This june, I got my first mac, a mac mini to be precise. And to be honest, I’ve always wanted own a mac. You always hear from the mac cultists, how a mac can’t be compared with any other computer.

When I first got my hands on the mac, I was… not very impressed. Like it was the same thing mostly as compared to my linux machine. Also I had riced up my ubuntu environment to look really similar to how a macOS desktop looks.

You can see for youself:

Linux Desktop:

Linux Desktop

Mac Desktop:

Mac Desktop

First Linux and Windows Desktop

I grew up using Windows 7 ultimate on the desktop computer at my home. When I got into college, I got an Asus Vivobook with windows 10 pre installed, which I envtually upgraded with windows 11. But in my 4th year of college, the laptop started lagging a lot. And since I didn’t have any important subjects in my last semester, I decided to completely nuke windows and go fullly-committed to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

And man that was such a nice OS experience. Everything was uniform, buttery smooth. I still think Ubuntu is one of the best Operating Systems.

Transition to MacOS

The transition from Ubuntu to Mac was a breeze, thanks to both using a similar unix style approach in their workflow. All I needed was clcloning my dotfiles from my GitHub account and just using them like they always existed in the system. One of the major reasons I wanted a mac, was that how convenient it is for anything software development related. And also, you need a mac for compiling macOS and iOS apps, and I used to do quite a lot of Flutter in my sophomore year at college.

Things I hate about the Mac

  1. One of the most annoying things about the macOS is the Option and the Command key. To this day I don’t know what made apple use this abomination of a key combination when the conventional alt and Control keys are just right there.

  2. When using “alt+tab”(I know it’s “option key”) nothing was working. Then I found that I’ve to do “cmd + tab” to switch between different apps. And even then, there was no realtime display of the screen of the apps.

  3. Closing any app doesn’t really close the app. I mean sure it’s for performance and stuff, but still it feels wrong for some reason.

  4. The best features of MacOS are not the default: For example, in the finder app, the column layout is far superior than the default one, but for some reason it is not the default.

default finder app column finder feature

Things I liked about the Mac

  1. The app installation process is comically simple. Like really simple! You just have to doswnload the app Image file and drag it to the applications folder!

drop to install app

  1. Quick Actions

One of the best feature of macOS I have to say, is Quick Actions. It’s just so handy!

  1. Breaks less often.

Although it has been only one month since using MacOs, I’ve never seen it fail at any task or lag or whatever. The memory management is really good, how it tries to take up as much memory it can for smooth performance, while simultaneously freeing up space when needed. And it will do all of this without you noticing anything.

Final thoughts

One month in, and I’d say the Mac experience has been mostly smooth. It hasn’t blown my mind, but it’s grown on me. I still run into quirks here and there, but I can work around them easily enough.

Would I recommend switching? If you’re deep into development or want to build Apple apps — absolutely. But if you’re happy on Linux or Windows and don’t need the Apple-specific stuff, you’re not missing out on anything magical.