So I moved to Linux

[robertosh]

Thanks for the nice post. I'm in the making of that. I would just add for the ones that are thinking in trying Linux, that I don't think the switch to Linux should be a on-off thing, like stopping using mac in Day 0 and start with Linux on day 1. It can be gradual and you can still keep your mac for some specific stuff around. Eventually, if your use cases in mac fade away, you can do the full switch and selling your mac (or not)

My recommendation for somebody that wants to try it out is to buy a cheap second hand PC and start experimenting, install different things, try different OS, etc. Ubuntu/Fedora with Gnome I think it's the sweet spot for anyone coming from Mac. Most of day-to-day apps have an official Linux version now, and normally there is an equivalent for more specific apps but that would require more work.

I'm currently using both my Mac and my Fedora box. Mac mostly for developing in XCode and for some audio stuff (Logic). For media consumption, browsing, gaming I use Fedora.

 

[robertosh]

Apple Music / Airpods. Decided I don't want them. Apple Music is utterly painful and laggy if you accidentally hit something that requires network access when the network is dicky. Also there are constant BT problems now with Airpods dropping due to the sheer amount of BT devices. So I've gone back to cabled earphones - some £20 Sony ones and the Apple USB-C/3.5 adapter for the phone for now. Player is VLC both on desktop and phone and I am using FLACs ripped from CDs with abcde or bought from online sources. I am directly supporting the artists and get to keep actual media forever without a subscription cost then. This has been a slog but I feel it was worth it.

I'm curious about your music workflow. I'm also ripping CD's (by the way, using an old Apple USB Superdrive that Apple do not let us to use anymore on modern macs) and I stored locally and on a network drive. My problem is that I would like to have an easy way to sync music with my iPhone. I know that are some kind of Connector Apps but Apple are constantly breaking these. How do you manage the sync with your iPhone? Or you don't have an iPhone?

 

[neuropsychguy]

Thanks for sharing. I hope it works out for you. Over the years I've tried to migrate mostly to Linux, but I always keep coming back to macOS.

Now, saying that, I currently have a laptop with CachyOS, one with Fedora (on what used to be a Chromebook), several Linux VMs between my unRAID server and mini pc running Proxmox, and a computer with Windows 11 with Ubuntu in WSL. I also use a high performance cluster for work that's running Linux.

While things mostly run smoothly, there are occasional updates that break things. This is much less common than about 10 years ago, but it happened just a couple weeks ago on one of my VMs. I have all these just for fun and the experience -- tinkering with Linux and various computer settings is a hobby.

But what computers do I use most? My Macs.

Would I ever go full-time to Linux? Maybe, but I'd keep a Mac laptop. I haven't found other laptops yet that are as well designed and made that cost substantially less than Macs do (factoring in resale values and my time managing them).

 

[romanof]

In my case it was the other way around. I was fully invested in Linux from about 2000 until I saw a Mac Mini at a demo of a video player. Front Row I think it was. From there I quickly moved to using OSX as my daily driver for anything but programming. All that Apple offered back in the day was Objective C and I could never get any enthusiasm for that language, despite being a C programmer.

And Xcode changed way too much and too often, obsoleting any expensive books bought only the year before and requiring both changes and learning to the new design. So I stuck to Linux for my programming. Of course, one of the drivers was that I was trained on Unix sometime in the 90's.

Actually, had OSX not been Unix based I probably would not have been enticed to try it other than maybe as a consumer box to run specific tasks, like my video library. But, despite the attempt of Apple to move from its BSD roots, Linux/Unix utilities still run.

So, my usage is about half and half, I would say.

 

[leifp]

As someone who has run Linux off and on since the mid 90s (I experimented with SuSe to start) but never committed, I am in the process of hardening myself to do so. I have a couple of Windows boxes and a bunch of Apple stuff. Step 1: get a Linux distro installed on my NUC, likely an atomic install, just to game. Step 2: when Apple finally releases Mac Studios that I can afford (and want), my M1Max will get turned into a Linux box as well. As I understand it, there’s a distribution of one on that list… that one needs to be able to do anything and everything I do in macOS and on my gaming PCs.

Then live with them. If I can come to terms with the internecine struggles of the Linux “community” (as @cjsuk notes in his urinal comic) and come to grips with the work necessary (lethargy and inertia are the big stumbling blocks for me otherwise pretty much everything I need or want to do on a computer is doable on Linux) then I will be cloud free and MS/Apple free to enjoy the frustrations of Linux rather than the frustrations of others…

 

[boswald]

I'm sticking with the Apple ecosystem but I do have a CachyOS gaming PC I use for games. I think I'd miss my Apple stuff too much if I sold it all. Besides, the computer is OLD and it was cheaper (at the time) to buy a new laptop for daily use than to part out a gaming machine that I play maybe 3 games on.

 

[Siliconguy]

My recommendation for somebody that wants to try it out is to buy a cheap second hand PC and start experimenting,

There are a lot of cheap PCs out there, but remember that an Intel Mac can run Linux too. I started with Mint (which has really easy installation of Broadcom Wi-fi drivers unlike nearly everything else.) Since the beginning of the year I was playing with various distros including Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Zorin, Debian, and Fedora with Plasma. Gnome was my least favorite by a large margin. Zorin supposedly is very Windows 11ish and I didn't like that either. (I never used Windows 11 and Windows 10 has apparently been 'updated' to the point I don't really recognize it.

The main PC is Mint Cinnamon, and I have an 2012 Mini that is on Mint MATE. I rather like that one too, it's sort of austere but quite friendly for some reason. It even works on a 2009 Mini (Core 2 Duo) although it is a bit pokey.

KDE Plasma is all the rage for the elite and it is pretty, but it's also a resource hog and some of the UI does not work on on a 2010 Mac Pro with a Radeon RX 560 graphics card.

So yes, you should go and play. For the moment avoid Arch, they had a security breach in a code repository and it will take some time to clean up the resulting mess. Also Arch is not really intended for beginners. Mint and Zorin are, and Ubuntu is manageable, they have good help sections.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Excellent write-up. I have plans to shift to BSD/Linux with my next computer. Probably Thinkpad. Apple's really not the same without Steve Jobs appreciation for design and art. And Jobs didn't seem to worship profit anywhere near the same level as current leadership. Jobs had that Indian/Buddhist background that I suspect helped him not get snared by greed to the extent of others.

I've used Linux in the past as my sole OS (several years) so I expect no major issues or any challenging transition.

They continue to stray from where Steve was at on so much of this.

This quote below never leaves my mind when thinking about all this and Apple today and moving forward, particularly as they lean further and further into being "the subscription company" 😞

 

[SLW3]

Laptops are still second to none, IMO. There's nothing wrong with macOS + Homebrew; I can run any system I want via VMware or Parallels, and it works really well. I'm not sure if I hated Windows as an OS or the hardware that follows it. But desktops? You need a true love for 60 Hz displays or a lot of money. There's no reason to avoid a Linux desktop (with a real GPU) these days.

 

[Andy_2341]

I'm curious about your music workflow. I'm also ripping CD's (by the way, using an old Apple USB Superdrive that Apple do not let us to use anymore on modern macs) and I stored locally and on a network drive. My problem is that I would like to have an easy way to sync music with my iPhone. I know that are some kind of Connector Apps but Apple are constantly breaking these. How do you manage the sync with your iPhone? Or you don't have an iPhone?

I rip CD’s using a usb LG disk reader on my Macbook Neo to sync to my iPods. Modern Macs still rip cds. I’m not positive, but I think you could plug the iPhone into the Mac and sync music like ipods do as long as Apple Music subscription/cloud doesn’t exist on either. The music should appear in the music app. I’ll check here in a bit.

 

[romanof]

There are a lot of cheap PCs out there, but remember that an Intel Mac can run Linux too.

Most definitely. My most favorite Linux machine is an old Cheesegrater 5.1. You can get them on Ebay for peanuts. I usually run Debian, but have installed other distros for trial. Solid as a rock and built like a battleship. (Stand on it to get a book from the top shelf - it won't care) Lots of room for cards and drives, drivers are long since tested and stable, etc. I added a 4 port USB 3 card since the machine comes with USB2, of course, and a WiFi card just because I had an extra. And a legacy parallel printer card. (Yep, but for the port, not a printer.)

And it is quiet.

The only disadvantage in the summer is the Xeons that emulate a 250 watt space heater. In the winter, that is a bonus.

Can't hold a candle to my Ryzen 7 64gb LLM machine in Geekbench, of course, but I do mostly C, C++, Perl and Ruby coding and don't need 2026 horsepower.

 

[cjsuk]

I'm curious about your music workflow. I'm also ripping CD's (by the way, using an old Apple USB Superdrive that Apple do not let us to use anymore on modern macs) and I stored locally and on a network drive. My problem is that I would like to have an easy way to sync music with my iPhone. I know that are some kind of Connector Apps but Apple are constantly breaking these. How do you manage the sync with your iPhone? Or you don't have an iPhone?

I’m currently using abcde to rip to FLAC. VLC as a player on the iPhone. I use LocalSend to send individual tracks to the phone.

 

[fedora616]

I tried. I have a MBP 16 M3 Max with 36gb of RAM (30 gpu)

I made myself a Mac Pro stylish PC. Beautiful and powerful.

- AMD 9900x3d
- 64gb of RAM
- 2TB of SSD
- GPU RX 9070 16gb
- QUBE 540

With fedora, and, it was amazing, everything amazing. I'm in love with it.
So fast, more powerful, as snappy like M chips, and the OS simply amazing. For me, better than macOS (KDE version)

Amazing again, but....

Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro and Power Consumption were an issue.

I tried a lot of photo editors and none of them was as fast and useful like Pixelmator pro

I some video editors and Kdenlive and was ok, but the file management was not for me.

And power consumption, from 0 noise and heat for 2 screens (4k and 2k). To listen the CPU fans speed up and more energy consumption. The energy bill show a double increase, so....

I'm back with macOS.

Thinking to make a Hackintosh but to much trouble and still power consumption, so prefer to pay M prices.
I was about to buy Mac Studio with 64gb of ram M4 or wait for M5 and next day prices increase, jajaja, pretty bad schedule for me.

I stuck with my MBP until Studio M5 came out to sell my MBP.

 

[OldNewMBP]

They continue to stray from where Steve was at on so much of this.

This quote below never leaves my mind when thinking about all this and Apple today and moving forward, particularly as they lean further and further into being "the subscription company" 😞

View attachment 2649547

Honestly, to me, a little more modularity would help have people saying that Apple products are easy to maintain in terms of hardware. But since we are on the quest for speed, well, we won't see that anytime soon.

 

[lostPod]

Im surprised you didn't decide to self-host with a NAS or something.

 

[meggie_v]

Good for you, OP. Glad to hear it's working out, too.

I've been thinking about the same. Last year I bought an M4 Pro MacBook Pro to replace an "obsolesced" 2015 13" Intel i5 MBP, and the experience has been a demonstration of the whole "wherever you go, there you are" parable--by which I mean, nice as the M4 Pro MPB is, the leap in raw "results" or "productivity" or quality of my "output" over what I was kicking out of the 2015 MPB isn't huge.

I don't write that as a proud, defiant luddite--I'm as surprised as anyone by it. I bought the M4 Pro MPB because it offered advancements that sounded significantly and practically useful to me. I'm an avid photographer and digital artist, so the "XDR" screen and its reference calibration modes sounded terrific. Moreover, Apple's marketing around the unified architecture and the overall efficiency of "M" silicon reads like a declaration of substantial, practical quality-of-life improvement in every app I touch, from Capture One to Photoshop to Clip Studio Paint to Ableton Live to Visual Studio Code. (And on my 2015 MPB, I was a also notch or two back from the latest development on most of these apps--so I anticipated picking up a big boost boost just in advancing to latest-and-greatest software.) And of course, I'm open to the latest trends in generative AI, custom vibe-coded software, and agentic workflows; having powerful and efficient compute at my fingertips seemed like an important step into a future I'm curious about.

Welp.

A year into my shiny Apple Silicon future, I keep bumping against an illuminating truth: my creative interests and ideas hadn't really come close to crashing the limits of what my 10-year-old Intel MPB had on offer. The M4 Pro MPB's promised quality-of-life improvements weren't lies--they exist--but they prove more subtle than expected in day-to-day work and they certainly aren't non-negotiables for the results I'm delivering. One case in point: the 2015 MBP's screen turns out to have been already more capable than my photographic screen and print work ever needed it to be, and it was well-calibrated from the factory; so the M4 MPB's "XDR" screen and its "reference" capabilities don't ultimately don't help me (if anything, they add a complication: the "XDR" capability "blooms" even in SDR highlights and gets in the way of print preparation--so I'm now constantly dancing among native, DCI-P3, and sRGB reference modes). The M4 pro silicon itself is obviously much, *much* faster than 2015's mid-grade Intel Core i5--I feel the legit "snap" everywhere--but a glance at the MacOS activity monitor shows an appalling portion of that processing power and memory diverted to "Liquid Glass" UI fluff-animation and surveillance telemetry, both for third-party apps (Geezus H Christ, Adobe creative cloud!) and the full "onslaught" of iCloud tie-ins Apple now foists over MacOS.

Stepping back, I just shake my head at how base and thirsty the whole tech-computing slice of the economic pie has become, at how much energy and talent and design divert into the scrambling, suctioning, and selling of my attentions. For me the grand summary of all this might be in my M4 MBP hardware's ridiculous resistance to being turned off! Just like an iPhone. If you power it down (by software menu only--the real-estate formerly occupied by a hardware power button is now a "lock" button), literally ANY interaction with the hardware pops it back to life. Open the lid when it's off? It's on! Touch any key or the trackpad while it's off and open? Hello Meg! I'm on again! Turn it off and plug it in? BOOM! We're back! I'm on, I'm here again! Gimme gimme gimme your attentions, Meg!!! The 2015 MPB seems so deeply quaint by comparison--if you turned it off it stayed off until you hit the power button, ONLY the power button, again.

That 2015 Macbook Pro still works superbly, by the way. I had the battery replaced a few years back; it looks new. But Apple halts it at MacOS 12 Monterey. What to do with it in 2026? I've always been curious about open source, so I figured what the hell, why not try a Linux distro on it and just see what's what. I did an hour's worth of reading on popular options and picked System76's Pop_OS riff on Ubuntu / Debian.

TL;DR: reader, the 2015 MPB is BACK, relevant, and a monumental living indictment of contemporary big-tech going nowhere fast.

Linux installation took 20 minutes, including the download. Everything worked perfectly out of the box, no tweaks / no terminal dives / no notes. Performance is SNAPPY--we're talking about a middling Broadwell Core i5, integrated graphics, and 8GB ram, here--which tells you exactly how much raw nonsense weight MacOS is hauling around these days.

And the apps? I can't believe how capable and refined they are--remember, in many cases we're talking about hobby software engineered by a handful of generous people in their free time--and it's oh-so-close to what you get from all-the-talent-money-can-buy at Apple and Adobe. What impresses me most, I think, is that the apps aren't at all "knock-offs" of "brand-name" stuff--many have their own original and interesting perspectives. Darktable reinvents the RAW photo-processing workflow around an entirely different perceptual philosophy. Krita has a more advanced and expressive brush engine than Photoshop.

All the frontier AI capability is right there, too, if you want it. You can spool up VS Code and let your vibing agents rip; the access is no different than if you're doing it on the latest apple silicon machine.

Is it enough to get me to flip the platform switch? Maybe? I'll keep experimenting and see where curiosity takes me. I like @robertosh 's suggestion above that the "switch" doesn't have to be "one-off" break, but rather can be a kind of slow slide from one platform to the other as experience accumulates and new workflows develop. But even in these early days of experimenting, I can't deny an overwhelming feeling I'll summarize this way: the more I use MacOS and Linux side-by-side, the more I feel like MacOS is built for Apple's enrichment, while Linux is built for mine.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[chikorita157]

I never really consider desktop Linux as an alternative, the UX is still terrible and it still is to this day as it’s either user unfriendly as the user interfaces are designed by developers instead of UX designers, which makes it very unintuitive. You get abominations like Gnome 3, which has the worst UX/Desktop Enviroment and difficult to use and The GIMP, which is perhaps the worst UX ever seen in any application.

I think this is a problem with most open source software as they have pretty bad UX. Even with the missteps with macOS with Liquid Glass, it’s still far better than Linux will ever be. Same can be said about Windows, although I’m not really a big fan of Windows, especially after Windows 8.

Not to mention, some hardware, namely NVidia graphics are notorious to install properly, and when you add desktop to the mix, when things break, it often requires a reinstall.

I have tried and bounced off Linux several times since the early 2000s. It’s just not a very user friendly OS and I don’t want to spend time fixing things to get things to work, requiring the use of the command line and editing configuration files. While I don’t mind using Linux for server stuff as there are far less things to go wrong. I think it’s a good OS for that, but when you introduce the desktop things, there is a lot more that can go wrong for the fact that it adds even more complexity when things go wrong.

There is a reason why I use macOS and will never switch to Linux, would rather give up on computers than ever main that OS. Sure, I have built a “Steam Machine Killer” with using Bazzite, which makes it possible to game without using Windows, but it’s still not perfect with anti-cheat being one of them. Also, some games require some workarounds to work, which is the reoccurring problem with Linux. I would rather have my system to work instead of being a chore to use. But for the most part, most games don’t require tweaks and only been using the SteamOS interface in Bazzite.

Likewise, the same can be said about Hackintosh, it takes a lot of troubleshooting when things go wrong with an update and it’s not an easy experience to get everything to work as you need the right hardware, same with Linux, although the hardware compatibility is a bit better than Hackintosh. That is besides not all the software is on Linux, especially creative and professional software like Adobe. The open source options are not going to cut it, especially given how terrible The GIMP is.

I want a computer that works, and Apple still provides that, unlike Microsoft which made some pretty bad decisions (and also had Windows installs break, but probably not as often compared to the 9x and XP days).

 

[capamac]

I started with this on the first Apple computers I used:

Then moved to this:

Then in college I used this:

And now this on my mac:

So when I use BSD or Linux ... it just feels "normal." :^)

 

[Luftkopf]

Good for you, OP. Glad to hear it's working out, too.

I've been thinking about the same. Last year I bought an M4 Pro MacBook Pro to replace an "obsolesced" 2015 13" Intel i5 MBP, and the experience has been a demonstration of the whole "wherever you go, there you are" parable--by which I mean, nice as the M4 Pro MPB is, the leap in raw "results" or "productivity" or quality of my "output" over what I was kicking out of the 2015 MPB isn't huge.

I don't write that as a proud, defiant luddite--I'm as surprised as anyone by it. I bought the M4 Pro MPB because it offered advancements that sounded significantly and practically useful to me. I'm an avid photographer and digital artist, so the "XDR" screen and its reference calibration modes sounded terrific. Moreover, Apple's marketing around the unified architecture and the overall efficiency of "M" silicon reads like a declaration of substantial, practical quality-of-life improvement in every app I touch, from Capture One to Photoshop to Clip Studio Paint to Ableton Live to Visual Studio Code. (And on my 2015 MPB, I was a also notch or two back from the latest development on most of these apps--so I anticipated picking up a big boost boost just in advancing to latest-and-greatest software.) And of course, I'm open to the latest trends in generative AI, custom vibe-coded software, and agentic workflows; having powerful and efficient compute at my fingertips seemed like an important step into a future I'm curious about.

Welp.

A year into my shiny Apple Silicon future, I keep bumping against an illuminating truth: my creative interests and ideas hadn't really come close to crashing the limits of what my 10-year-old Intel MPB had on offer. The M4 Pro MPB's promised quality-of-life improvements weren't lies--they exist--but they prove more subtle than expected in day-to-day work and they certainly aren't non-negotiables for the results I'm delivering. One case in point: the 2015 MBP's screen turns out to have been already more capable than my photographic screen and print work ever needed it to be, and it was well-calibrated from the factory; so the M4 MPB's "XDR" screen and its "reference" capabilities don't ultimately don't help me (if anything, they add a complication: the "XDR" capability "blooms" even in SDR highlights and gets in the way of print preparation--so I'm now constantly dancing among native, DCI-P3, and sRGB reference modes). The M4 pro silicon itself is obviously much, *much* faster than 2015's mid-grade Intel Core i5--I feel the legit "snap" everywhere--but a glance at the MacOS activity monitor shows an appalling portion of that processing power and memory diverted to "Liquid Glass" UI fluff-animation and surveillance telemetry, both for third-party apps (Geezus H Christ, Adobe creative cloud!) and the full "onslaught" of iCloud tie-ins Apple now foists over MacOS.

Stepping back, I just shake my head at how base and thirsty the whole tech-computing slice of the economic pie has become, at how much energy and talent and design divert into the scrambling, suctioning, and selling of my attentions. For me the grand summary of all this might be in my M4 MBP hardware's ridiculous resistance to being turned off! Just like an iPhone. If you power it down (by software menu only--the real-estate formerly occupied by a hardware power button is now a "lock" button), literally ANY interaction with the hardware pops it back to life. Open the lid when it's off? It's on! Touch any key or the trackpad while it's off and open? Hello Meg! I'm on again! Turn it off and plug it in? BOOM! We're back! I'm on, I'm here again! Gimme gimme gimme your attentions, Meg!!! The 2015 MPB seems so deeply quaint by comparison--if you turned it off it stayed off until you hit the power button, ONLY the power button, again.

That 2015 Macbook Pro still works superbly, by the way. I had the battery replaced a few years back; it looks new. But Apple halts it at MacOS 12 Monterey. What to do with it in 2026? I've always been curious about open source, so I figured what the hell, why not try a Linux distro on it and just see what's what. I did an hour's worth of reading on popular options and picked System76's Pop_OS riff on Ubuntu / Debian.

TL;DR: reader, the 2015 MPB is BACK, relevant, and a monumental living indictment of contemporary big-tech going nowhere fast.

Linux installation took 20 minutes, including the download. Everything worked perfectly out of the box, no tweaks / no terminal dives / no notes. Performance is SNAPPY--we're talking about a middling Broadwell Core i5, integrated graphics, and 8GB ram, here--which tells you exactly how much raw nonsense weight MacOS is hauling around these days.

And the apps? I can't believe how capable and refined they are--remember, in many cases we're talking about hobby software engineered by a handful of generous people in their free time--and it's oh-so-close to what you get from all-the-talent-money-can-buy at Apple and Adobe. What impresses me most, I think, is that the apps aren't at all "knock-offs" of "brand-name" stuff--many have their own original and interesting perspectives. Darktable reinvents the RAW photo-processing workflow around an entirely different perceptual philosophy. Krita has a more advanced and expressive brush engine than Photoshop.

All the frontier AI capability is right there, too, if you want it. You can spool up VS Code and let your vibing agents rip; the access is no different than if you're doing it on the latest apple silicon machine.

Is it enough to get me to flip the platform switch? Maybe? I'll keep experimenting and see where curiosity takes me. I like @robertosh 's suggestion above that the "switch" doesn't have to be "one-off" break, but rather can be a kind of slow slide from one platform to the other as experience accumulates and new workflows develop. But even in these early days of experimenting, I can't deny an overwhelming feeling I'll summarize this way: the more I use MacOS and Linux side-by-side, the more I feel like MacOS is built for Apple's enrichment, while Linux is built for mine.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't know. I guess it all comes down to what you want your computer to do. Going from a 2012 11" i7 MacBook Air to an M3 Pro was a day and night difference to me. Some of the software I need to use now wouldn't even run on my old Air!

Given my own experiences, Linux feels like it's an OS for people who either need it to do serious IT work, or who just want to play about with the OS more than just doing things. macOS is built for me to just do what I need to.