Mac OS

I've limited experience with MacOS but most of it was rather pleasant. I tried MacOS 10.11 and 10.6 on a 2009 Macbook 6,1 and MacOS 10.13 on a 2017 iMac. Using Mac makes me feel like a corporate office worker, going about with my lattes and emails and such. Politically-socially-economically-whatever I really despise the Apple ecosystem that MacOS is bound to without massive tweaks - the "user centered design" ends up too limiting and MacOS piracy is in a dire state so you have to pay for everything. But aesthetically, I enjoy it. Apple, I think, really nailed down its vibes game in the late 00s-early 10s, and I feel a big chunk of its stranglehold on the western culture is owed to that.

One thing I REALLY don't like though is how much vendor lock-in Apple exerts over its customers. Despite overheating being a notorious problem in all pre-Apple Silicon products, it's much more prominent when I'm using a non-Mac OS.

Windows

Bad. Bad. Bad. Shit. Doodoo. Windows used to be the only operating system I knew because I was a stupid and silly teenager with zero experience in anything. Now that I'm a slightly less stupid and silly adult with a little bit of experience in Things, I can see why Windows is so dogshit. Horrible optimization. Soon to be 4 decades of unused baggage code. The fact that everyone and their mom uses it, meaning game and program developers cater to it above all. Amounts of spyware and intended surveillance that would scare the abrahamic god.

But enough with objective facts, this article is about my personal experience. As of January 2025, I only dual boot into Windows 7 (NOT putting malware (8 or 8.1 or 10 or 11) on my machine) for A. very specific software or games I can't get to run with Wine/VMs and B. printing because there's no proper driver files for my printer online. That rounds up to around 10 hours a month. Maybe more, maybe less. Compared to Linux, it's so, so horribly optimized. On launch, Windows 7 consumes 25% of my desktop's 8 gigabytes of RAM (compared to 7-8% on my usual DEs). "Unused memory is wasted memory" my ass when opening unmodded 1.7.10 Minecraft makes it nigh unusable (Not a problem on my Linux of choice, mind you!). Open a couple Youtube tabs in a Firefox or Chromium fork (literally no difference, they're all shit RAM-wise) and it becomes a fireplace I could cook some yummy soup in. You see the problem.

And worst of all, there's ZERO whimsy to be had in using Windows! Zero childlike joy! No terminal to monitor the system resources or do silly tricks in, the LaF customization is almost not there at all. System made by boring people for boring people. Windows 11 would kill me.

Linux

Sighs dreamily. My beloved. I've tried Debian 11 and 12, Linux Lite 6.0 and Bodhi Linux 5.1.0; settled on Zorin OS 15.3 Lite (that I will gladly change to Debian 12 once I figure out my botched bootloader) for my desktop and antiX 22 for my Macbook. I will admit right off the bat that I'm average or below average as far as the Linux user archetype goes; I don't often make bash scripts to optimize my workflow, I'm not a good programmer, I mostly only use the terminal for package installs, htop and specific CLI programs like cmus. As is obvious from the Windows section, I mostly started using Linux because Windows 7 became too unbearable to use and I wasn't willing to upgrade to 10.

On the contrary, however, Linux has taught me a great plenty of things. Bash, troubleshooting, basic networking, general structure of How Computers Are. I want to try Salix or somesuch Slackware release someday.