Wi-Fi worked, sound worked, so I installed i3, applied my dotfiles and got going. Once that was done it mostly just seemed to work. Thankfully Alex Dzyoba wrote an excellent article on creating the appropriate partitions for dual booting. Installation was a bit of anxiety inducing to start with, for one thing I didn’t want to screw up the boot partition of my Mac just in case things went a bit wrong and it took a while to search about ways to do this cleanly. So switching OS’s isn’t really that much of a barrier for most of my use cases. I’m a huge gamer at heart but I’m fortunate enough to own a beefy gaming PC and a set of consoles to meet that need, so I can’t really comment on Linux support on that side of things. All I seemed to use on OSX was a web browser, Visual Studio Code and a terminal with lots of CLI/TUI software configured via a set of dotfiles. The meteoric rise of the web browser as a platform has made me realise that I don’t really use that much native GUI software anymore. Writing notes is a joy because the context switch is minimal. This has been an absolute blast with some custom note taking software I wrote, which I mount via FUSE. My favourite feature is the “scratchpad” where you can bring up and dismiss a window in the same workspace via a keyboard shortcut. The scratchpad window makes note taking a joy

Always open my web browser on workspace 1.

Take screenshots with keyboard shortcuts similar to OSX using maim.

Since installing I’ve tweaked my configuration to Keyboard shortcuts, tiled windows, lightning fast to use - it feels like a piece of software designed for people who tinker and use computers a lot. The main reason for the switch was one killer app the i3 window manager.

So don’t take this as a reflection on Fedora/Linux, I suspect the defaults with GNOME come with a lot less footguns.

I’ll preface this post by saying most of the issues encountered are down to the minimalist nature of the setup I’ve gone with. In this post I hope to document the pitfalls, traps and joyous moments I found along the way, complete with the annoyances that I’ve come to tolerate. So here we go, a few weeks ago I installed Fedora 32 on my Macbook Pro (early 2015 model). This is another one of those posts, the one’s where Linux desktop apologists have the urge to justify to the world why they do things.

Obligatory desktop shot with nothing on it

Firefox on macbook pro retina