the m2 macbook experience so far

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i didn't listen to any music while writing this, instead opting for john wolfe's let's play of crimson snow

i've been in possession of my m2 mbp for some weeks now and have largely avoided actually using it for anything interesting apart from some light go programming and heavy youtube consumption. here are some things i like and dislike about it

the good

• the keyboard is truly wonderful. very responsive. has made typing super enjoyable, and i've never had a similar experience on any other laptop keyboard before
• retina display is amazing. the colors, the resolution, the scaling. it all comes together to form pure art
• homebrew is pretty cool. using it always reminds me of that one tweet by the developer shit-talking the google interview process because it focuses on reversing binary trees instead of actually useful shit like designing applications, specifically the very one he created and many of the google devs use on their machines daily. the naming of the components is a bit cheesy, but thematic. casks, formulae, recipes. very cute
• macos is aesthetically pleasing. the experience is very uniform, which is something you can't say about the average gnu plus linux distribution
• facetime hd camera is acceptable. i'm listing it as a pro regardless because my previous device, a thinkpad x1 carbon 10th gen, had a built-in computer vision webcam with no available drivers for gnu plus linux, forcing me to either use windows (spoiler: i didn't pick this option) or fit a comically large logitech camera to the otherwise slim laptop. fuck all the parties involved in that affair
• airpod pairing does not cause any pain, which admittedly is something i would expect from the price tag associated with apple stuff
• you can play ftl on a macbook, so that's cool
• this is gonna sound weird, but the monaco font in a terminal is legitimately beautiful and i will miss it dearly when i inevitably switch back to gnu plus linux
• rosetta i guess?

the pain

• virtualization is a nightmare. the virtualbox arm64 beta is a mystery to me. i haven't managed to get past powering on a new vm with a mounted debian netinst iso due to the lovely "the virtual machine has failed to boot" error. vmware fusion has horrible UX, making it a pain to use. also, the fact that i bought workstation pro and need an actual separate product that costs similar money is so ridiculous that i'd rather not ever touch vmware products again in my life unless required by work. UTM, apparently something of a fan favorite emulator and fancy frontend for qemu, has a very limited feature set (e.g. can't take snapshots) and is therefore not mature enough to be used for complex work, though it has gotten me the farthest i.e. into an actual shell after installing debian. qemu by itself is pretty pleasant to use, but throws UEFI-related errors when trying to boot the installed debian from disk. for some reason it only works once, right after the first reboot following successful installation, and then never again
• the default docker experience is graphical on macos. i haven't looked into it much, mainly due to just not being particularly interested in it, but running brew install docker will outfit your laptop with a docker desktop installation. which i don't need. just give me the cli like on gnu plus linux
• the keyboard layout is terrifying. globe, control, option, command? i knew getting used to mac-specific keys would give me the most trouble ahead of time due to muscle memory, but it's been worse than expected. it's mostly trial and error to figure out which combination to use in-app, and it sucks
• the "maximize window" button in the top left fullscreens the application, like hitting f11 in firefox, and therefore hides the title bar as well as everything else. unless of course you hold one of the weird control or option keys while clicking it. then it works the way a normal human being would expect it to work. the people at apple call that zoom instead of maximize because they're cool and quirky. i call it maximize because i have used actually sensible operating systems before
• "zooming" terminal.app will leave some space between the bottom and right edges of window and screen. terrifying. it's the time of the year to be thankful for alacritty
• screen bezels seem quite large compared to similar laptops not designed by apple(c)
• the lack of gaming support on apple silicon. i know it's supposed to be a work device, yadda yadda, but i'm bad at managing money and have been known to enjoy a video game or two on my work laptops in my private time since those are the only computers i typically possess at any given time. native support for m1/m2 is miserable, which has unfortunately been a bigger deal than expected due to my sudden interest in getting back into the witcher series
• i don't like signing in to operating systems i.e. the whole apple id business. i demonized it when microsoft introduced it to the windows 10 setup, and i'll demonize it now. and yes, you don't technically have to sign in, but as usual, there are severe downsides to not doing it, so you really don't have a choice, as much as you want to tell yourself otherwise

the ugly

it just feels bad, man. this isn't so much about the product as it is about me. the macbook and me, we're just not compatible. i want control over my system, even if that makes for a janky experience. at least it's my janky experience, and i'd pick that over a streamlined (and admittedly very beautiful) something someone came up with for me. i miss not worrying about whether an application is compatible with my arcane cpu architecture. i miss the god awful multi-display experience on super snappy tiled wm systems, requiring you to mess around with xrandr pixel positioning on the command line. i miss having control, alt and super keys that are adequately placed and work in a predictable fashion, not requiring me to read OS documentation or trial-and-error my way through combinations. i miss having the countless packages of free software available on the big distros. i miss recompiling vmware host modules and manually copy-pasting and enabling systemd units to make workstation pro work after a kernel update because that way at least i could run 12 VMs if i wanted to without suffering through a headache. heck, i even miss the awful bspwm + sxhkd user experience because i'm not stuck with it. if i don't like something about the core OS experience, i can probably replace it on gnu plus linux. and i definitely miss having ports on my laptop that i can plug things into

some last words

overall, using this machine feels like taking part in a beta test, not only for hardware due to relative lack of widespread arm64 adoption on "the desktop", but also software due to some missing crucial OS features like a usable middle mouse click that doesn't cost 8 euros to unlock and granular volume control for apps, which has been a staple in any other legitimate operating system for what feels like forever. the touch bar is probably the most annoying thing. oh, the amount of times i have opened vim and then accidentally triggered the help by fat-fingering f1 while trying to hit the escape key. to paraphrase someone i worked with recently: "i never use it. it always shows something different depending on what app you're in. too unreliable". it's a failed fancy experiment and i wish we could move past it as a species

despite all of that, the arm architecture itself intrigues me, and i definitely want to look into some assembly/reverse engineering type stuff, mainly due to instruction set simplicity compared to dusty old x86_64

i'll end this post with a reminder: a 16g ram thinkpad x230 from minifree.org costs around 345 euros, shipping to mainland europe included. that's a fairly small price to pay for the superior gnu plus linux computing experience and i can't wait for santa (me) to stuff one into my tennis sock

I’m a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence - Sylvia Plath