Alright. So. Before we begin, I’ll give you a brief history of my computer usage and preferences. I am a long time Mac user. My parents always bought Macs, I’ve always bought Macs. The first Windows PC I used was in school. I absolutely hated it. I can’t stand using Windows to this day; something about it just feels claustrophobic to me. I have never used Windows as a daily driver. I can’t imagine trying to do anything beyond playing video games in it. About three years ago, I decided I would take some of the money I earned from working over the summer and build a computer. This posed a bit of a problem, as Apple is generally not kind to anything outside their ecosystem. Fortunately for me, however, the folks over on tonymacx86.com had my back. So after a careful selection of parts and a somewhat tedious installation, I had a custom built desktop computer capable of running OS X. As the hackintosh name implies, this solution was, well, a bit hacked together. I frequently had problems with sound and network drivers. Sometimes the computer would stop recognizing USB devices. USB 3.0 rarely worked. Of course, the occasional kernel panic. It was an absolute mess. But it was my mess, and it worked the way I wanted it to (most of the time). I have never been too fond of the way Apple runs their company; I much prefer Android to iOS, and am generally dissatisfied with the Apple developer experience. In short, it’s too closed off. But for a long time, I saw Windows as the only alternative to OS X. I had tried Linux a few times, but was unimpressed with the software capabilites and generally preferred OS X. I just couldn’t get Linux to behave quite the way I wanted it to (read: Like OS X). About a month ago, after getting fed up with OS X breaking and the general direction Apple has been taking the operating system, as well as some well deserved nagging from @jack-kinsey about the wonders of Open Source, I decided to look into Linux again. I installed a spare laptop hard drive in my computer and put Manjaro Linux on it with KDE Plasma as the desktop environment. After some tweaking, I had it largely laid out like OS X: tray in the top right, Plank dock on the bottom, multiple desktops, etc. One thing that has always bugged me, though, is the use of the control key instead of meta/super/command/whatever you want to call it. So I set out trying to rebind that, to moderate success. Chromium still behaves a little strange, but aside from that all the other programs I regularly use have allowed me to remap all the shortcuts. As for switching programs, all of the IDEs I use are compatible with Linux (I guess not XCode, but honestly I rarely even used it). I primarily use Atom and IntelliJ (Android Studio included) these days. I’ve made the switch from Photoshop to GIMP, and aside from a few minor irritations, functionality is largely the same. LMMS replaced Garage Band, and Flowblade/Blender replaced Premiere. I haven’t been using them much, so it’s still going to take some getting used to, but using Open Source software does feel much better. I haven’t booted to OS X in about a month. I’m quite happy with the setup, and surprisingly (or not) it has been much easier to maintain. We’ll see what happens once I head off to college, but for now I can safely say that I'm officially at home using Linux.
