2026-09-29

Switching from Linux to Mac

You must be wondering... What on earth is this guy doing?! He's switching in the wrong direction!

Why switch?

I know, Linux is fine and great but I always felt a bit of friction in the general day to day stuff. Converting stuff from one office format to another, everything that's not dev tooling living in the browser and not being able to properly enroll into my employers corporate system so I had to sign into things way more often than enrolled devices.

It kinda wore me down and when I was up for a new device I decided to try a Mac (an M5 MacBook Pro to be specific). Before pulling the trigger I did do some upfront research and the switch, at least for my work would not change much since it's VSCode and terminal stuff for almost everything. So on that front, Linux to Mac was not bad at all, basically have to learn some new shortcut keys and that was it.

The work-arounds

When it comes to some of the native things on Mac... work-arounds were needed.

Cmd-Tab

The big one: ~~Alt~~Cmd-Tab behavior. What. The. Fuck. Apple! Of course it had to be something special. Apps stay running when you close them, fine, but when you then switch back to them using Cmd-Tab they don't pop back up again (they do "focus" I guess, because the top bar changes, but no window appears), oh-kay. If I minimize them, would it then work?? Nah. I could not get used to that, at all. It's just too embedded into my muscle memory and use it so often that this needed to be fixed. Thankfully I'm not alone and there's a tool called BetterCmdTab which makes it work like I want it to. Just at the default settings it fixed everything.

Scrolling

The other big one: Touchpad scrolling and mouse scrolling are the same setting! I'm sure some of you are going to call me a weirdo, but I like the natural scrolling on the touchpad but my brain breaks when I do that on a scrollwheel. That nonsense had to go as well. Yet another tool! LinearMouse. Same thing, installed it, looked at it once to set the proper scroll behavior and boom. Fixed.

Window management

I had already assumed that window management would be a bit of a step back after years of Pop!_OS automatic tiling but thankfully there's a tool that makes it at least somewhat better. Rectangle lets me move and arrange windows with shortcut keys so that's something. There's more advanced stuff out there but I'll try it like this first because I don't really want to overload on tools for things I can adjust to (like the whole Cmd, Option, Ctrl, fn circus).

This might all sound a bit like complaining, and I guess it is. macOS is just different and I went in expecting at least some of these things and I'll learn the new things along the way.

The upsides

A huge upside of this switch is that the hardware is just far superior to anything I've had before. My Framework 13 was nice, but nothing like this. Battery life is really good, display is really good, touchpad is great, sound is insanely good. And on top of all that, this thing rips when you run small AI models locally! Great for playing around with GenAI.

Gaming?

I've not tried to run any games on this thing just yet but I'll definitely try at some point. Probably not as good as Linux (yet?) but I'm sure some stuff will work.

Wrapping up

Altogether it's a bit of an adjustment but probably not nearly as big of a jump if I'd come from Windows to this. The choice to never touch Windows again was made a long time ago and Linux is still the OS of choice, even for gaming. For work tho, this will do perfectly fine with the help of some small tools.

harre.dev