I've been a Linux user for more than twenty years now, and it might come as a surprise to anyone who's been following this blog for a while (the two of you out there), but I've recently purchased a new MacBook. Let me explain!
While I've not always loved the GUI of Ubuntu, in recent years GNOME has been rather fantastic. I was happy with everything it provided, and for the things it didn't, I installed GNOME Boxes, which gave me a virtual Windows system (mainly to finalize podcast edits with Hindenburg). The flexibility of the system, how it worked with periphery out of the box and generally holding up high the ethos of Open Source always appealed to me.
There's just one problem, and it's the hardware. While my Tuxedo is a beast with more RAM than I'd ever need, it's loud. And it gets louder when I use resource-intensive software. For example Riverside, which we've recently switched to for recording our podcast (not entirely sold on it just yet, but it seems promising and solves a few problems we've been carrying with us over the years). And as you know, loud computers tend to be picked up by microphones, which in turn means it's on our recordings. Not a good deal!
The solution? Hardware without a fan (or a rarely used one). The problem: there's almost no fanless or very quiet hardware out there and the only one that could potentially work with Linux is a Macbook (edit: I changed my wording from "fanless" in a previous version to what you can read above, as technically the M4 I now have does have a fan, it just very rarely uses it) I've never been a fan of the whole Apple ecosystem, but I figured at this point in time, I need to get some work done and look beyond my own preconceptions.
Which is where we are now.
What's it like? Well, it takes some getting used to, but all in all it could be worse. A lot of the nice things MacOS has to offer I'm already used to from GNOME, and while I'm still inadvertently closing windows when trying to write an e-mail address, the switch has been rather painless. In fact, I kinda liked setting up a completely new system I know so little about.
But, it's quite possible I'll be making the switch back to Linux again, once Asahi Linux supports M4 chips (which is the one I'm using now).
So who knows where this'll take me, but the one thing I already know is that having a fanless system is probably one of the nicest things ever.
