I’m seeing a lot (and I mean a lot) of articles aimed at W10 to Linux switchers. The point of most of these pieces seem to be aimed at making Linux into soft W10 clones and that’s surely not the way to go. If you’re going to jump out of the lap of Microsoft to Linux, you really should embrace the change.
I don’t blame folk for dumping Windows all together. W11 is clearly a substandard OS which has, according to Microsoft itself, ‘lost its way’, and they vow to ‘get W11 back on track’ at least once a month. But how long is it going to take them to turn that supertanker? A year? Maybe 2 years?
But the point is, articles like this are just pointing people in the wrong direction. Making Linux feel like home? That’s a very strange piece of thinking. I’d start with the art of the possible, and not fanny around the edges with a little bit of look-and-feel GUI goodness. The heavy-lifting behind Linux is proportionately greater than the capabilities of Windows and macOS combined. And that trueism is bonkers because macOS is based on Unix and, as we all know, Unix and Linux are ‘brothers in arms’ (to give a Dire Straits song a gratuitous mention). But Apple choose to lockdown macOS, which robs it of the same range of freedom Linux has.
My NAS (ah, you wondered when I was going to shoehorn that in, eh?) uses a custom Linux OS and I like it. I don’t want to make it like Microsoft because I enjoy the difference. I don’t often need to flip into CLI, I can do a strong 99% of what I want to do in GUI-world. Just today I installed a tracking utility I found in Github. It’s neat and it promises to give me data which, from time to time, I’m curious about. If this little experiment pans out and I’m going to install it on a bunch of websites. Yay for Linux!
I could – and probably should – make the switch to Linux, but last time I attempted to do so with any real vigour, I found I was just spending too much time in the CLI, sudo getting and whatever. I couldn’t be bothered with – effectively – learning a new computer language.
Linux has probably improved greatly since then, I’m sure. In fact, when TCMM’s Win10 PC became unusable a few months back, I reformatted the HDD and installed Zorin (the nearest-to-Windows GUI I could find) and – after a few initial grumbles – she gets on absolutely fine with it.
It’s stable and fast and saved us from spending 500 quid on a new PC.
Yay for Linux, indeed!
I agree with Masher. Using Linux is an exercise in proving you can do it and live with it, although I haven’t experimented in probably 5+ years now. You say macOS is locked down, but it is not really locked from most users’ perspectives. I write my own software (well, I coach Claude to do it for me), I install third party software from some web site, I install command line utilities just like Linux, and I create and run zsh scripts to automate stuff. I also use a number of only-on-Mac utilities, the likes of which don’t really exist at all on Windows. I don’t know if they exist on Linux — for instance one that offers custom trackpad gestures, one that watches directories and takes automatic actions, one that manages audio routing simply, and more I’m not thinking of at this moment. Yes it has some rough edges (particularly, lately, in design) and some things are more difficult than they could be, but there are also many incredibly useful affordances and more so if you have other Apple devices. I was logging into a web site today and the company sent me a SMS 2FA code, which I used two clicks on the Mac to enter because it talks to my phone. I put my more portable MacBook Neo down next to my big MacBook Pro with screen and I can instantly move my mouse pointer between the computers. And so on… this list goes on and on. Oh, and if you need accessibility, macOS is untouchable — get a new Mac out of its box and turn it on, then wait. It’ll start talking to you. I could go on.