As I mentioned in my last of these posts, Automattic’s a bit of a Mac shop, and while it’s not mandated, I thought it’d streamline the learning curve to be on the same platform as many of my colleagues. As it happens, it didn’t make much difference. In the photo behind that link you’ll see me with my Automattic Macbook, a personal Mac [dual-booting Linux], and a Windows box: I’ve been routinely triple-OSing for a few years now on a big Synergy-powered battlestation.

The MacBook’s okay. The hardware’s quite nice, with the exception of the excessively low-profile keyboard, the icky touch-unfriendly touchbar, and the handful of stupid design choices like putting the charging point on the underside of the Magic Mouse 2 (!) and putting the “Fn” key in a different place on the laptop keyboard than on the wireless keyboard!

(Of course, I don’t generally get on too well with laptops in general, but I needed a laptop for this job on account of all the travel I’d normally be doing, were it not for the coronavirus lockdown!)

MacOS’s still a bit of a pain in the arse. It’s like using a nice powerful Linux or BSD workstation except somebody’s playing Teletubbies in front of it. Oh, and all the nice configurability is gone. E.g. I like to use touchpads in “natural” scrolling mode but mice in “traditional” scrolling mode. Every modern operating system I’ve ever used supports this… except MacOS. Sigh. But as I spend most of my day in my text editor, web browser, terminal and a handful of other tools anyway, it’s not a big deal.

I’ve got blog posts going back to 2003 asserting my belief that all operating systems suck, and I’ve certainly not been disavowed of this belief. But as I sit here switching between three different operating systems on three different devices (using the same mouse and keyboard) I can at least appreciate a diversity of suck all at the same time. ;-)