I’ve bought an old 2015 x86 MacBook Air, to get a taste of the Apple experience, and to see whether it might be my daily driver. Currently, I’m quite happy with Ubuntu, but I’m always hesitant to suspend the machine - it never worked properly in the past. Also the Nvidia+Wayland support is just strange; IDEA also had a couple of GNOME Shell-related issues in the past. I wanted to see whether things work better on Apple machines.

The good

I must admit that thing is really easy to use, from the perspective of a common user. The iCloud is integrated seamlessly into apps provided by default with the machine: the photos, the reminders, the notes, the document writing, the files drive - everything just works flawlessly out-of-the-box. Updates to all apps happen automatically behind the scenes, via one centralized App Store app. The OS also updates automatically and reliably.

I love Apple AirPlay. It’s so easy to “move” my AirPads from iPhone to MacBook and continue listening to the music from the MacBook. Compared to that, the Bluetooth experience is a complete disaster - you either have to disable bluetooth on the current device, or to somehow switch the headphones to the pairing mode, in order to “attach” them to my notebook.

The Okay-ish

The support for MacBooks will eventually end at some point. My MacBook Air 2015 is stuck with MacOS 12 Monterey and can no longer update to newer MacOS. The security updates are still coming, true, but my iPhone warned me that some kind of setting won’t be propagated to the MacBook because it’s too old.

Even the machine is really old and no longer fast enough for Java development, it is still very well usable for common office tasks.

Coming from Linux which is supported pretty much indefinitely and runs on pretty much ancient machines, this is a bit of a letdown.

The bad

The fairytale ends when I want to do something beyond what’s provided by Apple.

For example, installing Firefox just feels weird - I have to download a dmg, then mount it, then drag something somewhere to actually install Firefox. Then I have to eject Firefox for mysterious reasons. Afterwards, Firefox doesn’t use AppStore but updates on its own.

Installing UTM works, but UTM never updates. IDEA also installs easily but never updates - you have to install IDEA via the Toolbox app.

The nightmare starts when I want to install git or java or other dev tools. I pretty much have to use HomeBrew, which installs by downloading a bash script from the internet (!!!) and running it as root (!!!). That is just unheard of in Linux world - no sensible Linux users will ever do such a thing!

Compared to that, installing software on Ubuntu is a breeze - everything can be installed either via apt install or snap install and Ubuntu will then take care of updating everything. All software comes from a trusted repository maintained by the Ubuntu guys, and is safe to use.

Verdict

I just won’t run a bash script as root. I simply can’t force myself to trust HomeBrew. So, doing development natively on MacBook is out-of-question. However, usually I have an Ubuntu-in-Ubuntu VM set up for every customer; this kind of setup of running Ubuntu in a VM on MacBook is therefore quite interesting to test out.