Well, that didn’t take me long at all, did it? (Bye Mac, Hi Ubuntu)
I have been using Ubuntu for about half a year and I liked it, I really did; just not all of it. Some things were amazing and some were just telling me I had made a mistake, and this feeling never left, unfortunately. But anyway, Ubuntu and I haven’t broken up on bad terms, we’re still friends, so let me first get into what I liked about it and why it took me half a year to decide that it just wasn’t the right one for me.
What I enjoyed
The speed
I really can’t say that macOS is slow because it isn’t, but Ubuntu just seemed to be a tad bit faster in about everything. Granted, faster app loading times and overall system speed-up was probably mostly owing to a faster processor and an NVMe drive, but I think that the simplicity of the system and lack of unnecessary overhead helped a bit too.
Better Spaces
However, I mostly noticed the speed when switching from one space to another, and this is still one of the things I miss a little on my Mac. Ubuntu’s (Gnome 3 environment, specifically) Spaces are simply a lot more versatile and swift than those on macOS. Thankfully, TotalSpaces2 (https://totalspaces.binaryage.com/) is an app for macOS which can help with this and it now works for Sierra too (which it didn’t a few months ago due to some low-level changes), so I might just stop complaining about this once I set TotalSpaces up.
Versatility and app equivalents
Other than that, I really enjoyed having the immense versatility to do basically anything I’d wanted with my system, such as remapping my entire keyboard, which I was in process of before finally deciding on switching back to Mac. Some of the app equivalents like the suggested Albert were also quite… well, I think functional about sums it up, but even thinking about this brings me more to the negative side of Ubuntu.
What I didn’t enjoy
Versatility comes at a price
Sure, you can remap your entire keyboard to your liking, you can create custom extensions to Albert (you can do that for Alfred too, and much better, actually), and you can even fiddle around with all the system settings you can think of, but the outcome is not always as straightforward as you’d like and this takes a lot of time.
When trying to remap my Caps Lock to a Hyper key + Escape, which is awesome, by the way, I spent hours online searching for a solution, looking through xmodmap documentation, and playing around with this, before finally settling on just Caps Lock to Escape, which is by far not as useful. I tried getting used to Albert but it just wasn’t even close to Alfred, and it didn’t work very well at all on a HiDPI screen.
Linux is not ready for HiDPI yet
This was, unfortunately, a problem with many other apps, including the built-in ones. On Unity, scaling worked pretty ok with some additional tweaks for apps like Spotify, but on Gnome 3, which I preferred, it didn’t go that well. Most apps were fine, yes, but seeing that tiny window of a new app I’d installed always infuriated me.
And this got even worse when I connected an external display. Since the external display wasn’t HiDPI, I couldn’t set a reasonable global scaling, and Ubuntu (or other versions of it) didn’t allow me to set a different scaling for each display, so I ultimately had to choose just one display that would look good, while the other looked like a zoomed in/out trash.
So I’m back to Mac
Honestly, within a couple of days, I got used to my old favorite system, and even on the keyboard layout, even though it was really hard for me to switch to the standard Windows/Linux layout half a year ago. When I connected my external display, everything worked perfectly, one display was scaled, the other wasn’t, each had a separate group of spaces, and it was just so much more usable.
I immediately installed all my favorite apps like Alfred, BetterTouchTool, and Karabiner, and I also appreciated that I could finally use Adobe CC, Microsoft Office and other non-Linux apps natively again. Since I knew my way around macOS already, I was set up within a few hours and I finally felt happy with my computer again, and I still do.
Mac is also very versatile
I wrote about how Linux is awesome because you can change whatever you like, it just comes at a certain price. Well, you can do that on a Mac too, to just a slightly lower degree, using apps that were designed for this, and the main advantage of this is that these apps tend to work. You can remap your keyboard using Karabiner and maybe Hammerspoon (I haven’t really used it that much), you can get that Hyper + Escape combo within a few minutes of Googling, simply because there were people before you who have already accomplished this, you can create any shortcut/gesture/TouchBar widget you can imagine using BetterTouchTool, and you get your clipboard and snippet manager, system/internet lookup tool, and a powerful workflow creator from Alfred.
Mac is not free and that’s awesome
It may sound nonsensical that Mac is awesome because it is not free, but I believe this really is the case, simply because there’s money flowing through it, and hence incentive. With apps like Albert on Linux, it was great to see that it can accomplish some of Alfred’s functionality and for free, but it was far from the user experience I get with Alfred, and that’s because Alfred is paid, constantly developed, and used by a lot of people, while Albert is an open-source experiment.
And the same goes for the apps like BetterTouchTool. Sure, you could probably get the same results for free, and BetterTouchTool used to be free, but now that it’s paid (and I think $5 is not much at all), the developers have more incentive to fix bugs and provide better functionality, which they still do, seeing as this is the only app that lets you customize your TouchBar I know of.
Lastly, I think the same principle applies to the system itself, and the ecosystem that Apple has built. Of course, Macs are expensive and almost certainly more than they should be, but you get a solid system that is great on its own and that gives you a plethora of amazing apps to work with and to enhance your user experience even further. While Ubuntu and other Linux distros are free, they don’t have the money flowing in, so the incentive to make that system work on all computers and function better is just not as high, in my opinion.
Last words
But anyway, I have tried using Ubuntu for a while, I liked it, but I wasn’t satisfied with it nonetheless, which is why I had to switch back. There’s much more I would like to add to this post but it’s already too long, so I’ll maybe just leave that to the comments section. If you had a similar experience, are trying Mac/Linux and are still unsure about it, or you just disagree with me on some of the points I made, I’d love to hear about it and have a discussion.