macOS Setup after 15 Years of Linux | Hacker News Reader

macOS Setup after 15 Years of Linux

hookrace.net

347 pointsdef-395 comments

I really tried to like macOS for an entire year. I used Yabai[1] as tilling window manager which is much better than Amethyst mentioned in the article. I also wrote my own compose key tool macos-compose[2] and rofi-like clone choosem[3] (eventually bought into Alfred).

Yet with all of this effort I still went back to linux after a year (Arch with Qtile and Gnome). What really killed macos for me was the fact that animations could not be disabled entirely and everything felt like it's behind several ms of a delay. I work on the move so I don't have the luxury of multi-screen setup so switching between programs, workspaces and windows is the most important part of my workflow - it just drove me nuts.

Now I run simple Lenovo yoga laptop with arch+qtile+gnome and honestly, my performance at work at least doubled. That's my anecdote anyway.

1 - https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

2 - https://github.com/Granitosaurus/macos-compose

3 - https://github.com/Granitosaurus/choosem

Well, if you're very opinionated regarding your setup, trying to force macOS into your ways won't work, macOS is great and very easy to use and gives you zero problems but you have to adapt to it. I've also moved after many years of linux and I could not be happier. I like easy and I like to focus on getting my actual work done, I got tired of spending weeks personalizing stuff, dealing with drivers issues, tuning the trackpad, adjusting applications to work with different dpi screens, etc, etc. For me it was a never ending war and a lot of time wasted.

Exactly the same story here.

It’s pretty bad when you show everyone enthusiastically that when you open your MacBook it wakes up immediately and actually works. They think you’re insane rather than a former Linux user who has programmed irrational fear that the AMD mobile GPU drivers are going to cause a panic.

Same story here, and little anecdote: In a pure mac shop we had a guy apply and he brought his Linux notebook and 5mins into the interview he started hating on hiw bad macos is. Before he had to show some of his work in his linux notebook we had a little coffebreak, after we came back somehow LUKS crashed he wasn’t able to boot the system or restore the disk. We gave him a USB Stick and 3hrs to solve it or admit that he was wrong about bashing macos.

But is it faster? And does it actually work?

I might be unlucky, but I can't count on my two hands how many times did my 2019 MacBook Pro become unresponsive (and occasionally it restarted itself... After being unresponsive for 10 minutes). It's a work laptop and there is some admin software on it (afaik), so that might influence my experience... But after a year of use, I still sometimes feel the need to defenestrate it...

My favorite bit is that after a restart sometimes it gives me a screen where I can't change the keyboard layout.. and I can't type my password because of the special characters I use. So, I just restart again and hope I get a login screen with the keyboard layout change possible. (And yes I have changed the default layout multiple times, but it always switches back to some other default)

Yes, it's like being mad that your salmon doesn't taste like tuna, even though you clearly chose it at the market.

> Well, if you're very opinionated regarding your setup, trying to force macOS into your ways won't work

Huh, they said they really tried to like macOS for an entire year ...

How is it "trying to like it" when you try to replace everything and re arrange the entire OS to your liking?

I think they just tried to convert it to Linux for 1 year and that didn't work, which as I said, that's expected, it might not be the OS for you and that's fine. We're lucky we have options, and we are all not the same.

As I said in the comments, macos is for people that can accept the trade offs, that can adapt to a more rigid and propietary system in exchange for something that just works and allows you to focus on your actual work, and not on tuning your computer as if it was a hobbies sports car.

Again, nothing wrong with that, I've been like that in the past. Now I just prefer things that just work and I don't have to waste my time maintaining. We are all not the same, thanks God.

10 years ago I bought Macbook Air to install and run Arch Linux on it. Since at that time Linus Torvalds was also using Macbooks and they were on Intel platform, it had all the drivers available.

Then in 2014 I was given the next Macbook Pro at work, and that did not support Linux anymore. Then I got upgraded version in 2019, and that one has even worse support.

During that time I had to get used to macOS, but I simply could not. Those animations or something else make it feel so slow in comparison to Linux desktop.

Then once pandemic hit and I started working from home, I could use my Linux desktop for work. It feels so much better. I am not sure why macOS feels so sluggish in comparison.

Now I am hoping for Asahi Linux to support the new M1 Macbooks well enough to use them on a daily basis, but not sure if it will ever happen. I think the main thing that is missing is the GPU driver. I have not yet seen a good community build open source GPU driver that has decent performance.

> Then in 2014 I was given the next Macbook Pro at work, and that did not support Linux anymore.

interesting, the MBP 2014 is what I will forever remember as "one of the best computer I ran linux on". With archlinux almost everything worked from the very beginning except the webcam driver, and much faster than macOS. It just took some time for Chrome and Firefox to adapt to Retina because those weren't following Xft.dpi system property, but otherwise...

If I remember correctly, back in 2014 it lacked wifi and audio drivers, and the hidpi support on Linux was the main deal breaker.

I have also installed Linux on my work T2 2019 MBP, and it is looking much better but still rough around the edges and you can't use mainline kernel. At least hidpi on wayland works nicely, though not all of the apps do.

is it actually necessary, if you're using it for work (assuming you don't do anything heavily gpu dependent)? Supposedly asahi works pretty well even with just a framebuffer, being powered entirely by the CPU. I probably wouldn't want to run that, but even an inefficient gpu driver should probably be fine for office type work, as long as it's not glitchy, right?

Will see how it goes. I remember how AMD open source driver started more than 10 years ago. It was not a pleasant experience on my machine. Even now on AMD APU box that I use for gaming - GPU driver crashes at least once a month.

I hope that people behind Asahi will have better luck. :)

If you don't like the animations why not turn them off?

It's incredible how sluggish animations can make a OS feel.

The first thing I do when I get a new Android phone is enabling the developer options and turning off all animations. The phone feels a lot faster then, especially switching apps.

I have more than one friend who I showed this and they suddenly didn't feel the need to replace their phone with a newer, faster one.

You can disable them also from Accessibility

Thank you for this, my phone feels 2x faster now!

I have found this setting to break some apps (e.g. Spotify, my bank's app) though.

Same here. Would be nice to be able to do it on an app-by-app basis, or add exceptions.

Yeah, same here. I'm now on an AMD X13 gen 2 and it's fantastic. I can't get temp to go past 68 degrees even with all 8x2 cores at 100% on performance profile. Fan is also completely silent and only goes on with sustained usage. Why deal with the pain of a poor WM/DE (OS X) and all the arm nonsense when you can get excellent thermals and performance w/ a Linux laptop.

Interesting. I switched to an AMD laptop for over half a year (ThinkPad T14 AMD). And I went back to a MacBook and convinced me not to go back to Linux on a laptop for at least half a decade.

Battery life was terrible compared to a Mac (6 hours if I was lucky, barely 4 hours when in video meetings). S3 Suspend worked badly, the battery would drain very quickly. Devices would often not come back after wake (particularly the trackpad). During video meetings, the fans would go into full blast (though they were more quiet than most non-M1 laptops). Noise cancellation was quite bad on Linux (ok-ish in Windows). Lenovo’s own USB-C dock wouldn’t work with 4k@60Hz (works with Windows, Linux misconfigures the lanes and didn’t use HBR3).

It was one of the models that was certified for Linux (IIRC even Fedora). But the whole experience was miserable. I bought an M1 MacBook and didn’t look back.

Fair enough - I think there were a lot of teething issues with the recent amd laptops due to lack of kernel support and some bugs in the s3 bios implementation. I probably would have been similarly frustrated if I bought 9 months ago.

Fortunately the bios bugs are fixed and the latest kernel (5.15.11) supports s3 pretty flawlessly so far, although I was using traditional suspend before that without issue. I haven’t had any other issues and has been stable over the last month of usage. Temps and performance are great and around 9-10 hrs battery life. So I think it's worth buying now.

Same story with my AMD based T495. It was horrible. I also have an M1 MacBook Air now.

I lost count the amount of times it’d panic or something would break when I needed it. The same laptop was rock solid running windows and my daughter has it now as her daily driver.

t14s here (ubuntu), there was a bios update that solved the suspend battery drain issue, same with the dock as there was updates for that too that can be installed with fwupdmgr. Disabled Bios power management to allow the OS to control it and really it's pretty flawless.

I love my thinkpad t14s, it's fast and quiet and all hardware works (even lte, although does admitedly require an alpha driver, it works fine)

How is battery life?

My 16 inch Lenovo with a Ryzen 5800H is good for about 10 hours of light web development

That said, I am not one to have their high refresh rate screen at anywhere near even mid brightness levels. That includes desktop, TV, phone, etc

How much does the processor scale down when you hit 68C for a while?

No throttling as far as I can tell. When using 16 virtual cores at 100%, each core tops at about 3Ghz (probably due to power limits). Temps creep up to about 68, fan goes on, and it stays there.

why should it?

I’m in a team where every member was forced into macOS against their will, because a lot of project scripts were hardcoded for macOS by a long-gone “architect”. My biggest gripes with macOS, after decades of Windows and Linux:

- Windows has better Linux support than macOS (WSL gives better integration which means Docker is easier to use compared to Minikube via Hyperkit vm)

- macOS doesn’t have the crucial software I need: FAR Manager

- I’ve had terrible experience with Apple’s customer support in the past where they couldn’t fix broken font antialiasing for external monitors

- I’ve been plagued by serious macOS bugs where it would cause 100% cpu load that could only be cured with closing/reopening the lid, and there are still some sleep-related bugs in it, whereas on Windows everything’s fine

- The window manager in macOS lacks basic features compared to Windows: no tiling, but Windows gets it out of the box with Win+arrows

- All hotkeys on macOS are different from the rest of the world (Windows, Linux) for no good reason and it makes switching between computers very difficult. And no, switching Cmd to Ctrl doesn’t solve it

- Rounded window corners make the first character on the bottom line of terminals unreadable

- GUI feels slow compared to Windows

The whole point of the CTRL key is for control characters when using a terminal. The command key on Macs (and the subsequent key pairs) predates CTRL-Z/X/C/V by around 10 years - Larry Tesler, had conceived the notion while at PARC working on text editing for Alto, decided to use the sequence for the Lisa OS.

Originally, Windows followed the IBM CUA [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access] standard, which it still does to a great extent today - Pressing Alt will still activate the menu for instance. In this standard, the cut command was Shift+Del, Copy was Ctrl+Ins and paste was Shift+Ins; which I believe still work as of Windows 10. Microsoft introduced CTRL-Z/X/C/V in Windows 3.1, released in 1992.

In short, the keyboard shortcuts for undo/cut/copy/paste have been constant on the Mac since it’s inception 37 years ago. It’s been “standard” in the Windows world for 29 years

> - Windows has better Linux support than macOS (WSL gives better integration which means Docker is easier to use compared to Minikube via Hyperkit vm)

'bit of a duh, that.

> My biggest gripes with macOS, after decades of Windows and Linux: [...] macOS doesn’t have the crucial software I need: FAR Manager

...

FAR doesn't work on linux either, the unofficial linux port (of 2.0) advertises macOS support, and midnight commander works everywhere.

> - The window manager in macOS lacks basic features compared to Windows: no tiling, but Windows gets it out of the box with Win+arrows

BigSur added a tiling system, but it's really just a split-window fullscreen (so you can't have one half of the screen full and the rest mixed-purpose). Much easier to use a tiler like divvy or BetterSnapTool.

Then again I find windows' tiling just as useless as macos' though it's less prescriptive, I use PowerToys' FancyZones there.

> All hotkeys on macOS are different from the rest of the world (Windows, Linux) for no good reason

That's next-level dishonest. There are excellent reasons for it:

1. macos was first

2. macos has always dedicated its own modkey to system-level shortcuts

3. this also makes ctrl and opt (alt) much more regular and convenient

The windows key is a half-assed aping of it.

> And no, switching Cmd to Ctrl doesn’t solve it

If I remember correctly there are generally fewer shortcut keys on macOS than the alternatives.

Things like controlling and moving windows is not supported without third party app.

Thus macOS is a more mouse centric operating system, but at the same time macOS has by default fewer mouse settings too (eg speed vs acceleration)

> - All hotkeys on macOS are different from the rest of the world (Windows, Linux) for no good reason and it makes switching between computers very difficult. And no, switching Cmd to Ctrl doesn’t solve it

There is a reason they’re different, and it’s because those are the shortcuts that macs have used since 1985. It would extremely upsetting to Mac userbase if all of the sudden shortcuts were wincloned.

I also think that most Mac shortcuts make more sense in the modern context; they’re nearly all mnemonic (e.g. Cmd+W to close a window and Cmd+Q to quit) whereas Windows shortcuts are more arbitrary and rooted in limitations of legacy platforms (Alt+F4 doesn’t mean anything to someone new to computers, for instance).

Any more example of arbitrary and limitations of shortcut keys on Windows except close window/application?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t you switch tabs with ctrl+tab but close a tab with cmd+w on macOS. How is that not arbitrary and not based on a limitation on a legacy platform?

- Rounded window corners make the first character on the bottom line of terminals unreadable

I've never come across this? Do you use some xwindows app that lays characters right on the borders or something?

> 2 - https://github.com/Granitosaurus/macos-compose

> Mac os doesn't come with a compose key feature built-in

There is is pretty handy, built-in, text replacement tool.

Settings -> Keyboard -> Text

Here are my top "compose" shortcuts "_shrug -> ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" and "_stare -> ಠ_ಠ" :)

And these sync over to your iOS devices too, where the shortcuts are even more time saving.

There's also a "unicode hex input" keyboard, though it takes over the entirety of the option mapping (option-[0-9a-f] becomes a charcode, the rest has no effect).

Great tip! Didn't know this. Thanks!

They can pry my Linux from my dead cold hands. I want to be the master of my computer, as it is an extension of myself. I'll thus use an open source OS.

The animations are a real pain. Who decided to make the animation to switch desktops almost one second in length?

Out of frustration for this, I wrote Craig Federighi an email some years back. I asked if it was possible to just disable the spaces animation without disabling ALL animations, since the rolling animation makes me nauseous. Previously I had used yabai, but it needed to disable SIP in order to switch without an animation, which was a no-go for me.

He responded with several follow up questions, but nothing came of it unfortunately… Hopefully it’s on someone’s task list somewhere

You used to be able to modify a plist to change the duration of things like switching spaces. It stopped working around 10.14 and I really miss it.

Have you ever tried “Reduce Motion” in Accessibility -> Display?

Yes. Instead of a sliding animation with a one second duration, I get a crossfade animation with a one second duration.

> so switching between programs, workspaces and windows is the most important part of my workflow - it just drove me nuts.

My kingdom for a way to cmd-tab through all windows. Truly horrific stuff.

https://contexts.co/

Enjoy!

I actually use it for the opposite function—to make cmd+` better at switching between windows within the same app—but it works great as an alternative cmd+tab if “window switcher” fits your mental model better than “app switcher”.

You're probably aware of this already, but if you command tab to an app you can use the up and down cursor keys to display all open windows for that app. You can also use command+` to cycle through open windows of the focused app.

I had forgotten about this, it's a bit fiddly but absolutely worth mentioning.

Why there isn't just an option to have cmd-tab show all windows is beyond me. As someone with sometimes several browser windows and often dozens of terminals open, this is just so painful.

https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/ will do that for you.

As far as window management, tiling, etc., I use BetterSnapTool. No relation to the developer, just a user for many years.

https://folivora.ai/bettersnaptool

I've been liking Magnet. I have an ultra wide monitor and being able to 3 vertical terminal windows all 1/3 screen in size is nice.

I've been using tiles for a while, it works pretty well

You can disable animations when switching between spaces. I use skhd for this to map the hotkeys to the Yabai command to switch spaces. Pressing f13 goes to the previous space immediately and f14 to the next space.

1. Install Yabai

2. install skhd

3. disable SIP (ugh): https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-I...

4. add `f13 : yabai -m space --focus prev` and `f14 : yabai -m space --focus next` to your `~/.skhdrc` file.

I've tried this and much more but there's still noticable delay compared to Linux' twms and it's not only about workspace switching. There's this huge thread on stackoverflow[1] which is a great illustration of what a mess macos display server is.

1 - https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/14001/how-to-turn-...

FWIW Monterey on a 13” M1 Pro felt incredibly tight compared to any model I’ve tried before.

I did the exact opposite. I was on MacOS since 10.2.

But lately I felt things have become way too locked down (both hardware and software), too dumbed down (too many apps resemble mobile apps with limited functionality) and too opinionated. Sometimes I just want things differently. Another reason was that many new features are specific to iCloud integration and as I use many OSes (both computer and mobile) I could not take advantage of those anyway. I need cross platform. So a lot of selling points became irrelevant.

I moved to FreeBSD with KDE on top and it felt like a breath of fresh air finally being able to set up my system the way I want it. This is so empowering.

It became my daily driver about a year ago and I haven't looked back though I still use Mac and Windows for work, Windows personally for gaming and Linux for some servers.

Of course I lost some stuff too like Apple's excellent multi DPI and great hardware integration. And many apps that were great like pixelmator. But I gained a lot of configurability and the ability to upgrade my hardware again.

Nitpick here - Apple actually removed support for decent font rendering on 1x DPI displays so I don't think it's fair to say they support multiple DPI anymore. Completely agree with getting out of Macos though!

Interesting! Why FreeBSD over Linux out of curiosity?

Good question. I had several reasons.

- I had used it until 7.0 in the past and missed the simplicity of having one single platform (rather than Linux with its kernel and the many distributions all doing things differently).

- The excellent handbook

- Almost devoid of corporate influence. Linux is being steered into the warm and fuzzy corporate domain. Many big players try to get their IP adopted by the Linux mainstream. Canonical with Snaps for example, Redhat with Gnome, etc. The big tech players are the biggest kernel contributors now. It moves from choices good for customers to the ones that are good for big tech.

- Non-opinionated platform. Some distros are also becoming quite opinionated like Mac. I did try to play the Apple game for a while (like I said it was my daily driver since 10.2) but they kept annoying me more and more by deprecating things I used. I want choices again.

- Stable platform but with rolling app packages. For example if KDE comes out with a new version I will see it usually a day or 2 later.

- Couldn't find a Linux distro I really liked. I like minimalism but without Arch's elitism. Debian would have been the closest but I have bad experiences with major upgrades. What I would have preferred would be something like Alpine for the desktop. I looked at Adelie Linux which is exactly that but it was too premature.

- The ports tree is really amazing. You're always able to change default package settings and recompile them

- Jails are more powerful than linux containers, though they lack a framework a la docker. This is why I still use Linux on servers.

So this was mainly it :) Unfortuantely running KDE did require installing some linuxisms like Dbus but overall it's not too bad.

I am curious about your third point. Why do you consider project choices that are good for "big tech" to be a reason to turn away from Linux?

I would have assumed that many contributions by corporations are in the end a net benefit for both corporations and customers or at least not detrimental to customers.

Do you consider some corporate contributions to Linux to be harmful towards consumers? Or is it more a decision of principle?

>and the ability to upgrade my hardware again.

And... not modern wifi? I take it you must be on a Desktop in this case?

Oh yes I use a desktop (intel NUC to be precise). I have no need for WiFi, I didn't even look at getting it going.

I'm not a big fan of laptops at all for ergonomics. Most of my systems are desktops, the only laptop I have is a really minimal one for the makerspace (and I have one for work).

I never said it was for everyone by the way. Just that it works for me! In general, things that work for everyone don't tend to work well for me at all, this is my biggest issue with Apple now because they make a product that is ultra-mainstream and very opinionated. You either have to go with the flow (which irritates me) or add a galore of thirdparty addon products to make it work your way which get broken in every major (and often minor) macOS release.

I did try to go the second way for a while but it got too annoying with everything constantly breaking. From reading the article this thread is about, I see the author is going the same way (lots of addon products) and I wonder if they will also be caught by this in the future.

Heh, no hate intended by my original comment - I'd run FreeBSD if I could get away with it, but I'm too wedded to macOS for work nowadays. Just saw the comment and wifi is the only true big holdup in FreeBSD that I'm aware of nowadays, the rest can be... worked around, for whatever definition you have.

Same here, but Ubunutu .. and the lack of upgradeability of storage.

For me Linux is about freedom. Other systems might be better in UI/UX or performance (e.g. give more FPS in games for NVidia cards), but I remember the times when Microsoft dominated the IT world and it looked scary.

All corporations strive to fragment the market using non-compatible technologies and then to monopolize the market by consuming other fragments.

This strategy failed in the 90s with the arrival of Linux. Although many times I felt like the whole world will become Microsoft/Wintel, I think we barely missed.

Now, corporations are trying to do it e.g. via forcing everybody into the cloud and killing open protocols. E.g. I have several email accounts and I can't gather mail from all of my mailboxes in one application. Situation is even worse with Calendars. I have two jobs and also my own personal calendar server and I can't collect all my calendars in one app also. I have to routinely check Google Calendar, because even though I can add it to my Thunderbird Calendar, moved or canceled events changes are not propagating to Thunderbird. And I can't integrate Microsoft Outlook calendar into my Thunderbird at all.

I really don't want to rely on whims of one corporation. Also, regarding MacBooks: I remember when the touchbar had no alternatives and it is really awful. This is what monopoly means: you have to live with bad decisions. You have to pay absurd money for a piece of cloth or a roller for the desktop case.

Since this is for work my choice was between a MacBook or Windows-based laptop. Personally I wouldn't even have considered using anything else than Linux.

Give https://rectangleapp.com/ a try if you want a window manager that can place your windows around the screen nicely.

Rectangle (and spectacle before it) is one of those absolutely essential tools for me when working on my mac. I didn't realize how essential it was to my workflow until it was accidentally disabled a few days ago and I struggled hard to use my laptop.

Happily donated to the author of an app so essential for my day to day productivity to show my gratitude for making it and making it open source. If the author happens to read this: thank you!

Also, you'd think Apple would natively support window tiling, but apparently their UX and desktop design philosophy is that they know best when it comes to window size and placement.

MacOS does support tiling. You can tile exactly one window across the entire screen by pressing the green button. If you want to tile more than one window, you can buy additional monitors.

(This is sarcasm.)

macOS window management philosophy is to not tightly manage windows, letting them live where they end up, not unlike papers on a desk. For occasions where windows need to be side by side and both fully visible (which at least for my workflow, isn’t all that often), they’re only loosely manually arranged that way.

It works for me at least. I have Moom installed for the occasions where I temporarily need tiling and that’s more than enough. Full tiling WMs on Linux give me a headache because with most of the programs I use, windows need to take up 70%+ of the screen to be usable which means the remaining space for other programs isn’t particularly useful, which defeats much of the purpose of full tiling.

IIRC they recently added support for some half-assed tiling, only for two full screen windows side by side. It's called Split View.

Spectacle was my jam. Simple and free.

I thought rectangle was the next evolution of spectacle

I still use Spectacle! Maybe I'll abandon it if I ever upgrade to Big Sur -- but it continues to work for me.

Is the "Jordan Peterson" who is a Silver Tier supporter of Rectangle that Jordan Peterson?

Assuming you mean the one in the news, no. You can see on GitHub it's just a developer with the same name.

Usually people just make up names when they are donating. I’ve seen few Steve Jobs and Bezos around patreon.

No, but in the realm of interesting Jordan Peterson facts, I recently learned that him and Jim Keller are brothers in law.

I've been using https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12 with my ultra wide I got for work. I like that it lets me do things in thirds.

As a Linux to Mac adopter I also use Magnet. No relationship to company.

So does Rectangle. I'm using it right now on a 49" U/W, with this Firefox window on the right-hand third, VSCode in the center third, and Discord in the top-left 6th, and Dune (2021) playing in IINA in the bottom-left 6th :-)

All tied to global keyboard shortcuts too. Free, open source, and does exactly what you've asked for.

This sounds really nice… I’m now quite keen on looking into ultrawides.

Daily drove mac for 5-7 years after a childhood of tinkering with Linux installs (no professional development) and falling in love with an AwesomeWM setup with custom keybinds.

After getting into professional dev during / after high school I ended up using Divvy for an OSX window manager. It wasn’t fantastic, but I could set up custom keybinds and it was “reminiscent” of those tiling WMs I found so much love for as a pre-adolescent.

I recently (2ish years ago) switched from mac to a Debian then eventually Pop OS setup for my daily driver development environment. While not as robust as a custom arch setup with a tiling WM like awesome, Mutter is quite good and everything PopOS offers out of the box has been fantastic. Perhaps one of these days I will find the time to dive back into arch and configure a _truly_ efficient and customized workstation / dev env :-)

It’s interesting to see all of these alternative, perhaps even _better_ / more robust / more FOSS friendly mac WMs being listed here. I’m keen on giving them a try whenever I end up back on a mac workstation, but I cannot deny that my Divvy lifetime license has served me incredibly well for years, with support through many big OS upgrades.

Another alternative is yobai (+ skhd) https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

I switched to it after having some issues with rectangle sending some of my windows into the abyss (way outside of the screen) which forced me to kill the app and restart it to get it back. But if Rectangle works for you that's good too, it's probably easier to configure.

yabai is the only alternative if you are used to i3wm or bspwm

Did you disable kernel security to inject the window server extensions? I don’t understand the repercussions so I’m a little reluctant to.

I've been v happy with Divvy for many years. It's not auto-tiling, but it's perfect for for my purposes. Quick cmd-shift-arrow puts a window in [top 1/2, bottom 1/2, left 1/2, right 1/2] or cmd-shift-enter [for fullscreen] (across 2 monitors)... it's exactly right for me to avoid ever reaching for the mouse to position windows.

Can you change workspaces without any animation (delay) with rectangle ? Or is just for tiling windows within a workspace ?

I've been using TotalSpaces 2 (https://blog.binaryage.com/totalfinder-totalspaces-future/) to change workspaces in macOS without the annoying animation which you cannot disable.

Too bad TotalSpaces 2 does not work with Monterey or M1 macs, so I am really looking for another solution that can enable this. I used to run skhd + yabai, but something about that did not click as good as with TotalSpaces 2.

Anybody know a solution for Monterey & M1 that you can use to switch between workspaces with the keyboard, without any delay ?

There is a beta-ish build (https://discuss.binaryage.com/t/can-we-help-test-total-space...) which works on Big Sur and M1, at least, (I haven't upgraded to Monterey yet.)

Thanks for sharing. Does not look like it's anywhere near production quality, but maybe it works just for transitioning between workspaces.

Seems there would be demand for such software based on the comments. For me at least TotalSpaces 2 has really changed how I use macOS, hopefully they will get it working on M1 & Monterey.

I use SizeUp for this: https://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

I use rectangle with a 5k2k 40” ultra wide monitor and it’s awesome. Very flexible and customizable, and I highly recommended it. Did I mention it’s free and open source? :)

Which monitor? I'd been waiting for the LG (forever) and finally ordered the Lenovo, although my shipping updates keep changing. I'll have to try rectangle once it's here.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-ultrasharp-40-curv...

Hows the macOS support on these? I’m due a monitor upgrade and an ultra wide is where I’m leaning..

Rectangle and its paid cousin, Hookshot (https://hookshot.app) are great. I use Hookshot.

They are the best window managers I've used on MacOS, because the resize features work flawlessly every single time. Other ones I've tried (e.g. bettertouchtool) have occasional issues with that.

They'd be perfect if they supported full customization of drop zones. They have some limited customization, including via the command line, but it's nothing compared to some of the other apps that are out there.

Hookshot does allow customization of the positions of the window throw (and long throw). You can create a custom shortcuts in the wrench and ruler tab, and then select the custom shortcut from the configure button for the window throw, at the end of the list. I realize this can feel a little hidden in the UI, so I'm planning on making it a little more straightforward in a future release.

The custom shortcuts in Hookshot are beyond what I've seen in most apps, especially since you can customize what happens in repeated executions of the custom shortcuts. Let me know what other apps out there have the customization that you are referring to.

Sorry just saw this. I actually already use keyboard shortcuts for some custom window positions. But I still usually just use the default snap zones because it's hard to remember the shortcuts.

BetterTouchTool goes a step further, and lets you customize the drop zones. I.e., if you drop a window on the top left, it snaps to your custom top-left position:

https://docs.folivora.ai/docs/104_snap_areas.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtgOseyyJ5U

Hookshot's performance is great but AFAIK doesn't let you snap windows to custom areas without keyboard shortcuts.

Amethyst is excellent, especially for multiple displays.

https://ianyh.com/amethyst/

Also check out https://highlyopinionated.co/swish/ for a gesture-based window manager by swiping on titlebars. It also features snake-selector keyboard shortcuts, so there's really nothing to memorize.

Disclaimer: I made this.

I use amethyst.

https://ianyh.com/amethyst/

All thumbs up for Rectangle. Taken me a while to memorize the various key maps, but they're pretty intuitive actually once you get the pattern. Memorizing those is key to really making the tool rock. I do a thirds a lot.

I recently started using MacOS. Rectangle is one the most useful apps I’ve come across… and free. I like that you can add padding to the windows. With keybind customization it’s a nice replacement for a tiling window manager.

Other window management options include Amethyst and Hammerspoon.

I highly recommend Hammerspoon for launching/focusing applications. Example from my config.

hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "alt", "ctrl", "shift"}, "F",

function() hs.application.launchOrFocus("iTerm") end)

I also use Karabiner-Elements to change capslock to cmd, alt, ctrl, shift.

I used to love iTerm2 but the only thing that it was missing was that I couldn't set it up as I wanted with a script when I needed to install a new macOS from scratch (there's probably a feature that allows that and I didn't notice).

I moved to tmux + Alacritty [1] (Rust hype and speeed) which is cross-platform and only needs its config file, a nice and clean yaml, in the right place to restore it as I want. Now when I full wipe my Mac I just need to run the script that pulls the config file from GitHub and tada! Also, the configuration file is almost identical to my Linux one so I can move around similarly and have a consistent look.

I'm also used to replace macOS programs like `sed`,`grep`,`getopt`,`ssh` (macOS OpenBSD one won't work with Yubikey),`coreutils` and `awk` with the GNU version. You can download them with Homebrew and to replace them with the macOS default ones you just need to put them at the beginning of your path like this:

    export PATH=/usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin:$PATH

[1]: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty

iTerm2 3.4.14

Preferences > General > Preferences > Load preferences from a custom folder or URL

You can save your preferences and load them as required.

You entirely miss the point. Folk want to do this from a bootstrap script. iterm makes this difficult.

iTerm doesn't make a bootstrap script easy, but it's still possible. I do it.

Use this to command to set the location of the iterm config folder:

   defaults write com.googlecode.iterm2 PrefsCustomFolder -string "/path/to/iterm config folder"

Then as long as that folder exists and contains your preferred settings, when iTerm opens up it'll be exactly like you want it. (though it would have been nice if this just defaulted to $HOME/.config/iTerm)

There are a bunch of ways to do this while bootstrapping. Just store your iterm config in a dot files git repo, and then symlink it on a new system. You can even use dot bot to automate symlinks. That’s just one way of doing it, I’m sure there are many other ways.

It’s weird to hear someone proficient enough to be talking about bootstrapping a dev machine complain about solving a very trivial problem.

Here is my .tmux.conf. It includes a quick tutorial at the top of the file.

I have set PREFIX to be ctrl-a, which mimics GNU screen.

'Ctrl-a m' toggles "mouse" mode, which allows you to resize windows and set focus with the mouse.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jftuga/universe/master/tmu...

+1 for alacritty.

However now that I don’t daily drive mac as much, I’ve defaulted back to iTerm 2 for when I do happen to be doing something on my mac. The default configuration is quite good out of the box. All I really need to do post-install is get my beloved zsh + ohmyzsh plug-ins and I’m good to go :-)

And also my tmux dot files ;)

Kitty has more features and is easier to use than Alacritty IMHO

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

As a recent convert from Alacritty to Kitty, I can confirm this. Kitty blew Alacritty out of the water in the first 10 mins of my experience with it.

Like holy crap, it's a very well written and well thought out piece of software. And it's fast. I'm all about the Rust hype, but Kitty reduced latency drastically.

Still slower than xterm. And I have yet to see a feature I need that's not in (famously bloated) xterm, and which Alacritty or Kitty provide.

With Mac you can usually just copy your entire ~/Library/Preferences folder to get all your apps back the way they were on a new Mac. It's a collection of pliat files that basically are equivalent to the registry on Windows.

There's even a system wide equivalent at /Library/Preferences

For a very limited set of apps perhaps.

You also want ~/Library/Application Support

Of course if you're using a lot of cross platform stuff it tends to ignore those conventions in favor of a bunch of ~/.stuff/ folders

I highly recommend Hammerspoon[1] for any macOS automation tasks you want to do. It is not only extensible but alleviates the need for using multiple tools due to its broad feature set.

The only downside after two years of using Hammerspoon is that the community is small since it isn't as user-friendly as yabai, amethyst, etc. However, you'll probably enjoy its open-ended nature, given your article.

[1] https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon

Hammer spoon is the shit. It’s super rewarding to be able to add really complex functionality (like menu bar applets) with ease.

What works best for me is to not really fiddle with the setup too much beyond the defaults or to install redundant stuff, like using brew to get a fresher version of ssh or installing iterm2 when terminal does the job, or otherwise spending time on window dressing.

I try and lean into the philosophy of the mac, which is that its a desktop which behaves like a real desk. Right now I have 15 windows from various applications open on this one desktop, and its in a giant pile just as if I had a bunch of papers and files in a messy pile on my desk. This works great because you can press a button or swipe along the trackpad and spread out this pile, exposing everything that's in it along with all your other desktops, as if you are spreading out the stacks of papers on your desk.

IMO this method is how you focus on stuff anyway. Your eyes aren't looking at the 12 different things in your tiling window manager at once, so you might as well just have a few things pulled up on top of your pile of windows that are of focus and take advantage of your screen real estate rather than have a bunch of tiny panes artfully spaced. The mouse makes it easy to do fast and sloppy window adjustments which are good enough.

Same. Even if I don't like the defaults, I try as hard as humanly possible not to start fiddling with them. I learn to live with them, until the defaults become my preference.

Now any clean VM or freshly installed machine or borrowed computer at work is set up to my preference. Do I maximize my productivity or have everything exactly perfect? No. But I'd rather have my nails pulled out than tweaking things. If I have to edit a configuration textfile, the computer goes out the window. My OS isn't an important part of my workday. It should just start my IDE and get out of the way.

<cmd-F3> shows Desktop and <Swipe up with three fingers> shows Exposé

A few tips/software recommendation in no particular order:

- On iTerm2 you can setup a system wide hotkey to toggle a floating terminal in front of all your windows, whatever you're doing [1]. This works even in full screen apps. It really changed my workflow with iTerm, and is really handy.

- For system stats in the menubar, I really recommend iStat Menu [2]. It's paid (12$ for a license), but the quality of the graphs and interface makes it well worth it imo.

- If you have an external display and want to precisely tweek your resolution, I recommend SWitchResX [3]. It's mostly a GUI that wraps some display CLI tools. With it I adjust the resolution of my 4k external monitor currently, running it at 3200x1800 with HiDPI, and adjust it based on my eye fatigue.

- As a more powerful and versatile replacement to Spotlight (Cmd+Space), Alfred [4]. You can customize it to run anything you want, from converting timestamps to dates, opening apps, search the whole system, run scripts, etc

- If you have too many icons in your menubar and want to hide some (either totally or behind a button click), Bartender [5]

[1]: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/48796/iterm-as-a-s...

[2]: https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

[3]: https://www.madrau.com/

[4]: https://www.alfredapp.com/

[5]: https://www.macbartender.com/

Hidden Bar is good as well, that's what I am using.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hidden-bar/id1452453066?mt=12

I have been using computers for over 30 years, and each and every one has issues, bugs, finicky bits that suck the life out of you and the minutes out of the hours. DOS, SunOS, *BSD, Linux and Mac. All of em.

Just pick your poison everyone, and let us all get on with our lives.

Edit: ...and Windows 3.11 and up.

Your comment reminds me of the 20 year old song “Every OS sucks”.

Every OS wastes your time, from the desktop to the lap, Everything since Apple Dos, Just a bunch of crap.

From Microsoft, to Macintosh, to Lih-- lie-- lih-- lie... nux, Every computer crashes, 'cause every OS sucks.

https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/76280/

Yup. This is why I use exclusively macs now for work and most non-work things (still PC for gaming, for obvious reasons). Of course I'm on linux systems almost daily when it's required, but thats via SSH or maybe a virtualized env if I really need it. For day to day its just a m1 mac with ridiculous performance and amazing hardware.

All OS'es and computing environments are horrible. Its just that Mac OS is less horrible and more in line with getting shit done as opposed to constant fiddling and fighting with your environment.

To each their own of course, but this is has been my experience after 25+ yrs of computing.

It sounds like this could be the year of OS X on the desktop!

I jest, but this all sounds like a lot more trouble to get the experience you want than most Linux distros would give you. It's not the primary audience of OS X, sure, but it's nice to see how well-served by Linux a sizable slice of users is.

> I jest, but this all sounds like a lot more trouble to get the experience you want than most Linux distros would give you

I feel like this is an opportunity to delve into a classic, IRC like "Windows vs Linux vs macOS" debate here, but instead I'll simply state a well known, agreed upon truth in our industry: Linux is an absolute joke on the desktop. Even Torvalds thinks it's a mess.

Build your desktop from scratch if you like. It's your time. It's your life. But please don't mislead people into thinking Linux (on the desktop) comes even remotely close to Windows or macOS in terms of a good user experience out of the box.

> But please don't mislead people into thinking Linux (on the desktop) comes even remotely close to Windows or macOS in terms of a good user experience out of the box.

So how do I record system audio on macOS in Audacity again?

Remind me how slow homebrew is compared to pacman on Arch? Having to click through the Security thing in System Preferences because Apple wants to protect me from apps I already know I trust, spending two hours trying to compile the new untested Tailscale since the App Store is broken and Tailscale used some API only App Store apps could use, trying to get my Logitech Marble Trackball to scroll when I press a button and roll the wheel so I can use my mouse. God forbid I want to use my mouse and not spend three hours trying to fix it when it took two minutes to copy the config off ArchWiki for X11 and two seconds to paste the command in on GNOME.

I could go on. Just like Linux has problems with user experiencs, macOS has some pretty egregious faults as well. As a developer, Linux is much more user-friendly to me and has a way better user experience. I can make my system do whatever I want without dealing with macOS's restrictions and that's what a good user experience is to me.

Completely fully disagree with you. My colleagues, friends and a family member have been using Linux for years now. I myself started using Linux full time for about ten years now.

I'll never go back, Windows and Mac cannot touch the experience with a ten foot pole. And Mac does not even begin to know what window management is.

I know, it's anecdotal. But claiming that Linux is not viable on the desktop is just plain silly.

I disagree entirely. If a user's use case would be suited well by ChromeOS, then it's been my experience that Ubuntu or something similar with Firefox or Chromium will suit their needs just as well.

Modern desktop Linux is actually a nice user experience, and contrasts with the poor Linux desktop experience before ~2015.

> If a user's use case would be suited well by ChromeOS

Do you know anyone like this? All such people I know prefer the UX on iPad.

> But please don't mislead people into thinking Linux (on the desktop) comes even remotely close to Windows or macOS in terms of a good user experience out of the box.

"Out of the box" is the key phrase here. GP said that Linux was good at serving a certain "slice" of users, and it sounded like they were arguing that trying to massage MacOS into something those users would like is probably more trouble than it works. The setup described by this blog post isn't really "out of the box" either, so I don't think it's crazy to suggest that to someone inclined to tinker with their setup to make it absolutely perfect would potentially be better served by Linux.

Every single HN thread vaguely related to Linux desktops there's these guys who never tried it for more than a couple of minutes but still feel the need to come here to spread their bullshit. GNOME these days is on par with MacOS if not better on every aspect.

Been using it for close to 15 years.

Too much work for very little gain.

As someone who uses MacOS, Linux, and Windows daily for development, family, general business use, and infra administration - and have for nearly 30 years - this is just not the case. Plasma is much farther along than GNOME but neither are as fluid and put together as MacOS. Now against windows, it’s very close.

Well, "every" can't be true because fonts look way better on MacOS.

Unsure if this comment is satire or serious…

> But please don't mislead people into thinking Linux (on the desktop) comes even remotely close to Windows or macOS in terms of a good user experience out of the box

I use KDE on Linux, and when I do a fresh install, it takes me about 5 minutes to set the settings how I like, 0 janky workarounds, 0 external software, and 0 reboots. The adware/bloatware in Windows and the ridiculous feature deficiency in macOS give me put UX so low that KDE doesn't need to be that good - although it is.

What a ridiculous overgeneralization.

A minimalist-ish Linux distro for a lot of people, especially those who mostly are on the web (hypothetical Grandma etc.) will 100% save you a TON of headaches over Windows, and fare quite well against Mac OS as well.

When she needs support or assistance, that theory holds about as much water as a fishnet.

Try to get video acceleration working with nvidia in FF/Chrome.

Interestingly, yesterday, after having to login and "enroll" into some kind of Micro$oft program to download older visual studio 2017 (which I only needed to compile from source and it was a dependency, not actual use). This rubbed me off so much that I thought I need to take a break from Windows. I installed Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It took me less time than ever to setup, hiDPI seems to work fine. No problems with suspend, GPU or sounds, everything works. So far I think UX for new users might be even better than macOS. (constant mac laptop user)

You sound like someone without multiple monitors of differing DPI, which I found to be suboptimal on Gnome versus macOS.

are we talking developers or end users in general? Because as a dev linux on the desktop works fine. I've been using basically bog standard ubuntu lts for a long time now. At my work where people can choose their OS it's like 40% mac, 40% linux, 20% windows

as far as I can tell in the industry linux workstations are common.

Not sure what "build from scratch" and "out of the box" are supposed to mean here.

Isn't it just installing packages?

And there are so many Linux distros now, that you can probably find a "box" with whatever WM or DE you want installed by default.

Though, it seems silly to do it that way. Installing whatever packages you want is so easy regardless of which ones install by default.

Installing is easy, configuring not always. Who thought blank defaults were a good idea in their package. But change distro and suddenly you have sensible defaults in the same package.

> I feel like this is an opportunity to delve into a classic, IRC like "Windows vs Linux vs macOS" debate here

Congrats on seizing the moment and living your life to its full potential.

What have you done with your life, again? What books have have you written? Is it you or me that runs a Discord with 2,000+ members? Have you got 6,000 members for your video courses?

Sit back down.

Completely agree. Ubuntu 20.04 with a 5k monitor (Dell UP2715K)? The result: Burn in that lasts for an hour and graphics completely messed up. After a few days the monitor broke. Are 100% scaling too small for your new 4k monitor? Well if you think 200% is too much, you'll have to switch to fractional scaling, where things get blurry. Don't know about macOS, but Windows have no trouble scaling things nicely to 150% for instance.

In Windows there are no monitor issues and it's super easy to set up my PlayStation 3 controller for games (that are also nicely supported). Overall there's just less configuration in Windows.

Instead I run Linux in VMware, which comes with its own perks: By creating a virtual machine per project, everything is neatly grouped in its own workspace, and by suspending instead of shutting down when done, I can get back to where I left off as easy as loading it's previous state from disk, with everything open - unsaved documents, applications, browser tabs, etc. I get the best of both worlds this way.

Yeah, I ran linux on the desktop (and laptop) for years and I learned a lot, but it sucks.

Occasionally I see comments on HN and I’m inspired to try again. It still sucks every time. Basic stuff like bad trackpad support, laptop failing to suspend, software scaling/resolution issues, missing drives on install, etc. etc. - you can hack it to work, but it’s not close. With M1 performance the difference is even more extreme than it’s ever been.

Use what you want of course, but I’m not sure why people pretend it’s something it’s not. Though OS arguments are mostly religious arguments.

NextStep was available for PCs as well as NextCubes. When do you think Apple might release their Intel MacOS code for PCs? It could give Windows 11 a run for its money.

> A better solution for me was using Karabiner-Elements to only swap the right command and option keys:

macOS has a built in tool called hidutil[1] for simple keyboard remapping. Prefer to use that since Karabiner-Elements has some issues on M1 and macOS Big Sur. I use this[2] tool to generate a simple launchd config.

1 - https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2450... 2 - https://hidutil-generator.netlify.app

That tool is awesome! Thank you.

Excellent tip, thank you!

Thanks, added to the article!

I recently went back to Linux after using MacOS for seemingly ever.

I’m on Ubuntu LTS with ZFS and i3 and while I miss the amazing hardware of my 2020 MacBook (non M1) I just love the flexibility of the Linux setup: package management is a first class thing, containers are too; Magnet was nice but it’s no i3. And overall things just work which is really nice.

I do miss airdrop and access to messages and other aspects of the apple ecosystem that I enjoy from lock-in but I’m happy for now and going to keep at it.

After using macs for the better part of a decade and recently moving to Linux: the Linux desktop ecosystem is vibrant and fun if you like to tinker.

There are things that aren’t as streamlined like power management but I’ve been able to get my framework laptop to pretty much exactly how I like it.

I was nervous about sleep/hibernation but honestly using systemd and a couple of tweaks (enabling sleep-then-hibernate) and everything is super reliable, rarely any issues.

Wayland + Sway is a killer combination and everything is super snappy.

I fell in love with workspaces in Mac with touchpad gestures but on a high refresh rate monitor the animation is so slow and it cannot be tweaked. On sway there is no animation and it is instant.

I think once the steam deck matures we are going to truly see a year of Linux desktop soon.

Plasma has workspace-like features and check this out for gestures[1].

[1] https://gitlab.com/cunidev/gestures

I didn’t bother to test this because I don’t use multiple desktops, but maybe this is what you were looking for:

> defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0

https://osxdaily.com/2012/02/14/speed-up-misson-control-anim...

That stopped working several versions ago.

I've spent hours trying to make the Mac interface work well. I've come to the conclusion that it's unfixable.

Can I install sway on the 20.04 LTS and when I choose it at the GDM login have it switch to Wayland? i.e Can I have both xorg+proprietary nvidia drivers running for i3 and stock gnome and then do wayland+sway when chosen?

> I do miss airdrop and access to messages

Check out KDE Connect[1]. It works outside of KDE, too.

[1] https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

There are several solutions to access iMessage on non-Apple platforms including https://bluebubbles.app/, https://airmessage.org/, and https://www.beeper.com/. You'll need an Apple device or Hackintosh as a server, but you can pay beeper to set up their software on a jailbroken iPhone and send it to you.

I also recently moved back to running Linux (on a Thinkpad) after using macOS for a few years. One of the things I miss terribly from macOS is pinch-zoom in Chrome. Has anyone found a way to easily enable it? Thanks!

I was on macs during 2015-2021 and went back to Linux this year. I'm not entirely happy, although sway/i3 is so much better than macos's desktop.

But I miss things like Bluetooth, wlan, sound, graphics just working. Yes, that's still a thing in Linux even if not quite as badly as 5ish years ago.

I think I'll be going back to macs.

Using i3 with Arch? I used to have problems with all the things you mentioned, takes a bit to learn what the best tools are and how to set them up. But now any other OS feels like I'm missing a limb

Sway, actually. Yeah, I just recently learned that network managers are not equal at all. Iwd keeps screwung up my tethered connections whereas networkmanager happily works with everything.

With sway, graphics are almost totally problem-free, now that almost everything I need are wayland-native. As for sound... pipewire might deliver that some day but not quite yet. Especially my DAC and usb headset make some troubles there.

Ought to use Mos for the mouse scrolling fix. Works pretty well. I think there is a brew cask for it too. https://mos.caldis.me/

I also used Linux for years and that has separate options (Gnome) for mouse and trackpad scroll direction. Really sad that this isn’t built in functionality. But hey, we got more emojis and FaceTime faces! /s

This is great guide to making macOS more comfortable for Linux users. I'm a pretty serious macOS (and Linux) user and was pleased to have learned something valuable from this article.

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist NoMulticastAdvertisements -bool YES

It drives me crazy that my desktop Hackintosh wakes up every couple of hours, and I'm really hoping this fixes it.

> It drives me crazy that my desktop Hackintosh wakes up every couple of hours, and I'm really hoping this fixes it.

Oh, I hear you! I've personally just given up and disabled sleep altogether, and moved to forcing the system to always hibernate instead of sleep with pmset.

I mostly switched to librem 14, arch linux (i3wm, gnome from time to time), still using a mac for work (mostly presentations, video conferencing). Development tends to get more and more difficult on the mac for me (the security check for running shell programs is sometimes annoying. Currently hunting down a node compile error ... works perfectly under arch).

For my mac: I tried Amethyst, as others mentioned Yabai seems better. Yet, I switched to just to hammerspoon scripts, for tiling/desktop management etc.: http://www.hammerspoon.org/ It fits my needs and is adjustable.

For shell: iterm2 is ok, yet I'm currently in love with kitty. https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty

Brew alternatives: macports, nix (https://nixos.org) I love the idea, yet still haven't gotten around to use it much.

shell: fish editor: nvim / neovide

Mouse acceleration: to disable it I've been using SteelSeries ExactMouse Tool (https://steelseries.com/engine -> expand Miscellaneous at the very bottom). It's very lightweight and I just install it once and never think about it again.

Mouse scrolling: I always found this to be a bad experience on OSX/macOS so I've been using Smooze. It allows you to set the scroll curve to your own liking. It has other features that I don't use and although it's not free, iirc it was cheap and definitely worth it.

Window management: a lot of others have mentioned great tools like Rectangle, but I've found Moom to be slightly better for my use cases. I prefer it over Rectangle (although Moom doesn't have window snapping so I actually use both) because you can set a custom grid e.g. 12x12 and have windows resize anywhere on the grid. With Rectangle, you can only choose from the (many) presets but unfortunately no customization.

You might want to look at the Command-line options[1] for Rectangle. For instance, if you want the "AlmostMiximized" size to be not so big, you can set that to something of your choice, similar to the 12x12. Hope that helps and you can reduce to one app instead of two. :-)

1. https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle/blob/master/TerminalCo...

Disabling mouse acceleration that way hasn't worked right since Catalina at least, maybe even since Mojave. You can test it with a high-resolution gaming mouse: slide it across your mousepad once as slowly as you can, and then flick it across once. There's still a difference in how far the cursor travels, even with SteelSeries ExactMouse.

The only tools I know of that actually work for this (if you comoletely disable speed/sensitivity controls as well as acceleration) are SteerMouse and CursorSense, which use some kind of driver hack: https://www.plentycom.jp/en/index.html

As a linux user since the Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog days, this is the first time in 16 years I've been tempted to switch to a mac. From what it looks like, the M1 seems to be deliver incredible performance at little power consumption. If there was a way to put linux on it without tinkering, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

But because I can't, I'm seriously considering what it'd take to switch from my current setup (ubuntu 20.04, cinnamon, slide dock) to a mac. Keyboard shortcuts and workspaces are top of mind. I've also never been a fan of mac's dock where it groups all instances of an application together - I much prefer a classic Windows tray where each instance of an application has its own box I can easily alt-tab between. I also think mac's file manager isn't great.

Much appreciated OP - may shoot you some questions over email.

<Unpopular Opinion> I’ve used msft windows most of my life. Recently switched to a macOS and for the life of me just can’t get used to the switch between alt tab and cmd tab behavior. Also windows explorer > finder.

Yes Mac OS looks cooler I guess, but I’ve found windows very practical.

The switch between Android and iOS is more jarring. Once you get really used to Android, iOS seems very unintuitive by comparison.

You're not alone. I made the switch this year. Primarily for working on an iOS project. There are days I miss Windows quite a bit. For most things, animations are minimal. Things just pop up, switch gears, and do what you want almost instantly. Explorer is far better than Finder for most things, even if it's also substantially uglier.

Just for a simple example: I change to arbitrary folders frequently. Control-L in Explorer, type the path, and I'm there the second I hit return. Done. Finder has a similar method using Command-Shift-G. But not only is the shortcut more awkward but going to the path has a delay. Not a long one. But it's noticeable and annoying.

Oh well. Spotlight does seem to work better than 10/11's built-in search. So maybe it's a wash. Still miss Windows sometimes.

At any rate, I did make one change in MacOS which long term Mac users might find heretical. When using my external mechanical keyboard, I have Command mapped to the Control key. Control (which doesn't get used often) mapped to the Windows / Super key. Alt / Option is unchanged.

It's a bit amazing how much easier this made everything. Most of the usual keyboard shortcuts I had in Windows now map 1:1 on my Mac. Which is great for the muscle memory.

Cmd+Shift+G in finder lets you type a path and jump to it instantly.

"AltTab brings the power of Windows’s “alt-tab” window switcher to macOS."

brew install alt-tab

https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app

Not a user or the developer, but happened across this recently.

Just in case you're not aware, Command+` is a necessary secondary shortcut for use with Command+Tab.

Is there any way to disable this behaviour altogether? After almost a year of being forced to use MacOS at work, I still can't wrap my head around having two sets of window to switch between (inter-app level + intra-app level). I REALLY wish they included an option to just treat all the windows as top level!

Edit: found elsewhere on the thread this app that purports to fix it: https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/

I’d love to hear what’s good about Windows Explorer. I used Windows for many years and never found it (edit: Explorer) satisfactory.

I wasn't satisfied with the Automator way to make a new-terminal shortcut, it was kinda slow, and not 100% reliable. I found FastScripts and was able to make it fast and reliable. (I still use version 2.8, version 3 was just released, haven't tried it.) https://redsweater.com/fastscripts/

For the mouse wheel, there's a nice minimal proper fix: https://github.com/emreyolcu/discrete-scroll

Moved to mac from Linux around 2010 after being exposed to it by a few other developers. Never ever looked back.

Sitting on a 2013 mbp maxed out, just required a battery change this year. Still usable but will move to the M1 2022.

Blows my mind devs are still stuck on windows and linux machines.

For me it's partly because I want to cross-train for our IoT stuff that runs Linux, and partly because of FOSS idealism that I don't ever want to give up on.

Possibly worth taking a look at MacPorts and Pkgsrc, both of which are arguably better package managers than Homebrew, although the latter has a hell of a lot more packages (and is pretty easy to roll your own packages for).

Also nix, depending on your personal tastes

some other suggestions (free):

  * window management/positioning: Spectacle, Easy Move+Resize
  * screenshots: Lightshot screenshot
  * status bar icons management: Hidden Bar
  * calendar on status bar: itsycal
  * battery: Battery Monitor
  * hex file viewer: Hex Fiend
  * folder/file compare: Meld

Thanks for the list. Regarding screenshots, I like macOS' built-in screenshot keybindings:

Command+Shift 3: Captures the entire screen.

Command+Shift 4: Captures a specific region (You have to select the area each time).

Command+Shift 4, Space: Captures a specific window.

Command+Shift 5: Captures a specific region (Remembers the last selected region).

Command+Shift 5 also displays a menu at the bottom of the screen that lets you select any of the screenshot options as well as options to record a specific window or the entire screen.

yup thanks for the reminder, I usually go with the app above because it allows to draw on top of the screenshot and to copy in memory (e.g. to copy and paste into some IM), e.g. adding arrows, text, lines, something I use for example to highlight areas of the screenshot

Same is possible with the macOS shortcuts. After taking a screenshot, preview is shown in the lower right corner. If you click on it, you can draw on top of it, and use Ctrl+C to copy it to the memory.

Hold down Ctrl when using these shortcuts to copy directly to the clipboard.

As covered elsewhere in these comments, Rectangle is the new Spectacle. https://rectangleapp.com/

thanks - looks like they chose a different set of shortcuts, that's a bit annoying after years and so much muscle memory

You can rebind easily. I find Rectangle to be much more lightweight than Spectacle

Hammerspoon has been really helpful in tiling windows with my keyboard and adding keybings like "jump to application". Also, there are a lot of useful plugins that add even more functionality like a fuzzy searchable clipboard history.

I love Hammerspon, I use it for keyboard switching to/launching specific apps, telling my iTerm2 + tmux session to ssh into certain remote hosts, automagically putting all my windows where I want them, manipulating my audio volume from the keyboard, toggling different input/output device pairs, etc.

Used to do my custom basic tiling with hammerspoon. I remember I loved it but at some point I started using Rectangle and I gradually forgot what I was using hs for other than window management.

Lots of links/tips on windows management on macOS in this thread. For people interested, you can check out my FLOSS app which brings Windows alt-tab to macOS: https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/

I investigated this space for years so check out the list of alternatives on the page linked above as well.

Also note that i'm looking for someone to take over the project: https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos/issues/1179

> So I decided to use the native macOS window management instead and try to get used to it instead of actively fighting against it.

That’s something I wouldn’t have expected to read here, as I myself find it quite hard to change paradigms. I learned that the hard way when I had to use a Mac for the first time after using Windows and Linux my whole life, and tried to use it as I wanted instead of how it’s intended to be used. Once you know how the paradigm works, you can try to adapt it to your workflow, but not before or you’ll be frustrated quickly.

On macOS, over the years, I have been trying to stay with the default native apps and programs that comes with the OSes as much as possible. You might need to tinker and learn the nuances (shortcuts, etc). However, I continue to tinker with other must-have tools, utilities, and programs to get things done.

1Password, Alfred, Lulu, Rectangle, Bartender (Hidden Bar is the open source alternative) - https://oinam.fyi/digital/apple/

Since a few people already have mentioned Rectangle for Window management, I wanted to point out that there is also a payed version of it called Hookshot (https://hookshot.app/). The same developer also offers a great app called Hyperkey (https://hyperkey.app/) which defines CAPS as your hyper-key.

> Putting the display to sleep easily by moving the mouse cursor in the corner is nice (I’d still prefer a keyboard shortcut), and can be enabled in the system preferences:

You can lock the screen with cmd+ctrl q.

Control–Shift–Power button* or Control–Shift–Media Eject : Put your displays to sleep.

Here are some other keyboard shortcuts: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236

There is no power button anymore:

> * Does not apply to the Touch ID sensor.

I have not found a way yet to reliably put the device to sleep from keyboard. With a shortcut it wakes immediately, maybe because it registers the letting go of the keys as a wakeup signal.

If you mean sleeping the display and not the whole computer, I ended up defining a hot corner to do it in the Displays preference pane in System Preferences. Then I can just swipe the mouse/trackpad to that corner without worrying about overshooting, works every time. I used to use the keyboard shortcut until I got a Mac without the power/eject keys.

Folk interested in exploring the macOS window manager landscape are welcome to check out my annotated list at https://taoofmac.com/space/apps/window_managers

I have been bouncing between Moom and Phoenix of late, and still looking for a good auto-tiling option that isn’t Amethyst (which is OK, but doesn’t do all I want).

> So here I noticed a major difference in how Homebrew seems to work compared to Arch Linux for example. On Arch Linux applications are built from source code centrally instead of relying on binaries from a vendor.

Homebrew also builds from source, but it uses cached builds they call bottles. I believe other package managers that build from source also used cached builds, I don’t know about Arch.

Strange, I had multiple Homebrew builds that took a dmg from some central place, even open-source software like mpv and (my own) DDNet.

You can show/hide terminal windows with a hotkey natively using iTerm2.

Under Preferences > Keys > Hotkey I've set the system-wide hotkey to option+space which means if I need a terminal, I can press those keys and have iTerm pop up over my active window.

Pressing them again hides the window and brings focus back to the previously active window which has been great for productivity.

I am thinking about getting a MacBook Pro M1 Max as well, however I would prefer running Linux on it... hopefully Asahi Linux (https://asahilinux.org) is usable soon.

Or is there (or will there be) a serious competition to the MacBooks in 2022? It doesn't look like.

I love macOS because it gives me pretty much every Linux tool and commodity since it's Unix based but is well organised and with a nice GUI design, you should try it out definitely!

Asahilinux will always be second class on locked down hardware and there are already better performing laptops for half the price.

Don't financially support locked down systems if you care even the slightest bit about freedom of computing.

> there are already better performing laptops

Which ones?

I don't know about better performing, but Manjaro on my Dell xps 9310 is near flawless. I never think about performance, everything is immediate.

From the article:

> "My current assumption is that the videotoolbox hardware decoding support doesn’t support the same codecs in mpv yet as it does in Firefox"

mpv supports videotoolbox hardware decoding of h264/h265, it's just not enabled by default. It prevents the use of most filters and has slightly lower quality decoding in my experience.

To get hardware decoding in mpv and hopefully get the same minimal CPU usage as Firefox just call mpv with `--hwdec=videotoolbox` or add `hwdec=videotoolbox` to your `~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf` file.

Also from the article:

> "here I noticed a major difference in how Homebrew seems to work compared to Arch Linux for example. On Arch Linux applications are built from source code centrally instead of relying on binaries from a vendor."

This is true for Homebrew formula as well, like the mpv formula, just not Homebrew casks. Most casks are proprietary closed source applications.

I forgot to mention that I have set hwdec=videotoolbox already, but vp9 and av01 from youtube don't get hw-decoded anyway.

> This is true for Homebrew formula as well, like the mpv formula, just not Homebrew casks. Most casks are proprietary closed source applications.

But even open source casks seem to be taken centrally instead of built again. My guess is that this is to keep the original developers' certificates.

Thanks for the reply! Also wow I hadn't realize that Apple supports hardware decoding of Google's VP9 codec. Googling a bit, it looks like this is new in the M1 Macs. Though not sure if it supports AV01 yet? When I browse Youtube in Firefox I seem to get AV01 encoded videos. Are you sure Firefox on an M1 Mac is using hardware decoding? I wonder if they might just be using an optimized software decoder. Wish I had an M1 mac to test!

Frustratingly I couldn't find any description of videotoolbox codec support on Apple's documentation, though I did find that this VP9 constant exists: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coremedia/kcmvideo... (but couldn't find an AV01 constant)

Re: Casks, I hadn't thought about it but you're totally right that this is probably mostly due to macOS developer signing issues.

Two must have productivity apps for macOS: Rectangle and Alt-Tab.

I faced similar issues with the Swiss keyboard layout. I suggest switching to the “US International“ layout and use the dead keys to obtain the umlauts. There’s also a keyboard option that enables a umlaut menu with a long press on the keyboard- if you really want to avoid the dead keys (this might help: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/254094/character-a...).

The Apple “English International“ keyboard has a big enter key - if you dislike the small enter key of the US keyboard layout.

I see way more people advocating. Homebrew now than a few years ago.

I chose MacPorts back then since it seemed a bit better designed as a package manager but these days I see few people suggesting it.

What’s the current consensus - is homebrew now good enough to consider switching?

Homebrew is two package management systems with one command line interface. One is MacPorts but worse and with more contributors (formulae, i.e., the main part of Homebrew). The other (casks) is like Chocolatey on Windows, and downloads the installers or bundle images for GUI apps from their official websites, and then does its best to install them non-interactively for you on an ad-hoc basis.

Casks are worth using because they fill a gap that 'proper' package managers mostly don't. Installing GUI apps automatically in this way isn't really package management, but it's still better than installing them manually.

Homebrew's main functionality, on the other hand, still has all of the same problems it always has. It also has the advantage that it's more likely to include trendy, new utilities than MacPorts is because it has more contributors.

I recommend installing Homebrew to a local prefix under your user (e.g., ~/.opt/homebrew) and using it exclusively for 'casks', but continuing to use MacPorts. If you need something that's not packaged in MacPorts yet, consider Nix instead of Homebrew. The package collection, Nixpkgs, is massive and even more up-to-date than Homebrew, and nothing installed from it will break anything from MacPorts (or be affected by anything MacPorts, either).

MacPorts is more likely to include Mac-specific software, but if you're curious about alternatives in general, Pkgsrc is also a sound choice, and you can probably try it alongside MacPorts without breaking anything.

I’ve found MacPorts to be better at running multiple versions of packages simultaneously, for example at my last job I needed to have 3 or 4 different versions of PHP running at the same time and it was a bit of a pain to do that with Homebrew compared to MacPorts.

Homebrew will often give you a more user-friendly config out of the box, whereas MacPorts will often leave you to configure things yourself.

When installing binaries I’ve found MacPorts to be much faster, however it needs to build from source much more often than Homebrew (especially on ARM) which takes far longer.

Homebrew has been good enough since the beginning, hence why it took over from Macports. But it hasn't changed any of it's major design decisions, so if you didn't like it then you wouldn't like it now.

It puts everything in /opt/homebrew/ now, which I believe was an issue for some people before.

I don’t use either. I mostly use my mac as an AWS and linode terminal. I think the only things I install locally are VScode and Go and both of those arrive as dmg/pkg format.

What’s the current state of tiling managers on macOS? Seems Rectangle, Magnet and Amethyst are all mentioned below, has anyone done the “pepsi challenge” and cares to share their findings?

I’d be grateful but I guess I just have to try all three myself…

Yabai gave me the best results by far! It's as fast as you can really go on MacOs and it feels like a true twm system. Unfortunately, due to restrictions of the OS itself (you can see the issue tracker) you can't really have the same quality of tilling as you can on Linux's X or Wayland.

I gave all three of those a try when I was trying MacOS a year or so ago. Rectangle and Magnet basically fill the same niche, except Rectangle is free and kinda eliminates the need for Magnet (I don't quite remember what Magnet did better but I don't remember it being enough to convince me to use it). Amethyst is entire beast of it's own though, and I almost immediately decided it wasn't for me. It doesn't replace the default window server, so it ends up running like a bad TWM and an even worse desktop option. Of the three, Rectangle is the only one I can't live without on MacOS. Amethyst kinda just feels like a waste of resources.

Complete outsider here, when you say ‘replace the default window server’ are you referring to the manager or the entire display server with something like X?

Thanks! I’d give you a beer but you’ll have to settle for internet points :)

I've used both Magnet and Rectangle. They're virtually identical (even the default keybindings). Every now and again, Rectangle will not place a window correctly and I'll have to restart it, but that is rare. I highly recommend both. I haven't tried the other options, so I can't comment on them.

I've used Magnet in the past and now I'm using yabai+skhd. I would say Magnet brings features similar to Windows10 like regions and snapping, while yabai+skhd is closer to something like i3wm with focus movements, space/screen management, swaps, etc.

I have the same MX Master 3 Mouse and had lots of troubles getting the acceleration and scroll feel "normal" on macOS. SmoothScroll[1] was the best for correcting the inconsistent rate of scrolling down pages -- however it was not free, so I stopped using it. I ended up using the free version of USB Overdrive[2] as it allows you to disable acceleration among other things.

1 - https://www.smoothscroll.net/win/

2 - https://www.usboverdrive.com/

I switched back to linux because I enjoyed it more than OSX, maybe I am strange but I find Gnome more "focus".

I was using ubuntu for the last year and hardly customized it, just using Gnome and my tools. (altho i mostly just need a terminal/web browser/vscode and compilers)

last three months I have been ill and had to stay at the hospital with plenty of time in my hand in between chemo so I decided to dig more into linux internals and went with nixos....

I learned so much during that time about my system and how it works. I think I actually enjoy more computing since then...

I don’t get all this hate for animations… they really are barely noticeable! Relax a bit! And also windows manager… I hardly need to have more that 2 windows at the same time together in the same screen!

Amethyst has some quirks, and you need to restart it at least once a day. But releases are fairly frequent and I use it daily. I really like it. I've been using alacritty with tmux because I don't need all the bells and whistles in iterm2. macos mostly has bsd versions of command line tools which tend to lack a lot of features, so `brew install coreutils gsed` gives you sane versions of these tools at the cost of having to prefix everything with `g`. But good enough.

I read all this and after seeing all the workarounds and special fixes to get back to a good workflow he had on the mac... I just have one question: Why use a Mac?

So he likes the extra performance (which he won't use 99.99% of the time), and he likes the screen (why not use an external screen like most sane people?).

I still don't understand. Why give up the amazing arch Linux for shitty Mac OS? Makes no sense whatsoever.

I agree, if you are savy enough working and maintaining your linux desktop I don't think I have any attraction to go back to OSX.....

maybe Alfred was the only nice things about OSX i miss on Linux (even with a bunch of wofi/rofi scripts)....

ah yeah the hardware gestures, I use libinpute-gestures which is nice but come nowhere the builtin osx gestures.

aside of that linux (nixos/sway for me) is IMHO a 100 time more efficient,

In my case: your employer only gives out MacBooks and expects you to use them.

They are a nice thin wedge shape. Use them as a doorstop.

I've been using Moom since 2013 as a window tiler on macOS. That combined with the new window snapping is much better than macOS tiling IMHO.