Back to the Mac
Like Jack, I've been dabbling in Linux. At home, I've been setting up a Linux server to act as my primary desktop machine and homelab of sorts. It's an old machine I bought for $120, and it's flying with Fedora i3 Spin. Meanwhile, at work, I've been testing out a Chromebook. While it's a stretch to refer to ChromeOS as "Linux,” when you fire up the terminal on a Chromebook, it runs in a Debian VM. So I am, in a sense, running Linux on my Chromebook.
But I'm back to the Mac now. Two analogies spring to mind describing this experience. One is traveling to a foreign land, experiencing the wonder and discomfort of another culture, and ultimately being happy to return home.
Another is a torrid love affair — hot, sweaty, exhilarating, exhausting — after which you come crawling back to your spouse and beg them to take you back in. This one falls apart pretty quickly though, as my wife would have a different perspective on that scenario than my Mac seems to have about this one.
The purpose of the homelab experiment was to get my personal notes off my work laptop and edit them remotely over SSH. I have some sensitive stuff in those notes, including journal entries about my ups and downs with the job. It felt foolish to keep them on corporate hardware.
The purpose of the Chromebook experiment was to give it a proper shot as my work laptop replacement. Chromebooks are the default laptop at my office, and you have to go through an exception process and face some scrutiny to get a Mac. Before I went and did that, I wanted to have an educated opinion on whether a Chromebook would work for me.
It’s all been a fun adventure, but I’m back to the Mac now. The primary reason is that the Chromebook, while harboring “real” Linux, puts significant limitations on what you can do with it. I can’t run another desktop environment or window manager, obviously. But I also can’t do things like run my own clipboard history tool, text expander, snippet manager than can operate outside of the terminal. I can run Flatpaks, and those GUI apps seem to work fine and integrate with the native app launcher. That’s cool! And there is an out-of-the-box clipboard history tool (Ctrl-V opens it) that works quite well, though for reasons beyond my understanding, it tracks only five clipboard entries.
Meanwhile, I’ve built a lot of little time-saving utilities on top of Alfred, which I love, and which also serves as my clipboard and snippet manager, my dictionary and spell checker, and so much more. I can’t replicate that stuff on the Chromebook, and I really miss it.
I will say though, my experiment proved that I could live happily with a Chromebook. There was a lot to like about it, and my office provides a fully spec’d out model with 32GB of memory. Plus, if I were moving to Linux on my personal computer, the Ctrl-based keyboard shortcuts on the Chromebook would offer me much more consistency between machines.
But once I decided to go back to Mac for work, the dominoes started to fall, and I bailed on the Linux homelab, too. While it was running great and sparked joy, all I really needed on it was SSH access, and my Mac mini can do that just fine. The homelab was also adding to the complexity of my desk setup. I won’t bore you with those details, but moving back to my Mac mini for my go-to home computer simplified things.
If I could live fully in a DE like i3 at both work and home, I would seriously consider that. But the Chromebook was just a bit too much of a compromise for me, so I chose my MacBook at work. And if I’m on Mac 85% of the time, jumping into i3 for that remaining 15% will be jarring. I fear I’ll never quite get to the flow state with it.
So, I’m typing this on my Apple Magic Keyboard, plugged into my Mac mini, plugged into my Studio Display. For a moment, I thought I might sell these things and go all-in on Linux. (Or “Linux,” that is.) But I’ve come crawling back, and I’m happy to be home.