Comment by chihuahua
6 days ago
I, too, only use Macs when my employer forces me to do so. Here's how I made it bearable: MacBook lid stays closed at all times; plug it into a Thunderbolt hub (requires just 1 Thunderbolt port for everything); connect a proper matte monitor, external keyboard, Logitech mouse.
Now the only annoying things are the MacOS window manager (uBar attempts to fix this, but is flaky) and the weird keyboard mappings for things like "start of line", "end of line", "previous word", etc. Karabiner fixes those if you're willing to invest 3 hours in setting it up.
> weird keyboard mappings for things like "start of line", "end of line", "previous word"
Those are Emacs keybindings, and they're also present by default in Bash since they were copied by GNU Readline. They're one of the few things I really like about macOS. (But I'm an Emacs user and I'm also used to using them in my terminal.)
The window manager never stops sucking. Rectangle and Contexts or Witch help. Ice helps with the stupid menu bar design and problems with overflowing icons or oversized menus.
I found external, non-apple mice had terrible functionality. There was forced acceleration and other ways in which the Magic mouse and Mac were purposely configured to work "differently" from normal mice and it made using anything other than a Magic mouse work terribly.
Which sucks because the magic mouse is the worst mouse money can buy.
Do you still have to install third-party software to keep it running when you close the lid?
Does it still not support "Windows Hello" style face unlock when closed? I remember I couldn't touch the fingerprint sensor when closed and the MacBook was unable to use my Windows Hello camera.
It seemed to just keep running with the lid closed. I think I woke it up with the keyboard and it didn't care whether the lid was open or closed.
I just used the keyboard to unlock by entering the password every time.
For window manager try rectangle or aerospace