Then you switch to macOS or Windows or even (not your) linux setup and hate it. When I manage to contain myself entirely to the terminal it's okay, but the moment I have to interact with GUI I start to miss those "just right" things.
I can relate. macOS hilariously sucks on certain GUI and terminal aspects. Not much you can do about GUI, just have to adapt to the way macOS wants to be used. For terminal, I use home-manager to manage my $HOME. It not space efficient and public caches are sub-par, but it's better than searching "sed in-place repace macos and linux cross-platform" for the 9000th time.
I do nerd out when customizing the shell, though.
> It not space efficient and public caches are sub-par, but it's better than searching "sed in-place repace macos and linux cross-platform" for the 9000th time.
When onboarding new devs, it's like Groundhog Day, where I will inevitably have the "did you use GNU sed or BSD sed" conversation at some point if they have Macs.
I'm going to have to look into home-manager
It's amazing, I have the same terminal environment in WLS2, macOS and linux. NeoVim with all of its native dependencies, all k8s tools, etc. Sometimes I run it issues something not working on macos, but usually easy to resolve, if not, I use homebrew via home-manager.
I like the hardware however. I really wish there was a good laptop using a competitive ARM SoC with great Linux support. I refuse to buy anything from Apple since they started the whole EU shenanigans and I don’t really now which laptop I will buy. I’m seriously considering only using a phone as my personal computing device now that Android takes convergence semi seriously.
> I’m seriously considering only using a phone as my personal computing device now that Android takes convergence semi seriously.
Not really. Google, in fact, very opposes that convergence because it will hurt ChromeBook and chomecast sales.
Pretty much any android today and even Nexus phones let you go from usb-c to HDMI, but not Pixels. Because that's what chromecast is for.
They oppose convergence so much that they have just added a desktop environment when Android is plugged to a screen and a way to run Linux app with GPU acceleration.
Also Pixels natively support HDMI through usb-c and have done so for years.
That just sounds like being accustomed to one way of switching tasks, honestly. If I want previews, I use Expose (three-finger swipe up/down or ctrl-up/down). But mostly I just use cmd-tab and haven't really needed to see previews there. Because macOS switches between applications, not windows, often there isn't single window to preview, and I'm not sure showing all the windows would work well either. For Expose it works well because the it can use the entire screen to show previews.
And then when you full-screen a window, switch to another app for a moment, and then you can’t find it without delving into the ‘window‘ menu.
First world problems. But daily annoyances.
... would only happen if the application you switch to is enforcing it for some reason. Ordinarily you can interleave windows all you want.
Switching to an application by clicking on it in the Dock or Cmd+Tabbing to it will bring all its windows to the front, though.
So if I have two Zed windows and Firefox in front of one of them, I can't switch from Zed to Firefox and back to Zed without losing view of Firefox. Means I have to move windows around so they don't overlap, which seems so counterintuitive.
Unless you mean to find the full-screen window. And that doesn't work either. At least for Zed, Firefox and iTerm, where I spend most of my life.
Going back to macOS where I don't get window previews forces me to think in terms of app icons, instead of the UI I've been staring at and will instantly recognize. And if I use the dock, I have to remember the window title's name to switch windows using the context menu.
Imagine having N apps with M windows each, with the macOS model your number of presses to find a given window goes from O(NM) to O(N+M).
The newest Macbooks have insanely powerful hardware (I have an M4 Macbook Max). Yet they do not feel as speedy or instant on my machines with i3. There's always a perceivable milliseconds of latency, with response time from the keyboard to the screen. As someone who has tons of key bindings, I find this tolerable, but it can get a bit grating compared to just how instantaneous everything is on my Linux.
Yes, I know about Yabai and the other things that modify the existing window manager. The problem is the window manager itself.
Outside of the windowing system, running native Linux if you're deploying to Linux beats using an amalgamation of old BSD utils + stuff from Homebrew and hoping it works between platforms, or using VMs. The dev tools that are native to Linux are also nice.
When it comes to multiple monitors, I want a dock on each monitor. I can do that in Plasma, but I can't in macOS, unless I use some weird 3rd party software apparently.