Today I'm leaving the Apple ecosystem and switching back to Linux. I own a MacBook Air M1 since 2022. It's been 4 great years, but my current relationship with technology makes it unfeasible to keep using it daily. 🧵I'm breaking down why:

As when Windows 11 completely ruined my MSI, macOS Tahoe has notably degraded my Mac's performance. I bought the 512GB model to avoid using iCloud... well, macOS has turned my laptop into a 256GB model by filling it with garbage. And now I have to use iCloud anyway.

Then, Tahoe came for the RAM. The Air does a fantastic job hiding its pain, mainly because it has no fans to scream. Even though the laptop feels smooth most of the time, the new normal for my Mac's Activity Monitor is basically living like this. This didn't happen before.

The Apple ecosystem has given me plenty of moments of delight, but its few moments of despair are annoying enough to make me reconsider its tradeoffs. Let's talk third party apps. I may be framing this the wrong way, but I feel bad every time I have to install one.

Apple sell themselves as the golden standard of simplicity and interconnection. Of course, this is marketing 101, but installing 3rd party apps to enhance macOS' features (Alfred, Raycast…) makes me feel like I'm altering that standard. Or that the system is flawed. Not great.

For instance, I once tried to use Finder to connect to my SMB share. The native app should work flawlessly. It was unusable. The way Finder lists files makes it painfully slow to operate. Is this the way it was intended? Any 3rd party app did the job perfectly, but are we going to use two file explorers now?

On a similar note, iOS limits access to network shares in the background. I didn't care about this until I wanted to keep my Obsidian vault synced between my Apple and Linux nodes. Now my project (and potential workflow!) is paralyzed until I switch back to Android. These constraints are starting to get really annoying.

The thing is, I probably don't need a full fledged ecosystem and the guardrails that make it possible. At this stage, I value the freedom of configuring my own system in my own terms. Linux gives me that, just as it did in 2015 when I started to code on my T400. And you? Have any of you left Apple's walled garden? I feel there's few of us here, so I'd love to connect if you read this!