From Linux to Mac and back!
This is my story about the journey I took, exploring different operating systems over the past 30 years. It all started back in the late 80’s with a commodore 64 and whatever was on it (if you can call it an OS). The first real operating system I used was Amiga workbench version 2 on a Commodore Amiga 500. For it’s time it was very advanced. At the same time Macintosh existed with it’s well known graphical interface , but it was too expensive and out of reach for many people. Then all of the sudden Amiga died! That was about 1993 and the only other choice was to switch to a PC if you wanted to continue to be relevant in the home computing world. Back then everyone used Dos and the version was 3.3. Later Dos 6.2 came (I don’t know what happened to the rest of them!). Window 3 existed but it was a layer on top of Dos and still you had to run major software in Dos including the mind blowing game of the time, Prince of Persia!. Then came the revolutionary windows 95 which was a big step out of non-graphical PC. This was the first version of windows not relying on Dos to start and it started it’s own kernel at boot time.
Fast forward to 2001 when I was introduced to Linux by a colleague at the software company I was working for as a system admin. At the time Linux was primitive and installation was an expert level job. You needed drivers even for keyboard to work properly. But still I loved the Unix like nature of it, first few years I was just exploring with Linux and used it as a server to accomplish certain tasks like a web proxy server using squid to allow office workers use the internet in a controlled way. As Linux matured into a fine desktop usable operating system, all my personal PCs at home were running some version of Linux (mostly Fedora) by 2008. I need to mention that I was so fed up with windows that I stopped using it at least on my own computers right around 2006. Still I was forced to use Windows in the office but I had no choice. Even in the office I used Linux on my non-production work PC.
Then came the Mac! for a few years I was a huge advocate of Linux and almost hated Macs. My friend used to use a Mac and always tried to convince me to switch but I always hesitated. At the time I believed it was too restricted and didn’t let me have the freedom I was enjoying with Linux. Around 2009, I started learning photography and decided to have at least one Mac at home for photo editing and post processing. I heard most creative people used Macs so I decided to give it a try. It was a time when I got a bit fed up with the constant need of upgrades to keep Linux relevant. back then every 6 months a new version of Fedora came out and if you wanted to upgrade you had to backup your data, format your hard disk and start from scratch. Also spend a week afterwards to tweak everything and install third party plugins for a usable desktop environment. Macs didn’t need any of that! It just worked out of the box and the updates were not that frequent and happened automatically. I started to realize that a good tool is a tool you spend less time fixing it and more time using it the way it was intended. Mac was and is exactly that, It just works effortlessly out of the box for many years without becoming slow (unlike Windows!) or crashing all the time. Linux was a good stable operating system, but back in those days it was not easy to maintain and lacked so many features the modern Linux distros have today.
Slowly over next few years I phased out of Linux as a desktop and continued using my Macbook happily doing all the nice things you can do on a Mac, such as video editing with Finalcut and post processing photos with Lightroom and the occasional music making with Garageband. I continued using Mac OS for a good 12 years until recently which I sold my Mac and switched to Linux again. Actually I am writing this on Ubuntu 20.4 LTS.
The switch to Linux was cultivated when a few months back, I upgraded my son’s gaming PC and I was left with an unused PC, so I decided to play around with different distros and see what has changed in the Linux world during last decade. I was in for a big surprise, Linux has come a long way. Now something like Ubuntu or it’s many many variants or Fedora are perfect operating systems nothing short of Mac OS. Before a lot of features were lacking in Linux, you always had to revert back to command line to do things (which wasn’t a major issue for me as I am a Linux/Unix admin), but now you almost forget you have CLI in Linux. Specially Gnome 3.x is so mature and well featured. So as I was playing around with Linux on the old mentioned PC, the Linux bug bit me again.
A few months later, coincidentally I needed some quick cash and first thing came to my mind was to sell my 2016 Macbook and I did. I decided also to sell my barely used 2020 Ipad 7th gen and buy a cheap laptop to run Linux on it until I can afford to buy a brand new Macbook. So I bought a Dell Inspiron 3593 at about $420 with Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS pre-installed. It has a 10th gen core i3 CPU, 4GB RAM and 120GB nvme SSD. Even with 4GB of RAM, it runs flawlessly. Linux is just free of bloatware. Now after almost 2 months of using this laptop with Ubuntu, I must say I do not miss my Macbook and certainly do not intend to go back. Linux and Gnome does everything I need to do and It’s perfect for coding also. I forgot to mention I started coding python a few months back, It used to work great on Mac and I can say the same for Linux. The only thing I miss about Mac is the lack of Finalcut and Lightroom. I have found Rawtherapee to be a good replacement for Lightroom but still didn’t find a good candidate for Finaclcut. So far I tried KDEenlive which was full of bugs and didn’t work as intended. Devinci resolve needed a dedicated GPU which I don’t have, so far I have settled for shotcut which is good enough. Everything else works just fine, I use a great app called Foliate to read ebooks and there are several options to view PDFs (okular for example). For coding python I use the fantastic Pycharm which is multi platform.
So in conclusion I must say, In about the span of 15 years, I have made a full circle by using Linux as main desktop operating system and switching to Mac OS and then back to Linux. It has been a great adventure and I would recommend it to specially Windows users to give Linux a try and see how wonderful it is to use.
