A Linux User's Notes on Macs

Linux and macOS are often described as being similar enough that migrating from one to the other is pretty straightforward. That’s been mostly true for me, and I’ve been scribbling notes to myself as a newcomer that might be helpful for anyone doing the same.

Window Management

I was surprised to find window management is pretty basic on macOS. On Linux (and even Windows 11), you can tile open application windows to fill the left and right (or top and bottom) halves of the screen with a couple of keypresses. Having to manually drag windows around and carefully resize them by hand feels like quite a backwards step coming from other operating systems.

Thankfully - and to gleefully invoke an ancient Apple slogan - there’s an app for that! Rectangle adds the window management functionality I was missing and will help Linux users feel at home shifting windows about.

HiDPI Output

HiDPI support has been standard in Mac software since Apple coined the retina term for its displays years ago. With Apple silicone though, HiDPI output from MacBooks to external displays is disabled unless the display has 4K resolution. That’s a problem for me and my 1440p Dell monitor; the monitor is capable of producing a nice, sharp image, but my MacBook won’t output HiDPI to it! I had super tiny, pixelated output that looked awful.

It’s another problem solved by installing a third party app - BetterDisplay overcomes the restriction on output to sub-4K monitors, allowing me to scale the display on my monitor and enable HiDPI for a beautiful, sharp picture.

Clipboard Management

On Ubuntu I use a clipboard manager that integrates nicely with the top bar in GNOME, and in Windows 11 clipboard history is built into the same menu as the emoji shortcut. I couldn’t find a similar feature in macOS, but Maccy has added the functionality I was missing.

It’s good that it has an option to change the menu bar icon to something more recognisable too; I’m used to accessing history from a little clipboard icon:

Launching Apps from the Dock

There’s no keyboard shortcut to quickly launch a specific app from the dock. On Linux I’d use Super + 1 to launch my browser, Super + 2 for the terminal and so on, but on macOS you need a third party app for that. I’m using Snap.

Mounting External Filesystems

I make a regular backup of photos and videos from my phone to an external hard drive so I’m not relying purely on cloud storage. My external SSD was formatted as LUKS, which macOS can’t read. To access the media I’d already backed up over the years I used a nifty utility called Linsk, which creates a lightweight Linux VM that mounts the external drive and exposes it to macOS as a network share. Clever!

Odd Defaults

A strange default setting is that macOS only properly “locks” 5 minutes after you shut the laptop lid, which doesn’t feel particularly secure. If you’ve shut the lid, there’s a good chance you’re also leaving the laptop unattended for a moment. Why should someone else be able to open it and access everything? The excellent fingerprint reader makes unlocking instant anyway, so it seems like a security risk for no real usability benefit.

{Thing}.App

I didn’t understand the inner workings of Mac apps at first. They have the appearance of a single file, but are really more like little directory structures. You can see that structure by right-clicking an app and selecting Show Package Contents.

The Good Bits

You already know what Macs do well; beautiful hardware, highly polished software, and as a long time Linux user it is nice to use an OS that everyone builds their app for first. The Mac monoculture still isn’t a good idea, but even tech companies tend to build for macOS and Windows first, and then maybe throw out a Linux port or beta if the demand is there (and it often isn’t. If there was a sad penguin emoji I’d use it here 🙁🐧).

Generally though the user experience is excellent pretty much all the time. The hardware and software is a pleasure to use, and I’m enjoying the way some apps make use of the much-maligned (and now abandoned) Touch Bar on this model. I’ll continue to use a mix of Linux and macOS to get things done 🚀