Back in April I posted this about how I had ordered a M1 Mac Mini and moved away from Windows. I’m happy to report that it was a good purchase!
It’s done exactly what I intended. It’s become my go-to PC for when I just need to get something non gaming related done. It boots up extremely quickly, sips electricity and most importantly “just works”.
The adjustment period to MacOS was a bit rough, not because of any gripes I have with it fundamentally but mainly just that I wasn’t used to it. Overall though it’s been refreshing. Program installation/uninstallation is a breeze, most of the time just extracting a DMG file and dragging the program to the apps folder. SSH is baked into the terminal by default so that was a plus. File management is quite easy, once I got used to it. The updates are un-intrusive and handled in a much better way than Windows.
Surprisingly I’ve not even had much trouble finding alternative versions of programs I use. The open source community developing for MacOS is much bigger than I thought and most programs that have a Windows variant also have a Mac one.
However, Windows is still not completely out of my personal life. Yes my “desktop” machines are MacOS and Ubuntu, but I still do have one Windows laptop. It very rarely gets used but on occasion I still do need to fire it up. But I’m OK with that balance. It gets powered on for a task, and then gets shut back down. It never even has chance to do an update, it’s data collection attempts will be futile as there’s basically nothing on there and if it does break nothing of value will be lost.
As a summary, even if you’re deeply ingrained into using a Windows PC it’s easier than you think to move away. And if you do, I think you’ll be surprised and wonder why you didn’t do it earlier.
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