I have a kind of love and hate relationship with my work laptop, a MacBook Pro M2 Pro (what a weird name). I love almost everything about the hardware, from the premium materials, to the amazing ProMotion screen, to one of the best speakers I have in my house (no kidding, those speakers are better than some of my dedicated Bluetooth speakers) and the best touchpad I ever used, period. But I hate macOS: after using it for work for the last 3 years I got used to its quirks, but the experience is just so... bad. I could never really point why I think so, this is why I decided to write about it.
To start: using terminal on macOS just feels slow. Everything is slower in macOS compared to my Linux desktop, and this shouldn't be a hardware issue since my MacBook Pro is probably more powerful and has faster I/O than my desktop.
From opening a new terminal and even typing seems slower (like there is something running in background every time I press a key). I am using the exactly same terminal (Kitty) and configuration in both. Just a quick and non-scientific benchmark:
$ hyperfine 'zsh -ic exit' # Linux Benchmark 1: zsh -ic exit Time (mean ± σ): 94.1 ms ± 2.4 ms [User: 60.2 ms, System: 34.5 ms] Range (min … max): 90.0 ms … 99.0 ms 29 runs$ hyperfine 'zsh -ci exit' # macOS Benchmark 1: zsh -ci exit Time (mean ± σ): 233.0 ms ± 180.9 ms [User: 54.6 ms, System: 51.0 ms] Range (min … max): 153.0 ms … 746.5 ms 10 runs
Warning: The first benchmarking run for this command was significantly slower than the rest (746.5 ms). This could be caused by (filesystem) caches that were not filled until after the first run. You should consider using the '--warmup' option to fill those caches before the actual benchmark. Alternatively, use the '--prepare' option to clear the caches before each timing run.
This may look like a unfair comparison because it seems that I run the macOS
tests with cold cache on purpose (and this is why hyperfine recommended me to
use --warmup flag), while I run the Linux tests with a hot cache. However it
is not, this basically matches my experience with macOS where it seems the file
cache expires much faster than on Linux. So while on Linux I rarely see ZSH
taking time to start, it is a common occurrence in macOS. But even ignoring
this issue macOS in general seems to be much slower, and this is not isolated
to my zsh, almost every binary inside my terminal seems to start slower.
Now let's look out of the terminal and more for the desktop part. One of my major grips about the system is the lack of choice. For example, I want to set my touchpad to use natural (or reverse) scrolling, since well, this is what we got used after the smartphone boom. But I also want my scroll wheel to use "normal" scrolling, since this is what years of using a mouse with scroll made me used to. This is easy to do in any other operating system that it is not macOS. And the worst thing is that macOS is even deceitful:
So you see in the above screenshots that both Mouse and Trakcpad have separate options for setting "Natural scrolling", but this is a lie: if you change one of them it changes both, and there is nothing to indicate this. This is so confusing that before I knew this I would change one option to fix the current input device that I was using, only later to realise trying to use my other input device that it would scroll the opposite that I expect, so I would "fix" again, rise and repeat.
To fix this issue? As far I know, only using an external program. I use Linear Mouse, that to be clear, it is a great program. It is just that I shouldn't need to use it, and thanks to the way it works (it uses Accessibility APIs as far I know) sometimes things get wonky and stops working.
Another example where macOS refuses to give you choices? Since I have a MacBook Pro, it has a Touch ID and it works great. Except that I can't use it with a close lid. No problem, I can just keep the lid of the laptop open. But in macOS if I keep the lid open I can't turn off the internal display. I don't want that display to be turned on though, not only it is a waste of energy but also it means that my mouse can sometimes go to a screen that I am not even using and this is jarring. The solution? Even another external program: BetterDisplay.
Again, nothing against BetterDisplay that is a really good program. It is just that I shouldn't need it for something so basic as disabling the internal screen when I am using an external monitor. BetterDisplay has way more features, but currently this is the only one I use. The fact that I had to pay €19.99 for the luxury of turning off the internal display is infuriating.
By the way, talking about multi-monitor support, another grip. I like to use the dock on the side of the monitor because this makes for better vertical space (especially good considering that my main monitor is a Ultrawide one, so I have lots of horizontal space but low amount of vertical space). However, if I set the dock to the side, it will go to whatever monitor is at that side. What? Yes, even if my main monitor is setup as the "Main display", if I set my dock to the left and my laptop is on the left side, the dock will go there.
This is one of the things that I don't have a good solution. My solution was to eventually just reorganize my whole desk to always ensure that my laptop will go to the right so I can have the dock on the left side as I want. Yes, instead of making the operational system works for me, I need to make my desk work with my laptop.
And of course, there are the bugs. Now to be clear, bugs happens in every operational system that I know, it is just the way that modern systems works nowadays: they're too complex, and complexity introduces bugs. But bugs that completely stop whatever I am doing bother me way more, and macOS seems to have lots of them. Let me introduce you one of them: the notification of death.
This innocent notification bought me lots of dread. For months every time I tried to click this "Allow" I would basically lose all my work: video and audio would continue playing and my mouse would still move, but I couldn't click on anything or type. The system would respond to a power button press (locking the screen), but 99% of the time if I unlocked I would go back to the same state. My only option would be to force turn off the system and restart. It was like my mouse focus was in a invisible screen that wouldn't want to release the focus. And yes, I tried everything I could thing, like for example Cmd+Tab to change the current application focus.
To be clear, it seems that this issue is finally fixed in macOS Tahoe, at least I couldn't reproduce this issue while writing this blog post. But the reason this bug ever happened is wild, there is no reason why an application could steal the focus of the input and not give it back. Also, this was not the only "stop the world" bugs that I had with macOS (I just had one last week while doing random things), it is just the one that I knew how to reproduce.
So that is basically why I feel so strong against macOS. Windows 11 is probably the worse of the two, but since I generally can do what I want it seems that I feel less strong about the system. And yes, KDE is far ahead of the two as my favorite desktop, since it tries to embrace whatever I want to do.