macOS has been breaking my heart lately. Some of it is a consequence of being on ARM instead of x86, but some of it is the OS- for example, I don’t have to tell

macOS has been breaking my heart lately. Some of it is a consequence of being on ARM instead of x86, but some of it is the OS- for example, I don’t have to tell this group Docker on macOS is the worst (versus Linux and Windows). The theory behind getting a Mac is that it lasts ~5 years before I really feel the need to buy another Mac, but this time, my 2020 M1 MacBook has only made it about 2 years before I’m now trying to unload it. 16GB just isn’t enough for Docker and the IDEs and other apps I have running. It sucks because I followed the “max out the Mac because you can’t upgrade later” rule. 16GB was as high as I could go, and hell 16GB was enough for my 2015 Intel MacBook. Anyway, because of the above and the lack of Nvidia/CUDA support for ML/NLP stuff that I do for work, I built a desktop and run Linux on it. I’ve been jumping around distros over the last few months and here’s what I’ve learned: Ubuntu Desktop has always been on the buggy side for me, going all the way back to 10.04 LTS. I guess taking Debian and GNOME and plastering your own brand on top will do that. The most-stable desktop experience has been Fedora Workstation, which uses pure GNOME as the desktop environment. I wanted a distro with a stable desktop environment (most of my woes pertain to having a 5K display), that supports fractional scaling (200% is too big for a 4K/5K display IMO), and runs all the stuff I want to run. Also rolling release would be nice, because I’m tired of running into issues where a guide I’m following works for Ubuntu 20.04 but not 21.04 for example, or a package (like AWS VPN Client) is made for 20.04 but doesn’t work out of the box with any newer version of Ubuntu. So brass tacks, stable (and modern-looking) desktop environment out of the box, plus rolling release = Manjaro (Arch) and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, both with KDE Plasma. There are other distros that meet this criteria, but they’re niche or having been around for very long. I’ve had a good experience with both Manjaro and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, but OpenSUSE had some annoying UI bugs that I don’t experience with Manjaro, so… I’m just sticking with Manjaro + KDE Plasma. The only downside is that as packages go, everyone makes DEBs but Arch you’ll often have to download a DEB or RPM and convert it and hope it works without any further action on your part. This also means that you can’t have apps auto-update like those that live in APT or Yum. Arch’s AUR technically supports updating the apps you have installed, however for unofficial packages (eg those that someone just converted from DEB or RPM and uploaded to AUR), you’ll be left behind the latest version until someone/the maintainer of that package in AUR manually updates it with the new DEB/RPM they converted for AUR. I think this is an acceptable trade off considering I’m free from Ubuntu and get a rolling release for the OS/desktop environment. Heck, what’s the point in having your apps auto-upgrade if the OS and DE only get updates a couple times a year?