Discontent

Whenever people ask “what operating system do you use” my answer is usually some variant of “all of them.” Except for a brief gap in the late 90s, since my college days my primary desktop operating system has been the Mac. Since that gap in the late 90s (when I actually paid real money for a nice HP) I've generally had at least one computer around that could run some version of Windows, but it's never been my preference. And the running joke of “this could be the year of Linux on the desktop” was always just that: a joke. But I can't help feeling now that things have changed, because of a confluence of factors.

I have several old Intel-based Macs that still see some use. I've mostly managed to decommission the oldest of them, a Mac mini we used as a home theater PC, replacing it with a NAS. The other two, a MacBook Pro from 2015 (the last model before they switched to the hated butterfly keyboard) and a 5K iMac from 2017, are no longer supported by Apple, but they're still surprisingly decent computers. It turns out that, for my needs, computers mostly got as fast as I need them to be about a decade ago. We bought an M2 MacBook Air when the battery cells in the old MacBook Pro turned into forbidden pillows but then I ended up replacing the battery just to keep it as a backup. And the 5K iMac still has a beautiful display, so I kind of resent the fact that it's no longer supported.

I've been using OpenCore Legacy Patcher to work around the lack of official support for all the old Macs, but it slows down the software update process, and the software update process on Intel Macs was already slow compared to Apple Silicon (I vaguely recall that Apple introduced some streamlining in Software Update a few years ago and restricted it to Apple Silicon, but this is too hard to find a citation for). With the advent of Liquid Glass I haven't bothered to update any of the old Macs to macOS 26, so they really are at the end of the line for software updates. And I have to wonder why I would expend the effort anyway, since most of what's new (like Liquid Glass) isn't actually better, it's just change for the sake of change.

Meanwhile, on the Windows side of things, I haven't updated anything in the house to Windows 11, because none of the hardware in the house is new enough to support it. Again, much like with OpenCore Legacy Patcher, you can just patch the installer and install Windows 11 on “unsupported” hardware, where it apparently runs just fine, but I have no interest in Copilot and I'm not sure what needs are served by Windows 11 other than those of capitalism.

And this is where we are. I don't want what Apple or Microsoft want to sell me, and it feels like software is just getting worse. Reportedly Apple's next OS release will be a Snow Leopard style focus on quality instead of new features (🤞🏻), but it's really starting to feel like Apple is focusing primarily on the funnel into a subscription cloud services, and their cloud services just aren't good enough for that. I still reluctantly pay for the 2TB iCloud plan because it's never a good time to ask my wife to migrate, but Apple has broken my music library more times than I care to count, and I've got duplicates of a bunch of documents because my Documents folder kept getting cloned instead of synced (so I have a Documents folder that contains multiple, nearly identical, subfolders named Documents – computername).

So I did the unthinkable and installed Linux Mint on the old MacBook Pro and it was … fine? All the hardware works, it starts up fast, and it doesn't seem to make anything impossible. I even spent some time getting the (few) Windows games I own to run in Lutris and Steam (all but Civilization VI, which requires newer video hardware than this old Mac has. But I also got it for free, so I'm not complaining).

Anyway, Linux Mint Cinnamon has a well deserved reputation as the “just install it, it's fine” Linux for Windows users, but it's maybe a little too Windows-y for me. So I looked around for Linux distributions that seem a little more Mac like, and found Zorin and elementary OS. Between the two of them, Zorin defaults to the Brave browser (ew (1), ew (2) although they turn off the misfeatures), while elementary OS has a strong policy against AI contributions, so I figured I'd try installing elementary OS alongside Linux Mint.

I ran into a couple problems with that plan, one of which was more significant than the other. First, it turned out that the installer elementary OS uses is inflexible with its assumptions about storage and EFI partitions, and my existing EFI partition was too small for it. I had to delete my Linux Mint partition and the existing EFI partition, manually create a newer, larger EFI partition, and then assign elementary OS to a new, unformatted partition. After that it installed just fine, but when I reinstalled Linux Mint after that, Linux Mint took ownership of my startup partition. To get it to boot elementary OS by default, I had to boot Linux Mint and change its Grub configuration. There may have been another way to change the default, but this was the first way that worked. Second, elementary OS hides uncommon keyboard layouts from its selection screen and doesn't have an obvious option to enable them (Linux Mint also hides them, but it has a checkbox for this purpose). I run the Carpalx QGMLWY layout, which is in the uncommon bucket, and the only way I could figure out how to enable it was to edit a file you're not supposed to edit.

Other than those two configuration issues, I'm actually quite happy with elementary OS and recommend it for the Linux-curious Mac user. The biggest positive in my book is that the trackpad gestures match what I'm used to, so the various two- and three-finger swipes I use for forward and back, or app and space selection, work the way I expect them to. Linux Mint got a few of these gestures right, but I couldn't figure out where or how to enable the other UI gestures I'm used to. Both distributions give you access to Flatpak apps, so you can pretty much install all the same GUI software on both with the same amount of effort. I have pointed a few default directories in my $HOME folder in both OSes to a shared partition so I'm not downloading all the same stuff twice, but I was able to point Lutris to the same games I had already installed, and everything worked without me having to futz around installing patches and no-CD cracks all over again.

Unfortunately, I don't think this is the last time I'm going to have to think about what's in my OS (or what isn't). I really appreciate how elementary OS has a clear no-AI policy, but I'm not sure how they're going to get around the AI generated code in the Linux kernel or in systemd. Depending on how things shake out on that front, I might have to spend even more time looking into alternatives.