I Forced Myself to Use macOS For 30 Days (macOS Challenge)

this is my MacBook Pro M1 Max which I've been using for a little over 30 days now and boy do I have a story to tell because I gotta say I've never been this conflicted with any product in my life thus far it all began when I made the video where I was trying out DaVinci Resolve for the first time after which I actually started using it as my main video editing software the issue however was that DaVinci Resolve was seemingly much more demanding in terms of Hardware compared to Sony Vegas because while in Sony Vegas you can manually select a specific area of your video to process it in order to see what your effects look like in real time without any lag DaVinci Resolve instead relies on automatic non-user controllable caching which can be really painful to work with unless you have a really powerful computer so while before I was kind of hopeful that I won't be needing to upgrade my 980 TI and ryzen 7 2700x desktop for at least another five years after I started using resolve it pretty much became a necessity in terms of product activity and that was all around nine months ago from that point forward I started doing research into what kind of Hardware I should eventually upgrade to but the issue was that at the time even second-hand graphics cards were still incredibly overpriced to the extent that the 980 TI I bought in January of 2018 for 300 Euros was still going for almost the same price in 2022. on top of that the 3000 Series cards had already been out for nearly two years yet they were still way above the MSRP and there was pretty much no indication of the speculative 4000 series cars releasing anytime soon however there was something else that caught my attention as well I watched a set of quality video where he bought a new Macbook that ended up being more powerful than his 15 000 plus Mac Pro and despite also having a ryzen 9 plus 39 DTI Windows desktop he ended up using the MacBook as his main video editing device and the craziest part for me was that on top of all that he was also able to connect all his peripherals including monitors audio interfaces microphones and so on to the MacBook with just one cable which also charges it at the same time this honestly seemed like a complete dream setup to me as recently I had been moving between multiple locations and I was always carrying my desktop and monitors with me which was incredibly annoying especially since I had to redo the gabling every single time as well meaning that this single cable desktop replacement laptop setup truly did sound like a dream to me however I sort of ignored it at the time since it's a Macbook meaning that it probably won't have the best price to Performance and it's also running Mac OS so this setup will most likely never be an option for me but then a few months went by and I saw some more reviews and performance comparisons of the MacBook and I was honestly really impressed the thing is that this 2021 MacBooks are nothing like the old ones instead of using an x86 Intel based CPU it's now using Apple silicon running arm architecture which is essentially very similar to how Smartphones work this means that the new MacBooks are very powerful yet they draw very little power hence they also have very little fan noise as the fan won't be even running most of the time all of which also contributes to them having extremely good battery life in terms of performance comes out that video editing in DaVinci Resolve with these MacBooks is generally comparable and in some scenarios even better than a 3080 or 3090 desktop but keep in mind that it's also a laptop with almost no fan noise and because the MacBook draws so little power the performance doesn't even drop on battery which also lasts for hours even during heavy video editing and what makes it especially valuable is that at the time electricity prices were also through the roof to the extent that even I had a build where the kilowatt per hour price was 43 cents during the summer meaning that even if I do get a powerful desktop for around the same price as the MacBook it might be pretty expensive to run over the long term and the performance might not even be better but even if the performance is slightly better on a newly maxed out desktop I sort of feel like there is more to the story than just raw performance because when it comes to doing work and productivity unquantifiable benefits such as being able to work from bed in your back hurts from sitting or the fact that the MacBook has nearly zero fan noise which can be important for recording can be invaluable and when it comes to Mac OS I assume that it's most likely going to be a very nice operating system despite me having almost no experience with it asides from using it a bit on other people's computers the only real concern I had was gaming compatibility because even though I don't actually spend that many hours on gaming right now I still use in-game footage in my videos very often and I have some videos and projects related to gaming planned in the future making it basically a deal breaker for me however I checked that RS league as well as CS 1.6 and CSS were all supported on Mac OS and apparently you can also use emulators to run other games as well so honestly everything I personally might want to play was available meaning that there was pretty much nothing to worry about but I wasn't rushing yet because regardless I had to save money for the abandoned store renovation and also because generally speaking new MacBooks released during October and it was getting pretty close to that so I decided to just wait until the new models come out and and the prices of the old one stock as well however by October the M2 MacBooks unfortunately didn't launch but instead the RTX 490 did which as you might already know was ridiculously expensive with an extreme power doll and since I live in Estonia the price of the 4090 wasn't the MSRP of thousand six hundred dollars but instead 2 300 Euros even a month or two after the release so obviously I wasn't going to buy that eventually 2023 rolled around and even a few weeks into January the release of the M2 Max was still nowhere to be found even the rather unreliable rumors and speculations also indicated that the M2 release will most likely be in either late spring or possibly even quarter 4 of 2023. at this point I had already been waiting for over half a year meaning that another potential 10 month wait was just not going to be worth it as I wanted better video editing performance right now so when I suddenly saw a secondhand MacBook Pro M1 Max which was barely used to the extent that it was indistinguishable from a brand new one up for sale for 2500 Euro which keep in mind was pretty much the same price as just a 40 90 at the time I felt like now is the time good as ever to just bite the bullet and make the investment especially since I had finally moved into the abandoned store as well so after waiting and doing research for over half a year on the 16th of January 2023 I bought myself a second hand 16-inch MacBook Pro M1 Max with 32 gigs of RAM and a one terabyte SSD and literally on the very next day on 17th of January Apple unveils the M2 MacBooks why to make matters even worse they weren't even significantly more expensive than the currently available second-hand M1 MacBooks but luckily for me I live in a country where everyone has just way too much money so to make it a bit more fair the prices are always going to be significantly above the MSRP meaning that a new M2 Max wasn't going to cost around 3 300 Euros but instead here they started from 4 300. so essentially I would have never bought the M2 Max anyway and the prices of the M1 MacBooks didn't really significantly drop right after regardless in fact as I'm making this video right now it's been almost two months since I bought the MacBook and to this day I haven't seen a single second hand M1 Max being sold here for as low as I got it for so despite the ridiculous timing in the end there wasn't really anything to worry about after all anyway as the seller didn't have the original box at hand I had to travel all the way to a different city just to get the laptop safely and when I finally arrived home it was time to try out my brand new second hand MacBook Pro for the very very first time in terms of the build quality it's really nice and solid I literally have nothing to complain about and I'm really picky it genuinely does feel like something that's going to last forever though because it's just on a completely different level to any laptop I've ever used as everything is just top notch and doesn't cut any Corners speaking of notches and Corners I also really like the design as thus far this generation feels like the most timeless design Apple has put out as unlike the previous generations which had a slight Mount design the new chassis is instead completely flat with slightly cornered edges meaning that it essentially just feels like a solid slab of metal and such primitive elements will always look nice and when it comes to the notch yeah it is one of those things that might make the MacBook look Antiquated in the future but honestly I really don't mind the notch that much especially since in reality it doesn't really get in the way of anything due to the aspect ratio when it comes to the keyboard however this one has the Swedish layout which is a bit unfortunate for me because I much much prefer the ANSI layout that pretty much every keyboard that I own has and because I'm daily driving a topra keyboard the macbook's keyboard of course doesn't feel anywhere near as tactile and it obviously also has very low key travel due to have low profile it is but it's still a pretty nice keyboard overall and I do enjoy typing on it however I just wish it was slightly more tactile which would make it so much more satisfying I'm also a bit concerned about keycap shine which seems to happen quite fast with these MacBooks as the keycaps are presumably made out of ABS plastic but there's not much to do about that as PBT isn't really suitable for such low profile moldings but anyway when I turned on the MacBook for the very first time came out that the previous owner had accidentally left some of their stuff such as Adobe Creative Cloud iMessage and Chrome password manager still logged in so the first thing I did was just factory reset the MacBook just in case and I gotta say that the reinstallation process was a lot less infuriating compared to Windows which is pretty nice and now is where the fun begins because it was time for my first proper experience with Mac OS and oh boy what an experience it was I took so many notes every single day about things I encountered during this journey that I'm already aware that it's not going to be possible to cover all of them but anyway let's get started so the first thing I wanted to do was install all the applications I was going to be using but what I found weird was that I couldn't click just by tapping and the same went for dragging windows but luckily those were just settings I had to turn on when I finally finished downloading something I was surprised at how easy it is to install programs on Mac OS you literally just drag the downloaded file into your applications folder and that's it it also plays this satisfying sound as well but as I was downloading and installing additional software I was starting to notice how much trouble I was having with using this operating system first of all the dock is nothing like the taskbar on Windows the way it indicates whether or not something is open is with this little dot on the bottom however it only shows one icon of the application if you have let's say five browser windows open it's still going to look exactly the same and clicking on it is just going to open up the window which was used most recently and when you click it again unlike in Windows it doesn't minimize that window but instead it literally does nothing the dock also doesn't give any visual indication to what application is currently focused and while on Windows I was used to hitting the Windows key plus some number to open or Focus apps from the taskbar on the Mac OS stock you can't do that out of the box so I had to download some third-party app just for that but it ended up being a bit buggy and I didn't like it so I ended up uninstalling it I've actually never been a fan of the dock even before when I saw someone using Mac OS I always hated the way the dock looked due to the inconsistent Blank Space it leaves when windows are maximized but regardless I was pretty aware of the fact that I might try using Mac OS as if it were windows so I tried keeping an open mind and I kept on diligently learning however then I also realized that Mac OS has no window snapping and this is something I found really weird because I don't think it's such a window specific feature as literally every floating window based Linux desktop environment I've used also has this feature what makes it even weirder is the fact that Mac OS actually has a similar feature if you hover the screen full screen button for a bit it then lets you choose to towel a window to either side however doing so will also full screen the application and there are no keyboard shortcuts to achieve this meaning that for myself personally this feature is just too slow and impractical to the extent that I'll probably never use it I also discovered that all tabbing or rather command tapping on Mac OS is once again nothing like on Windows it's pretty much the same as the dock meaning that it only shows you one icon per application so if you have multiple windows offset application open you still can choose between them or get a proper overview so clearly the workflow on Mac OS is designed to be completely different I found out that most people suggested using a shortcut key to switch between open Windows of the same application as well as using the mission control feature which is fancy but it's designed to be only used with a mouse so personally all of those options just felt like a huge downgrade in terms of productivity and speed compared to what I had been used to on Windows or even Linux and it was honestly a bit shocking as I had heard the statement that people quote-unquote feel more productive on Mac OS so I decided to Google why is that the case but ironically I came across multiple threads where people just flat out said that window management just isn't a strong point of Mac OS compared to Windows and honestly I just felt really sad over this another thing I started noticing is that when I switch between Windows with a mouse I have to click on the window before it starts properly registering Mouse events within the application so for example if I'm making a monkey card and want to copy text from a browser I first have to click on the browser and only then I can select the text or for example if I want to pause a YouTube video I also have to click on the YouTube window before Mac OS starts sending Mouse events to it and only then I can hover the video or click to pause and this has got to be one of the most infuriating things I've encountered from any operating system as it literally creates potentially thousands of unnecessary extra clicks you have to make throughout the day all of which slow you down and build a fatigue I assume there is something to do with Mac OS having this document based Paradigm where amps stay open even if you close all of their windows so you're still able to access their drop down menus which are always on top of the screen in the Mac OS menu bar so I can imagine that if hovering apps would automatically change Focus the menu bar could be unreachable in some scenarios as the active menus are based on whichever application is currently focused however there is no need to change Focus just by hovering on focused apps should just register Mouse events as well instead of needing to be focused first I'd say that it's probably some technical limitation from some ancient Relic in the Mac OS code but some apps actually do register inputs fine without needing to be focused first but those apps are the minority also when I full screen the window for whatever reason it made my secondary monitors go completely blank luckily it was just a setting which made every display have the same space aka the same virtual desktop in Windows terms but the thing I really hate about the way full screen works on Mac OS is that instead of overlaying the full screen window on top of everything it creates a completely new space which I'll talk about why I find annoying later in the video but for now the worst part about it is that quite often you literally can't even exit full screen via keyboard shortcuts unless the app has specifically made a Mac OS specific shortcut for it which are often inconsistent between different applications in which case you have no choice but takes it full screen incredibly slowly with your mouse anyway there are tons of things I had to configure to make Mac OS more usable for me but one of the more absurd ones was when I held down a key instead of the key repeating itself it showed me an accent selection as if I was using a smartphone and what's shocking about it is that there is no way to turn it off from the settings you have to turn it off via a terminal command and while I'm personally comfortable with using the terminal I can't believe they shipped something like this by default with no option to turn it off from the settings which ironically meant that the settings for the key repeat speed and whatnot which by default were awfully slow by the way were completely useless as they were overwritten by this undocking documented uncontrollable feature another thing which I ended up not solving is the fact that when I hold down the ALT key my keyboard layout is essentially going to turn into a bunch of symbols which is awful because personally I will most likely never use these symbols especially since they're going to be different based on whichever keyboard layout I have active and the main issue is that I can't use ALT key combinations for key bindings in some programs that don't accept symbols as inputs and if they do it's going to be inconsistent across different input methods there is a stack exchange thread giving an incredibly bothersome solution to this AKA creating a completely new keyboard layout from scratch but something like this isn't even a real solution for me because I use multiple input methods including Japanese but anyway I finally connected a mouse to the MacBook and of course Mac OS had Mouse acceleration turned on by default but I was pretty shocked to find that you actually can turn it off from the settings which was once again just mind-blowing to me Ubuntu did have the same issue however unlike Ubuntu for some reason using the terminal to turn off the acceleration didn't work properly for me another thing which I discovered was that I couldn't use the middle Mouse click auto scroll feature nor could I zoom with Control Plus scroll wheel in browsers as apparently those are Windows features so people just said used to pinch zoom on a trackpad which is of course a completely different thing or alternatively trusted control plus or minus but the position of those keys is once again input layout dependent and overall just an awful solution also other ux issues such as the traffic light buttons having such incredibly small hitboxes makes me kind of even understand why Apple doesn't want you to turn off mouse acceleration considering that the average person is going to have a pretty bad Mouse next to it not having the best aim hitting them is luckily not a big problem for me but I miss being able to just throw my cursor to the upper right corner where it's going to get stuck on the close button by Design even with multiple monitors allowing me to close a window extremely quickly even with the mouse and another absolutely terrible perhaps even a deal breaking issue I had was that text on my 27 inch 2K monitor looked just incredibly bad I've always had the same issue on Linux as well but if I recall correctly the fonts actually looked pretty decent on newer versions of Ubuntu right out of the box in which case it actually makes Mac OS even worse than Linux in this regard I'm also not alone in this as there are endless amounts of Trades online complaining about the same issue and in summary there is literally nothing you can do about it as Apple disabled the API that lets you control how text is rendered probably because it's not going to be an issue with their own retina displays some people suggested Solutions such as making a virtual 4K display dummy and scaling it down to 2K and whatnot but the fact of the matter is that none of those things will make the fonts look good so if you do want to use Mac OS with a 27 inch 2K monitor you have to hope that you personally don't care about all text literally looking like a compressed jpeg on your 700 Euro monitor making the experience of the entire operating system just feel like an inherit downgrade as these blurry fonts make it feel cheap and and low quality despite Mac OS having a reputation for being a premium product of course everything does look beautiful and sharp on the macbook's own display due to its high PPI but I wasn't really sure if getting a 27 inch 4k monitor was a good solution either because the BPI will still be much slower than retina and you also have to scale the 4K down to something like 2K as otherwise everything will be a bit too small but the issue with scaling is that first of all everything will look a bit blurrier when it's scaled and it will also constantly use more resources as it first has to scale everything up before it can scale it back down so I really didn't know what to do so at this point I started feeling pretty discouraged as deep down it felt like Mac OS probably just isn't designed for people like me who actually have a decent APM when navigating a computer with multiple monitors using a mouse and a keyboard I refresh rate retina displays don't even exist and it felt like the entire OS was designed to be used with a trackpad on a single screen in a leisurely casual friendly manner however it it's not that appealing to me as I don't want to feel like I'm being held back by an operating system that isn't designed to be used as swiftly as I'd like to use it I basically had to choose whether or not I'm going to accept some of these issues and keep on trying or if I'll give up right away which I actually kind of thought about doing as it really felt like I'll never get up to the speed I had on other operating systems and the monitor issue just made me sad every time I had to use my computer however since selling the MacBook felt a bit to bothersome I decided to give it one more chance and force myself to keep on using this operating system whilst doing as much experimentation and research as I could to hopefully solve some of the issues I was having so since a lot of those issues couldn't be solved natively I started downloading third-party programs and luckily I was able to fix Mouse acceleration with final Mouse window snapping with rectangle all typing with all tab clipboard history with Mackie which was another feature which Mac OS didn't have natively and came out that I was even able to enable auto scroll and the scroll wheel zooming features on Firefox from the configuration and on Chrome I got them browser extensions however for some programs like Anki zooming didn't even work with the keyboard so I set up a custom keyboard shortcut natively through Mac OS that presses a menu button within nonkey which is actually a pretty cool feature I actually had a bunch of other issues as well that I didn't previously mention such as for some reason context menus and drop downs kept occasionally acting weird to the extent that I thought they were buggy or something but came out that on Mac OS if you move your mouse too fast during the context menu pop-up animation it's just going to make the menu disappear and also if you never let go of right click it's just going to select whichever menu item you have currently hovered there are tons of small behavioral differences like this that you just have to get used to which was especially the case for the fact that key combinations for selecting or jumping between whole words or lines of text was quite different on Mac OS compared to Windows which was really painful to get used to at first but in the end I successfully got used to it to the extent that I actually sort of prefer the way it works on Macos as compared to Windows which relied on the control home and end Keys instead of just on command and ALT like Mac OS so as I got more used to the operating system combined with the previously mentioned improvements my Mac OS experience had already improved drastically however I was still stuck with the blurry text issue and one of the things I could just not solve was the fact that I still found the dock to be very impractical I did try third party programs such as ubar and dock call tab but they were all still pretty buggy and lacking features to the extent that I just went back to the vanilla dock after all but the vanilla duck is terrible for multiple reasons some of which I already mentioned before but also stuff like dragging and dropping files between programs using the dock being so bad and slow that it sort of feels like it's not even a feature at all as well as the dark teleporting to different monitors when you happen to accidentally leave your mouse on the bottom of the screen and since I hate the gaps it leaves when I maximize a window when you put the dock to automatically hide itself the revealing is just so goddamn slow that it once again felt like the operating system was just designed to be used slowly so while my experience had indeed improved significantly it unfortunately still felt like quite a downgrade overall especially since so far I've mostly just been talking about window management and the general user experience but that's just one side of the story one of the things I wanted to try out of curiosity already on day one was gaming so just like with the Linux challenge as the first game I wanted to try out Counter-Strike source which is compatible with Mac OS and it's also almost a 20 year old game so performance wise most Hardware should be able to run it no problem and the same went for CS 1.6 however came out that it's a 32-bit application and apparently newer versions of Mac OS don't support 32-bit anymore which I had no clue about meaning that it's not possible to run CSS 1.6 nor a bunch of other games that otherwise should have natively worked on Mac OS Steve team suggested using bootcamp to dual boot Windows on a Mac but that's unfortunately not possible with these arm-based MacBooks so the only other choice I had was to use Windows emulators such as parallels or crossover so I tried out the free trial of parallels and sure enough CSS and 1.6 actually ran perfectly with proper FPS and ball in games like Skyrim the FPS wasn't perfect all the time it was still completely playable I quickly discovered though that the issue with parallels is that there seems to be like a 400 millisecond audio DeLay So Rhythm games like OSU are pretty much unplayable and what makes matters even worse is the fact that there is also this input delay which is sometimes subtle to the extent that I'm not even sure if it's Placebo but other times it suddenly for a short period of time gets bad to the extent that it makes input sensitive games pretty much unplayable so essentially while something like surfing in CSS is technically doable when I tried it again on my Windows PC after a few weeks of using parallels it was clear that I had been playing with input delay the entire time I also tried crossover for each of those games as well but unfortunately the older game is the worst performance it will have with crossover and all of those games are pretty old so the performance was either unplayable or just pretty much the same I also tried native games like Minecraft which surprisingly ended up being a bit disappointing in terms of FPS and the old 2011 beta versions that I definitely like to play again when they are just completely cursed for some reason but I think there are multiple methods for drastically improving Minecraft FPS on the M1 chips by using different launchers or something so perhaps with those methods it's not that bad another native game I tried was League of Legends which at first actually didn't run that well but after a bit of research came out that there is a hidden setting called metal beta test that you can enable by editing the game config files which gave a massive FPS boost to the extent that it heavily outperformed My Windows desktop as well but league on Macos had a bunch of other issues as well such as when you change resolution or go from windowed mode to full screen the entire game is just going to be black screened even without the previously mentioned hidden setting but with some coincidental Stroke of Luck Riot happened to fix the black screen issue literally like the next week so League of Legends is unfortunately completely playable on Macos though I do have to say that when I tried playing on windows again it was once again clear that Mac OS perhaps due to the metal beta they're setting had some kind of an input delay as well as screen tearing so despite the FPS being much higher most of the time it was still a worse experience overall and also the last thing I want to say about Mac OS gaming is the fact that because of things like easy anti-cheat it's impossible to run games such as VR chat even with emulators meaning that if I ever want to make another VR chat segment in my videos or well if I want to do any other gaming related projects in the future or just have a proper gaming experience at all I'll have no choice but to keep my windows desked up as well and this whole ordeal actually bothered me much more than I expected it's not even so much to do with gaming itself but for my entire life I've been used to being able to do everything on computer as long as it's powerful enough and supports opengl I guess however with this arm-based MacBook well I was aware that it obviously wasn't going to be a gaming computer I expected to at least have a decent experience in all the Mac OS compatible games but I had no clue about the support for 32-bit applications being dropped and it suddenly just felt like I'm not even using a real computer anymore it kind of just felt like an advanced iPad that I could do most of my work on however when it came to that work at least in terms of video editing performance this MacBook is definitely way better than my semi-budget Windows desktop with an 8 year old GPU while editing on the MacBook is not a completely lag free experience it's still really good to the extent that additional performance will definitely start hitting diminishing returns in terms of productivity at which point other factors might start playing a bigger role such as it being a laptop that I can edit videos with pretty much anywhere even on battery power for hours with the same performance not once again mention that it truly does have nearly zero fan noise and power drive as well DaVinci Resolve actually seems to run a bit more stable on Mac OS as well as it has only crashed on me a few times and overall I think Mac OS is the most stable operating system I've ever used which can save quite a lot of time as well or at least all of that was what I tried convincing myself off but deep down when I did the effect heavy video editing I was kind of disappointed because I still really wished I had more performance at least in those scenarios but made it even worse was the fact that now I knew that if I wanted to keep the MacBook I'll also need to keep my desktop which I wasn't a big fan of since it meant that I needed two computers instead of one on top of that the desktop probably also has a resale value of around 700 euros right now so if we put all the prices together including things such as the Thunderbolt Hub I painfully waited a week for the total price is no longer the original 2500 Euros just for the MacBook but more like 3500 in total which is pretty much the same price as a brand new 4090 desktop build with a top of the line CPU as well so at this point I started getting through fully conflicted on one side I began to really like the MacBook as not only is it just an amazingly well-built device that I can take with me pretty much anywhere and the features that I thought I would never even care about such as the speakers ended up being so impossibly good that I actually use them daily and would be kind of sad if I was no longer able to but on the other side the desktop environment felt like a downgrade gaming was completely crippled video editing performance while definitely really good still left me wanting and the price of the entire setup ended up being even more expensive than a 490 build and of course the blurry text was still a constant issue even weeks later and even if a 4k monitor could have saved me in this scenario which I wasn't sure if it could it would have been another 600 or so Euros that I'd have to spend on something I otherwise wouldn't even want needless to say I was conflicted to the point where I started leaning towards selling the MacBook and perhaps just building a new desktop but at the same time I actually felt that I do need a laptop because this year I might move abroad in which case I felt like having a laptop I can do work on is going to be a necessity so I started closely following all the news and release dates of the RTX 4000 series Windows laptops but when they finally did release well they were definitely really powerful they were also really power hungry therefore really loud and overall except for the Razer Blade I just wasn't a big fan of their RGB designs and plasticy build quality but the real nail in the coffin was the fact that the 4000 series laptops were so expensive that it made MacBooks look like budget devices on top of that due to their questionable build quality and extreme power draw I'm also a bit concerned about how long the Windows laptops are going to last as their batteries are known to bloat quite quickly so if I want to keep the laptop for around 10 years by eventually using it as a secondary device the MacBook would most likely be a much safer choice and regardless even if I was able to get a top of the line Windows laptop I'd still lose many of the previously mentioned benefits that made me want to buy the MacBook in the first place such as battery life lack of fan noise and low power drive so at that point instead of a Windows laptop I think I'd rather just get a much more powerful 4090 desktop for much cheaper as well in terms of going abroad I thought that perhaps I can just take most of the PC birds with me on the plane and play a new case later so I got to the point where I already put together a shopping cart of a potential 4090 build but I ended up not buying it as I needed to sell the MacBook first regardless and I also wanted to wait for the upcoming Horizon 9 7 950x3d first which was going to be releasing in a few weeks while I was waiting I was still stuck with the MacBook and even though I was pretty uncertain that I'll keep it I record this still did quite a bit of research and experimentation to hopefully make the Mac OS experience a bit more enjoyable but it was honestly getting pretty hopeless however one day I happened to come buy a stream mod by Pepe aka the creator of OSU who does a ton of coding every single day and since the original version of Oso isn't officially supported on Mac OS I was surprised to see that Not only was he using Mac OS but he was also used using it only with a keyboard This Mac OS desktop environment overall just looked very different and came out that he was using a tiling Window Manager for Macos called jabai and waltersfar I always felt like using a tiling window manager is probably not going to be worth it for Me Maybe This Time it's going to be different as I was still pretty unhappy with the state of my Mac OS window management despite all the extra software I downloaded so perhaps using a tiling window manager is truly the last option I have left so very long story short I installed it configured it and learned it over multiple weeks of trial and error and eventually my Mac OS workflow had indeed become pretty a buy [Music] so essentially the way this setup works is that at first sight everything seems exactly the same I still have all the native features such as the dock as well as all the third-party programs I downloaded previously however when I open a new window it immediately maximizes itself and when I open another one it automatically resizes and repositions both the windows side by side and it does so for every new window I open and when I close those windows it basically does the same thing except in Reverse so basically what an automatic tiling Window Manager like your body does is that it automatically tiles Windows when I try to move a window with my mouse I actually can't because it snaps back to where it's supposed to be but when I have multiple windows open and then try to move a window it instead automatically repositions those windows and when I try to resize even though the entire layout will be adjusted automatically but the cool part is that when you combine it with a hotkey Daemon like a skjad that lets you bind terminal commands to keyboard shortcuts you're able to manage windows with the keyboard to a very powerful extent for example I set it up so that I can resize windows with the control plus wasd keys and I can also switch their positions or even rotate the entire layout by 90 degrees I can also change the focus between Windows and even rebalance the layout if it gets a bit messy all just by using the keyboard another useful thing I can do is send a window to a specific monitor or even just do a specific space AKA to a specific virtual desktop however in some scenarios I'd like to have some specific window maximized at least just for a moment in which case I can hit Control Plus F which will overlay that window over everything else but not gonna lie occasionally the automatic tiling does actually get kinda in the way but luckily I can just hit Ctrl space to float a window which will disable the automatic tiling and make it work like a normal window but if that's not enough I can also hit Ctrl H to turn the entire desktop into a floating space which basically means that nothing will be automatically titled as if I wasn't using the buy at all which essentially means that there are almost no downsides to using a tiling Window Manager like yabai because you can always just toggle it off when it gets in the way you might have also noticed that my windows have no Shadows except for when I float them well that's because your buy lets you configure a bunch of other things as well such as window shadows as well as things like how large the gaps and padding between Windows are I personally found that I prefer to not have any gaps at all as it saves a lot of screen space but they do look nice so I can occasionally toggle them back on with a keyboard shortcut if I so please so as I was saying there is a ton of configuration that your body lets you do even in a per space or per application basis for example I turned off the automatic styling of certain windows by default such as finder or system settings as it was either unnecessary buggy or just annoying if they got constantly automatically tiled but as with everything else I can always turn the tiling got them back on with a keyboard shortcut when necessary and finally another extremely important feature at least for me that diabai has is basically a counter measure to the focus issue that I mentioned earlier in the video if I hit Ctrl o now when I hover a window it's going to be automatically focused without me needing to manually click it first which is great because that issue was honestly kind of deal breaking for me it's still kind of a hack though as I've had this experience multiple times where I Mouse over the dock and it spam clicks and opens everything I briefly hovered it also struggles with windows that have a focus blocking dialogue in the foreground and I do need to turn it off with Ctrl P from time to time to access application menus from the menu bar in specific scenarios but anyway I also set up a few sk80 shortcuts that were unrelated to your body such as when I hit Ctrl e it's going to switch the audio output source to my headphones and control R to switch them to the speakers I also downloaded a program called cover up which lets me switch to a specific keyboard layout with a specific key binding so I don't have to cycle through the keyboard layouts and all of those key bindings are extremely handy however the most important part that I haven't even mentioned yet is have I now switch between applications using this setup the way I have been doing it up until this point was either by all tapping using the dock or occasionally via the mission control feature but like I already explained throughout the video it was just a really slow and bad experience overall however after I started using yabai through trial and error I figured out a much better method that revolutionized my Mac OS workflow essentially I made five different spaces AKA virtual desktops each for some specific commonly used application or purpose Space 1 is the quote-unquote main space where I'm working with some specific Peak applications such as DaVinci Resolve Space 2 is always going to be my browser Space 3 is always going to be Discord and Space 4 is always going to be Spotify or any other music application and finally space 5 is going to be a text editor like vs code now the most important part is to never move these spaces nor even close the applications within them except for space 1. this way I will never have to bother with opening closing or even repositioning those applications because they're always going to be open and they're always going to be at the same place regardless and now what ties it all together is the fact that I can switch between those spaces instantly using keyboard shortcuts that I set up with skjad and device so for example if I'm editing a video and want to switch to the browser I can hit Ctrl 2 and if I want to return I can just hit Ctrl 1 or let's say I suddenly want to listen to some specific song well in that case before I've even changed the space to be the music one with my keyboard and I can already start moving my cursor towards the search button in Spotify because I know where it's located as the window always has the same position meaning that not only can I multitask much faster but the amount of actions I need to perform including Mouse movements is cut down significantly because I don't have to use my mouse to switch between applications nor cycle through window when all tabbing and this workflow is finally something that I'm really happy with for the first time I started genuinely liking the way my window management was set up on Mac OS possibly even more than what the default experience on Windows had to offer with this setup I also didn't really need to use the talk anymore either however I still found it to be convenient occasionally so what I did was that I set it to be hidden by default on the right side of the rightmost monitor so it doesn't get in the way and I also ran some terminal commands to make the speed at which the lock reappears much faster meaning that even the talk didn't really bother me anymore I've also noticed that with the setup while it is still nice to have at least a secondary monitor I barely even used my third one anymore and overall I genuinely don't feel much of a productivity or Comfort loss when I have to use just a single monitor which is really nice because it means that I can take this laptop with me anywhere and I'll still be able to work just fine which also synergizes really nicely with the fact that I never restart or shut down the MacBook unless absolutely necessary I just put it to sleep by closing the lid and when I reopen it it instantly restores the screen meaning that I can immediately get back to where I left off and I also never have to worry about the battery because most of the time when it's asleep it's still going to be 100 in the morning also most of the time I actually have more than 5 spaces open to keep things like Anki and my sentence running Chrome tabs running as well but since I only used them a few times a day I don't really need a fixed permanent space for them and when I actually do use them that's the only time I do move spaces around to make it a bit more convenient the workflow with this setup is honestly so nice that I finally decided to see if I can fix the blurry font issue by buying a 4K 27 inch monitor and what do you know the fonts looked completely fine with that kind of PPI so essentially that issue was now solved as well however it definitely was an additional purchase that otherwise I wouldn't have made at all especially because personally if I were still using Windows I'd much rather buy a 2K 280 Hertz monitor than a 4K 144hz one I even wish that 120 hertz on the macbook's own display was a bit higher as I can easily tell the difference between the 144hz of this Monitor and 165hz of my previous monitor but anyway now that I was becoming quite happy with my Mac OS window management and had finally applied an expensive Band-Aid on the front tissue the overall experience started looking quite positive except for the fact that there is still a massive literally unfixable issue with Mac OS that directly counters and hinders this entire setup it's the way Mac OS handles full screen Windows I already mentioned this earlier in the video so as a reminder in Mac OS when you full screen something such as a YouTube video when using Google Chrome instead of it just overlaying that video over everything else it creates a new application specific full screen space for it at the end of all your existing spaces and it sends Google Chrome to that space meaning that it essentially messes up the locations of those spaces as well close my shortcut keys for them every single time and since full screening a video or an application is an action I performed dozens of times a day during sentence running and video editing having to manually reorder my spaces every time I leave something is full screen honestly just ruins the entire setup for me as it was so close to being perfect but unfortunately this annoying issue is something that I have to constantly waste time on and deal with throughout the day and there is nothing I can do about it as that's just how Mac OS handles those green windows I actually need to keep the ventures all full screen as well because if I don't it has this weird problem on Mac OS where if I maximize the preview window and then demaximize it DaVinci Resolve is no longer in Focus but instead finder is so if I demaximize the preview and for example press space to play the video or God forbid Ctrl Z to undo something it's going to send those inputs to finder instead of the winter solve unless I first click on DaVinci Resolve to get the focus back so while you can bypass this issue by keeping into inches all full screen it has side effects such as you no longer being able to Overlay anything over DaVinci Resolve meaning that sometimes I do need to toggle it in which case I need to deal with the Mac OS full screen issue as all anyway I also have this other really bad issue where the eyedropper tool in any application was for some reason always speaking the wrong colors came out that it also picked different colors on each display and eventually I luckily was able to fix it by setting my monitors to have srgb color profiles which was kind of an unintuitive fix for me because I always thought that the OS renders colors as an RGB bitmap regardless of displays in which case the Color Picker should never pick wrong values but it might actually not work that way which is actually pretty interesting I was wondering why I've never ran into this issue on Windows but comes out that on Windows all monitors default to srgbe which made me wonder if I can replicate the same issue on Windows by changing the color profile of my monitors to something else but the Color Picker on Windows worked line even then anyway there are plenty of other issues I have on Macos as well some of which I managed to solve such as when I tried right clicking on the trackpad with the two finger tap gesture it had a half a second delay by default which luckily I was able to fix by disabling this setting but unfortunately the list of annoyances goes on and on I also really miss this multi-tool program called sharex that I used all the time on Windows not only for screen capturing but also for its Color Picker ruler and so on and I even had a shortcut set up with it for instant the recording system audio just by hitting a single keyboard shortcut which is something that I used a lot during video editing as well as sentence mining but I'm not really sure how to achieve something like that on Mac OS which is why honestly if I wasn't using migaku sentence mining would have definitely been incredibly tedious both on Mac OS as well as during the Linux challenge but on Mac OS I even have a problem when using mingaku if I keep my cursor on a YouTube video it for some reason gets really laggy when I'm using in multiple monitors so I have to make sure that I move the cursor somewhere else and also quite often the audio of the video also gets delayed in which case I have to open the video in a brand new tab I'm not really sure whether or not digitalized within the Mac OS version of mikaku Google Chrome or just within Macos itself but at the end of the day when it comes to issues with software that you need to use it really doesn't matter who's to blame as when the only solution is just use a different operating system then you won't have much else of a choice that being said though with the exception of proper gaming I can definitely do nearly everything on Mac OS and I do think that Mac OS has a lot going for it for example the default applications on Macos are quite a bit better compared to the ones on Windows 10 except for the calculator I really don't know how it's so bad considering the history Apple has with their calculators besides applications though other features such as the quick preview are also definitely very handy but my personal favorite has to be the fact that you can remove a background from an image instantly just by right clicking on it as well as convert images to different formats and the default media players even have built-in OCR so you can select text from video and images which can be really helpful when learning Japanese however one of the biggest benefits of Mac OS is most likely the feature called airdrop it lets you very easily wirelessly transfer files including images and videos from your phone to the MacBook but I am unfortunately unable to use it as I don't have an iPhone and it's only compatible with iPhones and so are a bunch of other features which Mac OS has so if I were to keep the MacBook my next phone would most likely be an iPhone just for that feature alone as I do record all of my videos on my phone meaning that that feature would be and could have useful for me so with all of those things considered what are my final thoughts on Mac OS after having used it for nearly 3 months during which I put in a lot of effort into personalizing Mac OS to make using it as enjoyable as possible well overall I think Mac OS is a good solid and stable operating system I can definitely at least see why some people would never want to go back to something like Windows after using Mac OS especially when combined with the devices themselves that being said though I'm honestly also a bit shocked over how many ux issues Macos seems to have as I was under the impression that if there's any company that will try to perfect user experience it would be apple obviously I found the art of the Box default window management to be very lacking to the extent that I had to go over to a completely different third-party window managing Paradigm just to make the macquest window management tolerable for me and while it honestly ended up being amazing in many ways due to the full screen issue that I'm still dealing with to this day it's still an imperfect experience ironically this whole ordeal made me appreciate other operating systems much more than I did before it kind of made me realize how well thought out the ux of Windows is as well as not take for granted the fact that you're almost guaranteed to have the best experience in most applications and on the Linux side it's funny that the desktop environments of distributions such as Ubuntu are polished to the extent that they seriously give Mac OS a run for its money it actually made me really want to try daily driving Linux again especially now that I'd like to experiment with a tiling Window Manager on Linux as well but unfortunately the state of dementia solve on Linux is the main reason why I am unable to daily drive it but regardless if I keep this MacBook as my main machine the only realistic choice I have is just to keep on using Mac OS that's also one of the reasons why I personally feel like I would not buy a desktop based Mac the reason I put up with the solar deal for so long is just because I think the MacBook itself is just an amazing laptop I definitely still jump between wanting to sell the MacBook for a 4090 build almost daily but the reason I haven't done it yet is just because I feel like I might have more to lose than I have to gain the convenience of being able to do work and especially activities such as sentence mining from bed or even outside is a quality of life Improvement to the extent that I don't know whether or not I can never go back to doing absolutely every acting on a stationary desktop I was even able to get someone with an RTX 4080 to try out a video editing Benchmark I made and while the 4080 build was definitely more powerful than the MacBook the difference wasn't huge to the extent that it would make much of a practical difference in reality but of course that's just the 4080 not the 4090 so while I'm definitely not perfectly satisfied with the MacBook due to its limitations and in a way I constantly look forward to building a desktop that lets me do everything I think I'm still going to give the MacBook at least for now with the prospect that one day I'll most likely still build a maxed out desktop as well and just keep the MacBook on the side as a laptop for years to come perhaps they maxed out Windows laptop would be a great choice for me as well but maybe not well anyway as my final attempt at improving my Mac OS experience I wrote this monstrosity of a keyboard shortcut that automatically rearranges my spaces as well as applications to be in the correct locations and after using it for a few days I gotta say that not only does it make this workflow even better overall but it also works pretty well as a counter measure to the full screen issue so essentially My overall Macos experience is now honestly quite enjoyable of course it's still not perfect and I don't think it ever will be nor do I think that I'll ever stop wishing that I had a proper desktop build as well but there are things that give me hope that one day I might be able to do much more with this computer than I can now [Music] [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Livakivi

Views: 157,225

Keywords: livakivi

Id: bCdcuJZux_g

Length: 50min 40sec (3040 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 13 2023