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I've got a Mac at work and I hate it with passion. I now use my own linux Laptop instead. There is no del key, no home, ctrl and alt are swapped in some aplications and not the others. Login screeen does not remember the language and animations come back after every update even when I explicitly disable them. Muscle memory from other 99% computers I use doesn't work and most of the games don't. I feel like mac os is in contempt of me and I really hate it when I have to use it for mandatory tasks. Mac doesnt fit for me at all, I use Linux for Production and Windows for games


> no del key

Ctrl+d, like in emacs

> no home

Ctrl+a. Also: Ctrl+e for end-of-line. Like in emacs. Also Ctrl+fbpn.

Works best with CapsLock->Control, which is a native GUI option, not something you have to install/CLI for (linux) or something you have to registry hack (windows). I really miss these on Windows and Linux, though not enough to fight the native layout. It's a rougher fight than you might imagine, though.

> Login screeen does not remember the language

It does for me, but more importantly: it shows it. Windows likes to swap the keyboard layout out from under me and doesn't show it. Mix with a 3-strikes-you're-locked-out policy at work, and it turns into pain.

> animations come back after every update

Yeah, that's fair.

> Muscle memory

That's not.

> I feel like mac os is in contempt of me

I feel like windows is actively malicious towards me and linux desktop doesn't care enough about me to do even minimum viable bugfixing. It's definitely a "pick your poison" situation.


The last time I had to use MacOS regularly, the thing that killed it for me was the lack of a tiling window manager.

I use xmonad in Ubuntu and I haven't dragged a window on my personal laptop in years. Not only was that option missing on MacOS, the underlying OS abstractions actually made it impractical to build the last time I checked; windows were owned by the application, there was no language to move another application's windows except asking the application to move its own, and doing that required the application to be frontmost. So tiling was a context-switch morass and a bad UX.

However, it appears the Accessibility Manager may since have grown enough feature hooks to support what I want, and https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst may do the job. I'll have to test it the next time I have my hands on a MacBook of some flavor.


Delete forward is Fn + delete, Home is Fn + up. It's not a specific key, obviously, but all those keys don't fit on a laptop. However, if you plug in your own keyboard I'm sure they'll be recognized.

My experience is that the only apps that use actual Ctrl on macOS are GTK apps, like Inkscape, and terminal apps (because Ctrl-C should be quite different from activating the menu item corresponding to the Cmd-C shortcut). Unfortunately, if you use non-native apps, you're going to get a non-native experience.




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