I switched to an M1 Air back at the beginning of 2021, was on Linux (desktop machine) about a …

The way these modern macs are set up in terms of permissions is really strange and has put some projects on a backburner for me. My latest woe is getting newsboat to refresh my rss feeds either as a cronjob or launchd service. On my mojave machine this was as trivial as it sounds, either a single line in crontab or a single line with some window dressing to make it into a launchd plist file then its OK. I try and do this now and it doesn’t work, since it appears newsboat runs and pulls changes but is unable to actually write changes to the cache database now. I have gone down the rabbit hole now of giving full disk access to the shell, cron, launchd, launchctl, and the newsboat binary, but no dice. I can’t get it to work and I can’t find anything about why this shouldn’t work other than permitting full disk access. Even then that shouldn’t be required because the cache.db file sits in th…

By 4k monitor do you mean a high DPI monitor? Not much has changed in regards to resolution support, that should always have been fine, but a lot has changed in regards to high DPI support with Wayland now having "real" (direct) fractional scaling which makes it even better at approaching the problem than macOS which has "fake" (render and scale) fractional scaling. KDE Plasma and QT apps (the default desktop environment for Fedora Asahi) should support this already, I don't remember if Gnome has gotten around to defaulting to the newer protocol yet or if it was still experimental.

It seems a lot of those gripes are about specific apps, or simply not understanding that MacOS does somethings differently. By contrast I have never been able to use Linux successfully as a desktop OS because there is a dearth of polished commercial apps, and the HW compatibility has always been iffy. MacOS generally works out of the box with the HW, and the apps are generally highly polished. I caveat the apps as “generally” because there are some turds for sure. iTunes and now Music have always been horrible, and somehow they managed to make Music even worse than iTunes. Historically Macs do benefit from 3rd party software (see also Alfred), over time the best of it seems to eventually get baked into the OS. I don’t see that as a downside really.

My main gripe - how on vanilla MacOS alt(cmd)-tabbing cycles through applications first and then _all their windows_ rather than windows first, doing _nothing_ on a per application basis. I cannot imagine how this matches at all to anyone's workflow. Nobody at apple works on a single project across multiple applications (documentation in browswr, your IDE, an emulator, some terminals, etc.).? You have to install a specific app and give it some crazy permissions to fix those issues. Pfft

Some people prefer Linux (or Windows) to macOS, and that's perfectly reasonable. Some of your gripes are a little curious, though: > Solutions? Wait for Apple to fix it (or write a wonky script to fix it on boot, which I did). Eventually they did, but ug. Writing a wonky script to fix something on boot sounds eerily like my Linux experiences. > to support using 3 finger clicks as middle-click I had to buy software. On Windows this is just built in. On Linux it's on by default. This could also be phrased as "in some ways macOS works differently to Windows and Linux. However, there is a solution for those who prefer the Linux way." > to make Spotify work somewhat properly I had to download separate software... That's Spotify, not macOS. > if I open Spotify and hit the Play button on my keyboard, Apple Music opens Yes, Apple Music opening for inexplicable reasons is very annoying. > it took…

The tone of the community is really different, too—and imo the worst thing about the transition from Linux -> OS X. And ok, it's not a fair comparison, because Linux users tend to be way more technical due in part to the OS family's barriers of entry. Still, it's annoying when you search for how to do something in OS X and the first few threads are full of people saying "that isn't how it works! Instead of wanting to change it, you need to understand and follow the Apple Way™!" You're usually able to find the solution after a bit more searching, but the Apple Forums are especially bad.

Your list sounds more like app related things rather than OS related things to be honest. Also, contrasting your issue list with the issue list of Linux, where Wayland barely works, audio issues are constant, the whole system is so delicate that an automatic update can easily brick the OS, 10 different ways to install apps leading to no consistency at all (flatpak, snap, .tar.gz, AppImage, native binary, apt-get, software center ...), makes MacOS sound really great.

MiddleClick is a free app that brings middle click functionality: https://github.com/artginzburg/MiddleClick-Sonoma