I’ve been a dev for 7 years. I used a PC for the first 6 years and I switched to a mac the last year.
My experience with mac has been terrible. The file explorer is just horrible to navigate. It took me ages to find the way to go anywhere except the “favorite” folders. Compability with the remote linux-servers has been awful with broken keymappings and shortcuts. Using hardware from any other manifacturer is riddled with bugs. The machine is unable to adjust volume if the audio is passed through usb-c. And I routinely encounter bugs where I’m unable to interact with apps until I restart them. Everything which seemed to work by heuristics on a PC requires a lot of attention on my mac. I don’t care if I get a floaty animation and bouncy icon if I minimize a window. I just want alt + tab to actually bring back the apps I select.
I am not getting a mac the next time.
I dunno, I used PCs pretty exclusively until about halfway through college when I switched and every time I try to go back it’s pretty bad. Windows sucks, it just does everything different than *nix systems, and they have like, 5 different ways of doing things? It feels like they’ve had multiple efforts to clean up the tech debt and never completed them.
And Linux is just lacking for day to day use. I still would love to switch at some point, but it just doesn’t have the right tools and polish. Like, I rely on Karabiner for key remapping and layering and the Linux story is pretty lacking there (though I haven’t looked in a while so could have gotten better). Core stuff for my day to day.
I think a lot of it is muscle memory. Like yeah, it’s hard to relearn a lot of muscle memory type things. But if you open a terminal, it’s just like any *nix based system, same layout. You can navigate anywhere and open the Finder with open, etc.
I respect that muscle memory is a big thing when iit comes to OS preference. I have spent more than a year now to configure to my preferences and build up muscle memory and understanding of my mac. It’s just not happening. Small things which were trivial to me on PC suddenly requires my full attention and I feel like I’m spending a ton of energy doing simple things. And I feel the same way when I look over the shoulder of my collegues who are seasoned mac users. Things which I would do in no time on PC seems to take many additional clicks and more time for them as well.
But my biggest issue is the hardware compability. I like my mechanical logitech keyboard, which features a mac layout (physical stamps on keys). But several buttons are mixed up when connected. And the key mapping seemingly varies depending on whether it’s connected through bluetooth or usb. As mentioned audio passed through usb-c is not possible to adjust thourgh the default system. I had to download a third party app to adjust volume - which also stinks because the volume at the lowest setting is a lot higher than I want for some cases. My stream deck seems to work with the mac by a coinflip: half of the times I start the machine, it won’t connect.
But the thing that really works me up is when I ask people about the hardware issues. The answer is always “you need to buy apple hardware”.
And that’s where I really fall off. I want to use hardware which I find comfortable to me, but it feels like everything about the mac is trying to make me buy more apple stuff.
And I feel the same way when I look over the shoulder of my collegues who are seasoned mac users. Things which I would do in no time on PC seems to take many additional clicks and more time for them as well.
That’s really strange, can you give some examples? Just curious what things are easier to do on Windows (assuming that’s what you mean), I just have never had that be the case. Maybe it’s cause I’m a webdev and most tooling for web stuff is tailored for *nix systems?
But the thing that really works me up is when I ask people about the hardware issues. The answer is always “you need to buy apple hardware”.
Uh whaaaaat that’s crazy. Yeah I’m the same way, I’ve cycled through a lot of different mechanical keyboards and whatnot to find the one I like now (Ultimate Hacking Keyboard, dumb name but nice features lol). But I can’t say I’ve ever had an issue with a keyboard having hardware compatibility like that… I guess I don’t really use function keys. Again I use Karabiner to remap that kinda stuff to a different layer, which works universally so the same layering works on my laptop as my mechanical keyboard and I don’t need to have different muscle memory for different work-zone setups.
This is the article that got me introduced to Karabiner, even if you hate Mac I do recommend giving it a look. One of the best things I ever did was use Karabiner to modify my layout and reduce hand movement/chording. It completely fixed my RSI issues. My current layout treats the JKL; home row keys as arrow keys when I hold down Capslock, and Capslock + CMD turns them into jump-by-word so I can navigate really fast. Rarely use a mouse when writing code these days. Oh, and Capslock + ’ is delete, surprising how often that is a common hand movement. Plus plenty of other small optimizations. Really couldn’t live without it.
