I don't miss anymore.

You can pay for a tiling manager on the Mac, but it's definitely not as good as the alternative.

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