I also have many phones as a result of work, and have preferred Android for years — but recently decided I prefer the iPhone for my personal phone.

I'm surprised by it, in a way, but Android flagships leave a lot to be desired lately.

Google Authenticator feels like a side project that vastly exceeded its intended, critically important use.

When did that happen? Just opened the system preferences on my Win10 desktop, its still shitty.

However, may be in a few years they could catch up ?

I've gone crazy trying to find a good, maintained GNOME terminal with good implementation of Smart Copy (Ctrl-C copies if there's a selection, which is unnecessary under OSX) and some semblance of UI. Kitty was the best but it has no UI, which means you need a cheatsheet for the first month of usage to remember how the heck to access the scrollback buffer when you're doing some late night server debugging.

Windows Terminal has GPU acceleration, splits, a good implementation of Smart Copy, the fact that it does both WSL2 and PowerShell is pretty neat. No tmux integration yet, but I don't use tmux personally.

That's because macOS uses a wholly different keyboard shortcut for copy which is only a standard for Apple. The rest of the world uses the IBM CUA standard at their core. On a Linux desktop, you use `Ctrl+Shift+C` to copy when in the terminal. Alternatively, you can re-bind Super+C and Super+V to copy and paste - then it's just like your Mac. But I wouldn't do that [0].

Macs have all sorts of inconsistencies and hardships for keyboard users. For instance, open the `About this Mac` window (or any app running in the menubar which is not a System Preferences app) and then move focus away from that program. Now try to use the keyboard to switch back to it. You can't. The only way you can do that is by starting `About this Mac` over again via Spotlight or by focusing on the menu (Fn+Ctrl+F2) to restart it.

Aside from that, if you don't want to memorize keyboard shortcuts on your Mac you have to at least memorize the cryptic symbols that they show in the program menus. A sane OS shows the same words that are typically printed on a keyboard (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Esc) whereas macOS shows you a caret symbol, a long up arrow arrow symbol, a lambda symbol or the "Escape" symbol that looks too much like the international symbol for the power button... and then they don't print those symbols anywhere on the laptop's keyboard. Those symbols are only printed on the external Mac keyboards, not the ones that come with your Macbook.

[0] Macs have so many limitations. You can't even easily change the mouse pointer color from black to white without buying a third party program - and even then - that program didn't exist for a long, long time. I've tried to force my Mac to be an OS that I like by getting rid of the hideous global menu bar and replacing the brain-dead dock with uBar, using Witch instead of Cmd+Tab, using Karabiner to modify all the keyboard shortcuts and so forth and so on... It's not worth it and things will break often. So now I just use it the way it was intended (but only when I have to - I vastly prefer XFCE and Linux).

IMO its significantly superior for programming.

It's also the reason there is less key on the keyboard, it's simply more efficient. Plus, you have the benefits of having the same bindings in all the apps. Either it's the terminal, your mail client or your IDE. `cmd+s` or `ctrl+x` or `ctrl+q` or name it, always do the same thing. That can't be said for any other desktop.

I know you can configure Gnome to have emacs keybinds, but it's not the same and many apps break the users configured.

The vast, vast majority of my Linux and Windows desktop apps share the same core keyboard shortcuts. `Ctrl+S` is always save, `Ctrl+X always cuts and `Ctrl+W` always closes the current window. The terminal is one program that doesn't - but that's fine with me because I don't think of it as just another program - it's more like a wholly different operating system or subsystem. Aside from that, the amount of work I have to do with memorizing extra keyboard shortcuts like `Ctrl+Shift+C` for the terminal is still overall less than what I'd have to do on a Mac.

I can operate the entirety of Windows or XFCE with just a few shortcuts that I've memorized (or not) while macOS will have you using the mouse or memorizing hundreds of distinct shortcuts - one for each separate function. Even something simple like switching windows - on a Mac you have to memorize 2 separate shortcuts - one for switching between programs and another for switching between windows in that program.

Macs also don't have keyboard acceleration via the "Alt key + underlined letter in context menu." They also don't have a dedicated right-click key. These are super useful since I can hit a key to bring up a menu and then hit another key to activate a menu item - no memorization required.

I've never seen anyone operate a Mac with just their keyboard. Anyone I've ever observed on a Mac used the touchpad very heavily with low efficiency.

- back then i was missing, pane zoom (only recently got added).

- looking at the docs, i think cycling through zoomed / unzoomed panes is stil not yet there. i might be wrong.

- configuring how the split lines looks of the terminal.

- moving panes to other tabs

found the ticket around panes: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1000

there is quite some todo left.

Pop!_OS is Ubuntu based but with Flatpak instead of Snap and without the Ubuntu calling home stuff. Meaning it is great for development. Last time I tried developing on Windows I remember being very frustrated. Now I don't have Windows installed on anything and I am happier for it.

I've tried so fedora, Pop!_OS, elementary, KDE Neon. As a long term Ubuntu / Debian (server) user I was used to apt but would be open to other package managers. Based on my trials, I'm probably going to go ahead with KDE Neon, that is Ubuntu with KDE Plasma Desktop. This seems to be a nice cross-over between Windows 10 and MacOS with sane defaults but enough options to tailor it to my liking.

I already had a Windows Desktop for game, and for the first time in the Windows history, I really liked what they did with windows 10. They also seem to be more invest in pushing the platform forward. And contrary to the popular opinion, I do believe in convertible devices. Also, I told myself I can also run Linux for development.

I then bought an HP laptop with similar spec than the MBP, for about 500$CAD less. Seem like a real save, but god I was wrong.

The fun with Linux lasted for less than a month before I just gave up.

The consistent (across all apps and terminal), powerful default emacs key bindings on the macs is a gem for programming and productivity. I miss that all day.

The touchpad is mediocre, they are all mediocre, never saw one working as good as the MBP. Even when someone told me that they're working great and let me try it, it was clear they never work with a MBP or don't use it that much.

Native apps in general, like photo, video editing, notes etc. are more polish and perform better on the mac. Web app though is quite different. icloud.com is terrible compare to onedrive.

Resume, battery life, screen, even if the tech specs sheet says it's the same, it's not in real life.

It's hard to put a price on all that, but at the end, I didn't save 500$ in value, I lost way more than that. Moreover, comparable specs, innovative devices like the surface line, are now price about the same.

I find my daily routines have been deeply overfitted to macbook/macOS on a firmware level. The sunk cost can be quite staggering for users like me.