My gripes with macOs

For work I have to use a Macbook. This is due to reasons I won’t go into in this rantblogpost, but suffice it to say that there’s currently no other option. It’s a Macbook Pro, previously an Intel variety, now it’s one of the Apple Silicon persuation.

This has been the case since 2019, when I took up this role. The last half year (from mid 2024 to start of 2025) I had a slightly different role where I was using a Windows machine, but now I’m back on a mac.

And sigh it does manage to frustrate me constantly.

The half year with Windows actually felt blissful. It didn’t get in my way. macOs does so on the daily. Very opinionated, if you don’t want to do it “The Apple Way” it’s frustration 101.

Let’s start positive: the hardware is nice. The battery life is stellar. The screen is sharp and bright.

Less positive: The keyboard and keyboard layout suck monkeyballs. But that’s a personal thing.

Things that annoys me on the daily:

• Apple built-in keyboards. Sigh. Luckely my fantastic Keychron K1 Max helps me on the go, and my aging Corsair Strafe RGB does so at home. Add to that the fact that their keyboard layout isn’t quite standard, either.
• No support for Multi-Stream Transport, to allow multiple displays to be daisy-chained over a single Displayport cable. This actually works on the hardware, just the OS doesn’t support it. So I need yet another cable to support two screens.
• The need to install additional software (Sane Side Buttons) to be able to use the forward/backward buttons on my Logitech mouse (unless you buy a ‘mac’ variant of said mouse). This is retarded - it works with every other OS. No, I will not buy, request nor use one of those ergonomically horrible Magic Mice.
• The need to install another piece of software (NoTunes) so that Apple Music doesn’t start every time I power up or power down my Poly Voyager Focus 2 headset - you know, a reputable brand, proper work-setting headset. Nevermind I’ve disabled all options in the app that should control this, it still pops up. Retarded.
• Finder is really a bad file manager. As in, horribly bad. Yes, another app can solve that. Also, it doesn’t seem to have progressed since the days I actually owned a Macbook2,1 in 2007.
• Home/End key inconsistency. This works the same on every platform I own (Linux, Windows, Android), but yet macOs needs to do something not quite the same. Also, not all apps do the same thing when you hit the keys.
• Maximizing doesn’t. If I hit that button, I expect the window to maximize over the entire screen. Not so with macOs, it’ll just do something weird like maximize to content. Which is not what I want.
• Another full-screen issue: you can choose between having the option to have applications being able to go full-screen on just one screen, and having the Dock hop all over the place if you happen to hold your mouse a little bit too long at the bottom of another screen, or you can have a fixed Dock but then your other screens go black when you use the full-screen option. How is this even linked to eachother?!
• In 2024, they finally introduced some form of Window Management, but it still sucks quite a lot. Better off installing (yet another piece of software) Rectangle.
• Shoving ‘Apple Intelligence’ in your face all the time. No, I don’t want it, fuck off.
• Opaqueness. Often when things go haywire it’s really hard to figure out what it’s doing. Best solution is to reboot the damn thing. If I want that, I’ll just use Windows. Hell, even that OS is easier to debug.

Linux is my preferred OS privately - Fedora KDE Spin - which I wish I could also use at work, but I can’t. And no, I cannot say I find macOs even remotely as pleasant to work with.

Yes, I know, I could buy one and install Asahi Linux on it. But no, I won’t.

• Apple is really an anti-competetive company and goes out of it’s way to blame other parties when it doesn’t get to do 100% what it wants. We’ve seen that with the recent EU regulation.
• They flaunt privacy/… but in the end will just fold to oppressive governments when it looks like it will hurt the bottom line. Extremely double-faced.
• I really dislike vendor lock-in. I mix and match my hardware and software, and it all plays together. Except, well…
• I don’t want to give my money to a company which isn’t directly supporting Linux. Apple isn’t actively trying to stop Asahi, but they could at any given time since they own the full stack - hardware and software. They could just send an update which changes enough in their firmware together with a macOs update so that Asahi is fucked.

END OF RANT