MacOS

From day one on the Macbook I looked at how I could make this thing work for me in a way I was accustomed to. I come from Linux, a world of endless possibilities. In the 15+ years I used it as my main system, I got a certain workflow that was my own. People used to joke that I didn’t need to lock my laptop when I was away, as it was unusable to anyone else. I didn’t use a bar. A logged in system would show nothing but the wallpaper. Pressing the super (Windows) key did nothing. Right clicking the desktop did nothing. Sure, a Linux window manager user would press super + enter and they would be greeted by Kitty, my terminal emulator, but no Windows user would press that combination. ...

I don’t like a messy home. Home is where all your stuff lives and if you want to find something, it’s easier if there’s not a bunch of clutter in the way. This is true in your physical home and your digital $HOME. Most Linux distributions and macOS populate your $HOME with directories you never asked for. The difference is whether you can rid yourself of them. On Linux they come from xdg-user-dirs. You can remove or disable it, delete the directories, and they stay gone. macOS has no such switch: delete its home directories and the system quietly recreates them. So on the Mac you can’t remove them… but you can hide them. ...

It’s great that your OS tries to protect you from yourself, because let’s face it, you don’t always make the best decisions. When you download an app macOS slaps a com.apple.quarantine extended attribute on it. This is what triggers Gatekeeper’s super duper handy popup asking you if you are really, truly sure you want to open a thing you just deliberately downloaded. If you could just click OK on this and move on, that’d be fine. It’s a little reminder that “hey, you did a thing you might not want to do”. And it does this sometimes. Other times it will flat out deny you running it. You’d have to go into settings and click through menus to allow the application in order to actually launch it. This is going too far. Luckily a single terminal command will handle it in one fell swoop. ...

I have been switching browsers a lot these last few months. The new CEO of Mozilla, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, stated in his post that “It [Firefox] will evolve into a modern AI browser”. This rubbed me the wrong way. Granted, Mozilla has been adding junk to their browser for a while now and none of it is good. He floated the idea of blocking ad-blockers in an interview. The Verge wrote: “He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission”. ...

On an Apple Macbook, there’s a file browser. It’s always “open” and always in the program switcher, which bugs the heck out of me. It’s called Finder and I need it to go away when I am not using it. By default it’s impossible to actually quit Finder due to it being such a large part of the OS. It even handles the desktop, for example. I personally don’t use macOS in the intended way. I don’t have a launcher bar, all my applications are launched through shortcuts. I do not use, or really ever see the desktop. I do use the application switcher. A lot. Having that stupid face icon there is one thing. Having to tab over it to get from one app to the next is too much. ...

I’m used to formatting disks on Linux with GParted, but unfortunately there’s no version for MacOS. They offer some sort of bootable image, but that sounded like a hassle. Luckily it turns out MacOS has a built-in tool. Usage is simple. I wanted to format a drive to ExFat, and all it takes is: 1 diskutil list To list the drives on your system and find the name of the one you want to format. Then: ...