this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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I went from Linux to a Mac for work years ago. Install home brew on day one and the experience overall will be much better.
The terminal on the Mac is surprisingly good. I felt right at home with it very quickly. Xcode comes with cli tooling to build software without a lot of messing with it and finding library dlls (looking at you, windows)
The window placement philosophy takes some getting used to (see yabai for a viable tiling window solution though) and the key modifiers will frustrate you (though I eventually ended up liking cmd a lot).
Overall though I feel like Mac gets a lot of hate where it’s not deserved. I still hate their business model, and my personal laptop is Linux for that reason, but the product itself is fine.
Most Linux software is available for macOS as well.
The indie developer scene for macOS is quite healthy and there are a lot of gems to be found like Panic, Omni, Kaleidoscope.app, GitTower, and many more.
Buy as much RAM and storage as you can afford. The high purchase price is offset somewhat by the very good resale value.
Install homebrew. Install packages with brew install. Done.
Install MacPorts, it's better than Homebrew. It's
sudo port install <NAME>instead.I tried MacPorts once and felt Homebrew was less confusing
Depending on your needs, UTM might be sufficient, and it’s free. I use it on my M1 mini to run Win11 so I can check Office doc compatibility for the Windows users at work, and it’s remarkably good. I wouldn’t use it to run games or anything hefty, mind.
The bad:
I use Nix on my M1 Pro machine, and it’s by far my favorite laptop yet. The company and their business practices absolutely do suck though.
That said, there is certainly a middle ground for software there. I hate windows as much as the next guy, but macOS is at least Unix-adjacent, so it’s not a complete pain
BTW, I'm not OP, but just interested, about the general feel of the UI and solutions - how much of the 3d\blur\other effects can be turned off? Same with choosing a purely monochrome color scheme. These cause nausea for me every time I even look at MacOS screenshots.
And another question, about window management and solutions to that and the desktop and dock and launcher, - how simplified can that be? In addition to nausea, have anxiety from most things there, and every time touching a Mac wasn't pleasant. Can one have a keyboard-controlled environment without rounded corners, without animations, without scrolled screens with icons to launch something? And how well can one hide the functionality of virtual desktop overview or whatever that is, to just forget it was there?
Suppose my ideal of tranquility would be a DOS prompt, gray on black. How close can one get to that?
Hypothetically.
You can reduce animations and transparency, enhance contrast (though not every application supports it) and turn everything grayscale but you can’t change the overall style and layout of the OS.
To get a DOS prompt, you either install MS-DOS on a VM, or on a vintage PC.
Or just make the Mac boot directly into the command line as Single User. CMD+S on startup.
I don't mean that. I mean using a PC normally, but with a level of UI appearance adequacy approaching that of a DOS prompt.
You can customize the Terminal app.
No, I meant reduce distractions in the UI. Using all the same applications with native look. And reduce epilepsy-inducing elements in that native look.
I meant normal use.
Maybe just stick with Linux.
You can turn off a lot of the transparency and other effects in System Preferences under accessibility. Setting the traffic light window buttons to greyscale is done in appearance I think.
I always enable “reduce transparency” and “always show scroll bars” for a saner default. There’s a bunch of other settings there that are sensible as well
Keyboard navigation for windows and menus is turned off by default. So turn it on for a more efficient experience.
I like aerospace for a tiling windows manager, but I never checked out yabai
Unfortunately Homebrew isn't good for casks, aka GUI apps. It can install them initially, but after that most casks need to be updated from inside the app itself. You can force Homebrew to update casks, but it's not recommended and could break the app. I did that with Chromium (which doesn't have an auto updater) and it messed up the keyring for some reason.
Well, that sucks that you’ve had problems, but it doesn’t match up with my experience of using homebrew over the last decade. I can’t think of a time outside that one time they changed the install paths where homebrew has caused an issue.