I do think that's where you're hurting yourself. I've been using Macs since before OS X came out, and in the OS X era I have never had long downtime when switching to a new machine. In the old days before Migration Assistant, you'd just clone the drive. These days you use Migration Assistant. I do understand the "dirty" sentiment, but in reality I've been upgrading via cloning or Migration Assistant for close to 20 years now with never a clean install, and it's worked well.

Absolutely not hurting myself. I love Linux. :D I don't think I'll ever switch back. I actually understand how every aspect of my machine works, and this feeling of control is absolutely addictive.

I kinda lost the thread at this point, but I was just trying to make the point the Macs aren't magically usable out of the box, at least for power users.

> Absolutely not hurting myself. I love Linux. :D I don't think I'll ever switch back. I actually understand how every aspect of my machine works, and this feeling of control is absolutely addictive.

This is exactly the reason for the feeling of empowerment I got when I moved to FreeBSD/KDE after Mac. I didn't realise just how closed down macOS had gotten over time. This was the number one reason for my move but the extent of it still surprised me. Everything I want differently now is just easy, documented and usually even has a GUI button ready for the clicking. Whereas in macOS it's just "this is how it works, get used to it" now.

Apple is working so hard to lock the underpinnings of the OS down now and even if you can still change things to work your way you have to jump through so many hoops it becomes really annoying. And as well as that whatever option you used to get there is bound to get changed or removed without notice.

I just realized I'm not happy just going along with other people's choices. I hate 'going with the flow'. I recognise any the specific annoyances you mentioned in your post higher up in the thread.

You can copy your home directory on macOS, too, I do it every time I get a new machine and it works fine. I just `cp -a` my home directory onto the external drive and do the same back off. I do have to chown -R the directory sometimes, if the UID is different for some reason. Obviously you need to reinstall the applications, but that is mostly just dragging them into /Applications. Not too much different from `apt-get install`ing them, really.