A.Way Mac OS
This is the fifth post in my series on finding an alternative to Mac OS X.
A bit over a year ago I wrote about my search for an alternative to Mac OS andswitch to Linux. In this post I reflect on how that year went and detail somefurther adventures into Mac OS alternatives.
January 2017 — Linux All The Things
This one is tricky. Ideally you would be able to go into the App Store on a Mac, look at your previous Purchases, and download it from there. However, on newer versions of macOS this is not possible. If you are running a Mac with Yosemite installe. The best way to restore your Mac to factory settings is to erase your hard drive and reinstall macOS. After macOS installation is complete, the Mac restarts to a setup assistant that asks you to choose a country or region. To leave the Mac in an out-of-box state, don't continue setup. Instead, press Command-Q to shut down the Mac. Engst looked at several ways to get Mac OS X Lion (10.7) installed, a popular goal since it supports iCloud services and is usually the latest version of Mac OS X that these machines can handle. Step Four: Create an Apple Mac OS Virtual Machine. Create Apple Mac OS X Virtual Machine. Click File, select New Virtual Machine Select Typical (recommended) and click Next. Select I will install the operating system later. Select Apple Mac OS X in the Guest operating system section and select macOS 10.14 in the Version section. The easiest way to perform an Undo on Mac is with a keyboard shortcut: Command + Z Simply press Command and Z together and the last action, typing, or activity will be “undone” on Mac OS. Note that some apps have multiple layers of Undo, meaning you can continuously Undo and revert back various steps and actions or typing.
After originally choosing to use elementary OS full time I grew frustratedwith some aspects of the system and switched to Arch Linux. After a bit oftime on Budgie I eventually settled on the GNOME desktop environment.
The experiment was going well so I also installed Arch on my Mac mini andMacBook Pro in addition to my work PC. I usedthis as the primary OS on them.
February 2017 — Settling Into GNOME
I installed tools like Albert and Plank, GNOME extensions, and a customtheme to feel at home in GNOME. Over the following months I gave these up as Igot more comfortable with the environment. I now run a vanilla GNOME desktop.
Yay JavaScript? pic.twitter.com/9WzI1BXmaR
— Wesley Moore (@wezm) February 8, 2017My experience with GNOME extensions was mostly bad. Many I tried suffered oneof these issues: memory leaks, flakiness that broke gnome-shell, orgenerally low quality. I question the choice of building significant parts ofthe shell in JavaScript.
April 2017 — New Job
In April I started a new job and was given a choice between a ThinkPad T470sand a MacBook Pro 13'. I chose the ThinkPad. It too runs Arch and GNOME.I found the ThinkPad to be pretty lacklustrebut it does run Linux well.
A.way Mac Os Update
There are 3 other devs at work running Linux. All the other devs have MacBooks,mostly the 13” MacBook “Escape”. That's the one without a touch bar and onlytwo USB-C ports. My feelings about modern MacBooks were only reinforced byseeing these machine in use on a daily basis.
Each MacBook is issued with a gross $100 dongle to connect it to theexternal displays we use, and to provide at least one USB-A port. The USB portis juggled between external keyboard, mouse dongle, phone charger, andoccasionally a USB hard drive. For a time there was a shortage of these donglesin Melbourne. Some people tried non-Apple ones which proved flakey and causedsystem instability. Apple's choice to fully embrace USB-C has completelyignored what people actually need from their computers.
I'd estimate we have 20–30 of these MacBooks in the office. Many people chooseto use a crappy company supplied Logitech keyboard with their MacBook or apersonally purchased Filco TKL. I haven't seen the same sort offailure rates mentioned elsewhere but I've still seen a coupleof the MacBook keyboards fail in their short life. One had a key become stickyand unreliable, the other had its space fall off.
Starting a new job also meant that my chunky work PC came home, replacingthe Mac mini. I later sold the mini for 60% of the price I paid for it 5years ago! It was one of the quad core ones they don't make any more. Goes toshow people want these machines. For whatever reason Apple is happy sellingthree year old hardware at brand new prices.
August 2017 — New Laptop
In August as I gained more confidence that the switch was going to stick Ibought my first non-Apple personal laptop: a Dell XPS 15. The XPS has proven to bereliable, well-built, fast, and has a 4K screen that continues to impress me.On top of this it still manages ~8 hours battery life.
The XPS is a beast: Quad core i7, 32Gb RAM, 1Tb SSD, 4K display, and discretegraphics. It's a fairly heavy laptop, but I love that I have the choice of athicker, heavier machine if I want better battery life, a larger screen,or more ports. I'm not forced to compromise for thinness and lightness. Iregularly work with Rust and having a powerful machine for compiling isreally helpful.
The thing I dislike about the XPS the most is probably the power connector. Imiss the ease of attachment and feedback of MagSafe. The Dell power connectoris a barrel style connector with an LED embedded in it. The LED appears toserve no useful purpose. It's always on, whether connected or not and doesn'tchange colour or turn off when charged.
October 2017 — FreeBSD Desktop
I continued to be lured by a BSD desktop. The stable base + rolling packagesmodel of the system is appealing to me. I prefer BSD style licensing, and theflexibility and guarantees that ZFS provides.
I installed FreeBSD alongside Arch on the XPS but its laptop support (Wi-Fi,graphics, power efficiency) seems to be quite a bit behind Linux.
Eventually I realised I could try running it on my desktop PC. All thecomponents were well-supported, including the Nvidia graphics card. Nvidiaactually release official drivers for FreeBSD.
ZFS likes to use whole disks and one of the benefits of generic desktophardware is that it's upgradable. I invested in a trio of 250Gb Samsung 850SSDs and added them to the system. Then installed FreeBSD 11.1 on them.
Let’s build a zpool #zfs#FreeBSDpic.twitter.com/XMfMNELZbK
— Wesley Moore (@wezm) October 25, 2017A FreeBSD 11 Desktop How-to by Allison Nicole Reidproved especially helpful in configuring the system for desktop use. As usual,I went with a GNOME desktop. Unfortunately the FreeBSD version of GNOME isstuck on a more than two year old version (3.18). For the most part this isn'tan issue, although I do miss some improvements from subsequent releases.Fortunately this version does have good HiDPI support as I'm using it with a 4Kdisplay.
Update: In October 2018 the GNOME FreeBSD port was updated to 3.28, bringingin more then two year of development. The upgrade was seamless and has beenworking perfectly.
The one hurdle to using FreeBSD was password management. The password manager Iwas using, Enpass, did not support FreeBSD. I did some research and settledon pass as a replacement. It's an elegant solution to password management. Atree of files encrypted with GPG and a shell script to manage them. There arebrowser extensions and an iOS client so actual use is surprisinglyuser-friendly.
I imported my 1200+ passwords into pass and was then able toaccess them all on FreeBSD too. As a bonus, my password manager is now opensource and the data is self-hosted and tracked in git.
Even with various settings tweaked the desktop FreeBSD experience is not asseamless as it is on Linux. For example, when starting the GNOME sessiongnome-keyring-daemon --start doesn't appear to be called. Or, if it is calledit's not having the desired effect. So I have to run it manually and set theagent environment variables myself. I've also been unable to eliminate screentearing in Firefox when scrolling. I've poked at various settings but itremains.
I initially missed playing the game Stardew Valley onFreeBSD. It was consuming a few hours of my time each week prior to the FreeBSDinstall. The extra friction of rebooting into Arch to run the game basicallystopped me playing, which wasn't entirely a bad thing. There was some recentprogress running Stardew Valley on OpenBSD so I couldlook into porting that work... I have enough side projects as it is though.
To a lesser degree I've also missed Dropbox on FreeBSD. I'm not a heavy Dropboxuser and can get by with the Dropbox website but its absence is a minor annoyance.It would be nice if there was a FreeBSD version available.
March 2018 — Windows?
In January 2017 I wrote:
Regarding Windows, I should say that I am strongly biased towards *nix styleoperating systems and find it unlikely that I'd be happy using Windows fulltime. However, in the interests of keeping an open mind I will give it a try inthe next few months. I have backed the Eve V campaign. The Eve V is a2-in-1 laptop tablet that will come with Windows 10. For now Windows is off thetable.
It took a lot longer than expected, but the V finally arrived in February2018. I backed the campaign in December 2016. I've been getting a feel forwhat a 2-in-1 Windows machine with a pen has to offer. I still can't see myselfmaking Windows my primary OS but I will keep exploring. I've been tweeting myadventures with the #wesonwindows hash tag. At some point I'll attemptinstalling Linux on it too.
My initial goal is to be able to replicate my workflow for updating ReadRust on Windows. This feels like a reasonable sample to determine if I can useWindows to get real work done. It uses the following tools:
- SSH
- Git
- Rust
- Cobalt static site compiler
- A Makefile
- Ruby (for a little date script)
- AWS command line tools
A.way Mac Os X
I haven't yet tried installing the AWS tools but I have all the rest working inPowershell, without the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Most tools wereinstalled with Scoop.
I'll post more about the V and Windows in the future.
General Observations
Missing Apps
In October I wrote:
My migration away from Mac OS X is still going well. I rarely use Mac OSany more. The one remaining application I'm yet to find a suitable replacementfor is MoneyWell.
This is still the case. About once a month I open up the MacBook to balancefinances and track my budget. I've looked into many alternatives and noneof the non-web based options I could find do:
- Envelope budgeting
- Automatic distribution of funds to envelopes based on a spending plan
Update 30 March 2019: I have discovered Buckets and will be triallingit as a MoneyWell replacement.
GNOME
A.way Mac Os Download
In my opinion the GNOME desktop environment is very good, it's not Mac OSlevels of polished but for most part it works well. It is consistent andcohesive, uncluttered, and unobtrusive. Releases are made every 6 months soit's always improving. However, in the vein of, 'yyyy is the year of Linux onthe desktop', I have a bit of a perpetual feeling that the next GNOME releasewill solve all my gripes.
For part of the year I was eagerly awaiting the 3.26 release. It brought perdisplay resolution settings (allowing 2× and 1× displays to be used together)and the ability to adjust the split position when two windows are tiled next toeach other. These features arrived and I suppose my attention was then drawn toother things. What I'm getting at is it never quite feels feature complete andthere's always this feeling of waiting/looking forward to the next release.
Notifications
I don't like the notification handling in GNOME. Notifications appear centredat the top of the screen, which is super annoying. I assume because of thisthey don't slide down to make room for subsequent notifications (because they'dbe filling the middle of your screen). Instead they just replace the currentnotification.
Almost all the notifications seem to be transient and don't show in thenotifications panel. If several show in quick succession you only see the mostrecent one. Mac OS handles notifications a lot better.
Wrap Up
At this point I can't see myself switching back to Mac OS. There is only onetask (MoneyWell) that I haven't been able to achieve with my new Linux orFreeBSD systems. I'm hopeful that I will eventually be able to move that onetoo. In all other areas I'm using the same tools or have found suitablereplacements.
Me on Twitter 8:27 AM - 5Mar 2018:
@wezm OMG what’s happening to me‽ My immediate reaction to this was, “that’sinteresting but if it was open source we wouldn’t have this problem”.
@b0rk: super cool post about how to get the abandoned mac Twitter client tosupport 280 character tweets by modifying its assemblyhttps://alva.link/post/reclaim-your-abandonware/
Over the year I think what I value in an operating system has shifted. I wentin valuing design, consistency, and attention to detail. I definitely stillvalue those things but I think I've softened on them. I'm willing to settle fora few rough edges. In return I get:
- Systems that are always up to date
- More hardware options
- Upgradeable hardware
- The ability to build an environment that works for me
- 'The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so itdoes your computing as you wish'.1
That last one has come as a bit of a surprise. I've always been a fan of opensource but was happy to use well-made proprietary software. It turns out thatwhen a huge portion of your system is open source your perspective changes.Jumping through hoops to install proprietary software (that's not in thesystem package repos) is kind of a drag, and feels sort of wrong for thesystem.
There's also something wonderful about public bug trackers. You cansearch and track the progress of an issue instead of just submitting it intothe void.
To say thanks for all this wonderful software I'm using for free I've tried togive back a little. Financially and through code and documentationcontributions. I also maintain a number of packages in the Arch UserRepository and hope to submit my first FreeBSD port in the not too distantfuture.
That's all for now, thanks for following this journey. Happy computing!Subscribe to the feed or follow me on Twitter or Mastodon forupdates. If you enjoyed this post consider supporting me on GitHub Sponsors.
This is part 5 in a series. Read Part 6