I switch constantly between a German and English keyboard layout, and regularly between various machines. My physical keyboards are German, and my fingers are used to the Windows-default German and (international) US keyboard layout. These are available by default on Windows and Linux, but MacOS goes its own way.

However, keyboard layouts on MacOS are saved in relatively simple text files, and can be modified with relative ease. The process goes like this: Download Ukelele (free) to create a new keyboard layout bundle for your base layout¹. Inside that bundle, there's a *.keylayout file, which is an XML file that defines the characters that each key-modifier combination produces. I changed that to create a Windows-like US keyboard layout. And I replaced the keyboard icon with something sane (not "A") by creating a 256x256 pixel PNG, opening it in Preview, holding alt while saving to select the ICNS format. Save the keyboard bundle to ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts and reboot. Then I remove the unremovable default ("A") German layout by selecting another one, then plutil -convert xml1 ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.HIToolbox.plist, and delete the entry from AppleEnabledInputSources. Now reboot. Almost easy. Almost.

One the one hand, this was quite the ordeal. On the other, I have tried to do this sort of thing on Windows and Linux before, and for the life of me could not do it. So I actually think this is great!

My main text editor is Emacs, and I am very used to its keyboard shortcuts. Of particular note are CTRL-A/E for going to the beginning/end of a line, and Alt-B/F for navigating forward/backwards by word. I have long wanted to use these shortcuts not just in Emacs and readline-enabled terminal applications, but everywhere else, too. And with MacOS, this is finally possible: Install BetterTouchTool ($22), and create keyboard shortcuts that maps, e.g. Alt-B/F to Alt-←/→. Ideally, put this in a new activation group that excludes Emacs. It may be necessary to remove the keyboard character for Alt-B/F from your keyboard layout before this works. I've spent an embarrassing number of hours trying to get this to work on Windows and Linux, and really got nowhere². Actually, however, most readline shortcuts such as Ctrl-A/E/B/F/K/Y already work out of the box on MacOS!

I generally use a trackpad, and occasionally a traditional mouse for image editing, and have used a trackball. I find that any one specific device will lead to wrist pain if used constantly, so I switch it up every now and then. The trackpad and trackball, however, need configuration to be usable.

After experimenting with many a trackpad device, I have found Apple touch pads the best trackpads on the market³. On MacOS, they lacks a middle mouse click. So I created a trackpad shortcut in the aforementioned BetterTouchTool ($22) to map the middle click on a three-finger tap (can also be had for free with MiddleClick (OSS)). For Windows, Magic Utilities ($17/y) provides a wonderful third-party driver for Apple devices that also supports the three-finger tap. I have not gotten the Apple touch pad to pair reliably on Linux, and have generally found their touch pad driver libinput a bit lacking.

My trackball is a Kensington SlimBlade. To scroll, you rotate the ball around its vertical axis. This is tedious for longer scroll distances, however. But there's an alternative scrolling method called "button scrolling", where you hold one button on the trackball, and move the ball to scroll. You need to install the Kensington driver to enable this on Windows and MacOS. Button scrolling is available on Linux as well using xinput⁴, but I haven't gotten the setting to stick across reboots or sleep cycles. So I wrote a background task that checks xinput every five seconds, which does the trick.

Frankly, Windows does window management correctly. Win-←/→ moves windows to the left and right edge of the screen, as does dragging the window to the screen border. Further Win-←/→ then moves the window to the next half-screen in that direction, even across display boundaries. KDE does this correctly out of the box as well, Gnome does not do the latter, and it drives me mad. MacOS doesn't do any of these things. But Rectangle (OSS) does. Easy fix. (BetterTouchTool can do it, too, but Rectangle is prettier)

Furthermore, I want Alt-Tab to switch between windows. Again, MacOS is the odd one out, which uses CMD-Tab to switch between apps, now windows. And then there's another shortcut for switching between windows of the same app, but the shortcut really doesn't work at all on a German keyboard. Who came up with this nonsense? Anyway, Witch ($14) implements window switching properly.

In Windows and Linux, I hit the Windows key and start typing to select and start an app. In MacOS, this is usually Cmd-Space, but BetterTouchTool can map it to a single short Cmd, if you prefer.

More annoying are the various docks and task bars. I always shove the dock off to the right edge of the screen, where it stays out of the way. Windows 10 had a sane dock, but then 11 came and forced it to the bottom of the screen. Dear OS makers, every modern screen has plenty of horizontal space. But vertical space is somewhat limited. So why on earth would you make a rarely used menu such as the dock consume that precious vertical space by default? And Microsoft, specifically, why not make it movable? Thankfully, there's StartAllBack ($5), which replaces the Windows task bar with something sensible, and additionally cleans up the start menu if you so desire. On KDE, I fractionally prefer Latte (OSS) over KDE's native dock. The MacOS dock is uniquely dumb, offering no start menu, and allowing no window selections. But it's unobtrusive and can be moved to the right edge, so it's not much of a bother.

One of the most crucial tasks in computer work in general is file management. I am not satisfied with most file managers. Dolphin on KDE works pretty well, it has tabs, can bulk-rename files, can display large directories without crashing, and updates in real time when new files are added to the current directory. Gnome Nautilus is so bad it is the main reason I switched to KDE on my Linux machines. Finder on MacOS is passable, I suppose, although the left sidebar is unnecessarily restrictive (why can't I add a shortcut to a network drive?). Windows Explorer is really rather terrible, lacking a bulk-rename tool, and crucially, tabs. In Windows 10, these can be added with Groupy ($12) (set it to only apply to explorer.exe). Windows 11 has very recently added native tabs, which work OK, but can't be detached from the window.

The sad thing is that there are plenty of very good file manager replacements out there, but none of the OSs have a mechanism for replacing their native file manager in a consistent way, so we're mostly stuck with the defaults.

Oh, and I always remove the iCloud/OneDrive sidebar entries, which is surprisingly tedious on Windows.

On laptops, you can control screen brightness from your keyboard. On desktops, you can not. However, some clever hackers have put together BetterDisplay (OSS for screen brightness), which adds this capability to MacOS. That's actually a capability I have wanted for quite a while, and apparently it is only available in MacOS. Great stuff!

Less great is that MacOS does not allow volume control on external sound cards. SoundSource ($47) adds this rather crucial functionality back, once you go through the unnecessarily excruciating process of enabling custom kernel extensions. Windows and Linux of course natively support this.

Another necessary functionality for me is access to a non-sucky (i.e. no FAT) cross-platform file system. At the moment, the most portable file system seems to be NTFS, of all things. Regrettably, MacOS only supports reading NTFS, but no writing. Paragon NTFS (€20) adds this with another kernel extension, and promptly kernel-panicked my computer. Oh joy. At least it's only panicking for file transfers initiated by DigiKam, which I can work around. Paragon Support says they're working on it. I'm not holding my breath. Windows and Linux of course natively support NTFS.

I have learned from experience not to trust graphical backup programs. TimeMachine in particular has eaten my backups many times already, and can not be trusted. But I have used Borg (OSS) for years, and it has so far performed flawlessly. Even more impressive, my Borg backups have a continuous history despite moving operating systems several times. It truly is wonderful software!

On Windows, I run Borg inside the WSL, and schedule its backups with the Windows Task Scheduler. On Linux, I schedule them with systemd units. On MacOS, I install Borg with Homebrew (OSS) and schedule the backups with launchd tasks. It's all pretty equivalent. One nice thing about launchd, however, is how the OS immediately pops up a notification if there's a new task file added, and adds the task to the graphical system settings.

I have to emphasize what a game-changer the WSL is on Windows. Where previously, such simple automations where a pain in the neck to do reliably, they're now the same simple shell scripts as on other OSes. And it perfectly integrates with Windows programs as well, including passing pipes between Linux and Windows programs. It's truly amazing! At the moment, I'd rate Windows a better Unix system than MacOS for this reason. Homebrew is a passable package manager on MacOS, but the way it's ill-integrated into the main system (not in system PATH) is a bit off-putting.

I generally use my computer for three tasks: General document stuff, photo editing, and video games.

One major downside of Apple computers is that video games aren't available. This has become less of a problem to me since I bought a Steam Deck, which has taken over gaming duties from my main PC. Absolutely astonishingly, the Steam Deck runs Windows games on Linux through emulation, which works almost flawlessly, making video games no longer a Windows-only proposition.

What doesn't work well on Linux are commercial applications. Wine generally does not play well with them, and frustratingly for my photo editing, neither VMWare Workstation Player (free) nor VirtualBox (OSS) support hardware-accelerated VMs on up-to-date Linux⁵. So where MacOS lacks games, Linux lacks Photoshop. Desktop applications in general tend to be unnecessarily cumbersome to manage and update on Linux. Flatpak is helping in this regard, by installing user-facing applications outside of the OS package managers, but it remains more work than on Windows or MacOS. The occasional scanner driver or camera interface app can also be troublesome on Linux, but that's easily handled with a VirtualBox VM (with the proprietary Extension Pack for USB2 support), and hasn't really bothered me too much.

Luckily for me, my most-used apps are generally OSS tools such as Darktable (OSS) and DigiKam (OSS), or cross-platform programs like Fish (OSS), Git (OSS), and Emacs (OSS). This is however, where Windows has a bit of a sore spot, as these programs tend to perform noticeably worse on Windows than on other platforms. Emacs and git in particular are just terribly slow on Windows, taking several seconds for routine operations that are instant on other platforms. That's probably due to Windows' rather slow file system and malware scanner for the many-small-files style of file management that these Unix tools implement. It is very annoying.

So there's just no perfect solution. MacOS can't do games, Linux can't run commercial applications, and Windows is annoyingly slow for OSS applications. Regardless, I regularly use all three systems productively. My job is mostly done on Windows, my home computer runs MacOS, and my Steam Deck and automations run Linux.

Overall, I currently prefer MacOS as my desktop OS. It is surprisingly flexible, and more scriptable than I thought, and in some ways is actually more functional than Linux or Windows. The integrated calendar and contacts apps are nice, too, and not nearly as terrible as their Windows/Linux counterparts. To say nothing of the amazing M1 hardware with its minuscule power draw and total silence, while maintaining astonishing performance.

Linux is where I prefer to program, due to its sane command line and tremendously good compiler/debugger/library infrastructure. As a desktop OS, it does have some rough edges, however, especially for its lack of access to commercial applications. While Linux should be the most customizable of these three, I find things tend to break too easily, and customizations are often scattered widely between many different subsystems, making them very hard to get right.

Theoretically, Windows is the most capable OS, supporting apps, OSS, and games. But it also feels the most user-hostile of these three, and the least performant. And then there's the intrusive ads everywhere, its spying on my every move, and at work there's inevitably a heavy-handed administrator security setup that gets in the way of productivity. It's honestly fine on my home computer, at least since they introduced the WSL. But using it for work every day is quite enough, so I don't want to use it at home, too.

The configuration file of rsnapshot says that you might experience data corruption if you run several copies of rsnapshot at the same time (and you can use the lockfile to prevent this). This is a problem if your computer is asleep while rsnapshot is scheduled to run, since launchd will then re-schedule all missed tasks at once when the computer wakes up. If you enable the lockfile, only one of them will run.

On the other hand, only the hourly task will actually create a new backup. All higher-level backup tiers merely copy existing backups around, so in theory, they shouldn't step on each other's toes when run concurrently. I have opened an issue asking about this.

There are other possible solutions: ① You could modify the launchd entry such that backups only trigger after a few minutes or, better yet, only once all other instances of rsnapshot have finished. I am not sure if launchd supports this, though. ② You could schedule the hourly task using cron instead of launchd, since cron will not reschedule missed tasks. This would only work for two tiers of backups, though. ③ You could just ignore the issue and hope for the best. After all, if a daily or hourly backup gets corrupted every now and then, you still have enough working backups…

CoreAudio is the native audio library for macOS. It is known for its high performance, low latency, and horrible documentation. After having used the native audio APIs on all three platforms, CoreAudio was by far the hardest one to use. The main problem is lack of documentation and lack of feedback, and plain missing or broken features. Let's get started.

The basic unit of any CoreAudio program is the audio unit. An audio unit can be a source (aka microphone), a sink (aka speaker) or an audio processor (both sink and source). Each audio unit can have several input buses, and several output buses, each of which can have several channels. The meaning of these buses varies wildly and is often underdocumented. Furthermore, every audio unit has several properties, such as a sample rate, block sizes, and a data format, and parameters, which are like properties, but presumably different in some undocumented way.

In order to use an audio unit, you create an AudioComponentDescription that describes whether you want a source or sink unit, or an effect unit, and what kind of effect you want (AudioComponent is an alternative name for audio unit). With the description, you can create an AudioComponentInstance, which is then an opaque struct pointer to your newly created audio unit. So far so good.

The next step is then to configure the audio unit using AudioUnitGetProperty and AudioUnitSetProperty. This is surprisingly hard, since every property can be configured for every bus (sometimes called element) of every input or output of every unit, and the documentation is extremely terse on which of these combinations are valid. Some invalid combinations return error codes, while others only lead to errors during playback/recording. Furthermore, the definition of what constitutes an input or output is interpreted quite differently in different places: One place calls a microphone an input, since it records audio; another place will call it an output, since it outputs audio data to the system. In one crazy example, you have to configure a microphone unit by disabling its output bus 0, and enabling its input bus 1, but then read audio data from its ostensibly disabled output bus 0.

The property interface is untyped, meaning that every property has to be given an identifier, a void pointer that points to a matching data structure, and the size of that data structure. Sometimes the setter allocates additional memory, in which case the documentation does not contain any information on who should free this memory. Most objects are passed around as opaque struct pointers with dedicated constructor and destructor functions. All of this does not strike me as particularly C-like, even though CoreAudio is supposedly a native C library.

Once your audio unit is configured, you set a render callback function, and start the audio unit. All important interaction now happens within that callback function. In a strange reversal of typical control flow, input data to the callback function needs to be fetched by calling AudioUnitRender (evoked on the unit itself) from within the callback, while output is written to memory provided as callback function arguments. Many times during development, AudioUnitRender would return error codes because of an invalid property setting during initialization. Of course, it won't tell which property is actually at fault, just that it can't fulfill the render request at the moment.

Error codes in general are a difficult topic in CoreAudio. Most functions return an error code as an OSStatus value (aka uint32), and the header files usually contain a definition of some, but not all, possible error codes. Sometimes these error codes are descriptive and nice, but often they are way too general. My favorite is the frequent kAudioUnitErr_CannotDoInCurrentContext, which is just about as useless an error description as possible. Worse, some error codes are not defined as numeric constants, but as int err = 'abcd', which makes them un-searchable in the source file. Luckily, this madness can be averted using https://osstatus.com/, which is a dedicated database for OSStatus error codes.

By far the worst part of the CoreAudio API is that some properties are silently ignored. For example, you can set the sample rate or priming information on a microphone unit, and it will accept that property change and it will report that property as changed, but it will still use its default value when recording (aka "rendering" in CoreAudio). A speaker unit, in contrast, will honor the sample rate property, and resample as necessary. If you still need to resample your microphone recordings, you have to use a separate AudioConverter unit, which is its own bag of fun (and only documented in a remark in one overview document).

Lastly, all the online documentation is written for Swift and Objective-C, while the implementation is C. Worse, the C headers contain vastly more information than the online documentation, and the online documentation often does not even reference the C header file name. Of course header files are spread into the CoreAudio framework, the AudioToolkit framework, and the AudioUnit framework, which makes even grepping a joy.

All of that said, once you know what to do and how to do it, the resulting code is relatively compact and readable. The API does contain inconsistencies and questionable design choices, but the real problem is the documentation. I spent way too much time reading the header files over and over again, and searching through (often outdated or misleading) example projects and vague high-level overviews for clues on how to interpret error messages and API documentation. I had somewhat better luck with a few blog posts on the subject, but the general consensus seems to be that the main concepts of CoreAudio are woefully under-explained, and documentation about edge cases is almost nonexistent. Needless to say, I did not enjoy my experience with CoreAudio.

Format an SD card as described in the wiki. I just installed the version of Debian that is provided on the official website. Now just boot up.

Next, I was stumped because I only have an Apple LED display and no convenient way of connecting the Raspberry Pi's HDMI output to the LED display's Mini Display Port. After some searching and a combination of three adapter cables, I finally got it connected and could see it boot. Really, I have no use whatsoever for the HDMI port on the Raspberry pi. So the first thing I did was to enable SSH, which luckily is available right there in the configuration utility that starts when you boot the thing for the first time.

After that, I disconnected the display and immediately was stumped because I now had no way of finding the Pi's IP address. Actually, I did not even have a network to connect it to. So I strung an ethernet cable from my laptop to the Pi and enabled Internet Sharing in order to (1) start the DHCP server and (2) give the Pi internet access. The IP address was then easily found using arp -a.

First off, I needed to format and mount my external hard drive to be usable as a Time Machine volume. ls /dev showed the hard drive as /dev/sda. Thus, I installed parted using sudo apt-get install parted and used it sudo parted. In parted, select /dev/sda sets it up to modify the external hard drive, rm 1 deleted its main partition, q to quit parted. Next, creating a new partition: sudo fdisk, then in there n with p and 1 to create a new primary partition, then w to apply the changes and exit. Lastly, I created the file system with sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sda1 with the whole partition as its size. Now lastly, I created a mount point for it using mkdir ~/TimeMachine (don't use sudo!) and auto-mounted it by appending this to /etc/fstab

    /dev/sda1 /home/pi/TimeMachine ext4 rw,auto,user,exec,sync 0 0

Note: sync specifies that all file system changes have to be written to disk immediately, without caching. This might be bad for performance, but on the other hand, this behavior is probably a good idea for a backup system. I once read something somewhere that Apple is enforcing a similar behavior on their Time Capsules and that this is the reason why they won't allow any other network drive as Time Capsules.

First up, this requires netatalk, so I did sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get install netatalk to install it. Next, netatalk has to be configured to actually share the drive on the network. This is accomplished by appending this line to /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default:

    /home/pi/TimeMachine TimeMachine allow:pi cnidscheme:dbd options:upriv,usedot,tm

Also, the afp daemon should be configured to use the proper authentification schemes. Thus, add this to /etc/netatalk/afpd.conf:

    - -transall -uamlist uams_randnum.so,uams_dhx.so,uams_dhx2.so -nosavepassword -advertise_ssh

(maybe append mdns to the hosts in /etc/nsswitch.conf? Probably not necessary.)

I am also not quite sure whether I actually had to create a new file /etc/avahi/services/afpd.service and write into it:

    <?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
    <!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">
    <service-group>
		<name replace-wildcards="yes">%h</name>
		<service>
			<type>_afpovertcp._tcp</type>
			<port>548</port>
		</service>
		<service>
			<type>_device-info._tcp</type>
			<port>0</port>
			<txt-record>model=Xserve</txt-record>
		</service>
	</service-group>

And maybe, you have to create an empty file that signifies the drive as Time Machine compatible using touch ~/TimeMachine/.com.apple.timemachine.supported.

Edit: Turns out, all these were not necessary. Thank you, reader Philipp, for trying them out!

I certainly did all that, but I am not quite sure which of these steps were strictly necessary. If you know, please let me, too.

Anyway, with all that done, restart both the netatalk and the Bonjour daemon using sudo /etc/init.d/netatalk restart and sudo /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon restart.

Now, back to the Mac. In order to make Time Machine accept the new network share, run

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Edit: Turns out, this setting is not necessary. OSX just picks the Raspberry Pi as a usable Time Machine drive by default.

Finally, the TimeMachine folder on the Raspberry Pi was available as one of the backup drives. Halleluja!

Now transfer speeds for the initial backup are not exactly what I would call fast, but this might not be the Pi's fault. For one thing, the Pi is reporting to only run at half load. For another thing, the external hard drive and its USB connection is probably not very speedy. And lastly, I seem to remember that initial backups always were slow. But really, only time will tell how well this thing can do the job of a Time Capsule.

Further testing shows that transfer speeds are very comparable to the Time Capsule. Thus, I declare this a raging success!

This article heavily steals from these fine folks on the internet:

• Matthias Kretschmann
• Steffen L. Norgren
• Mike Palmer

Computer people like to try new software. Some new software is crap. You should delete crap from your computer. Amazingly however, the Mac does not have any way of uninstalling some software.

At the moment, there are three ways of getting software on your Mac.

1. Install from the App Store. Installation and un-installation work through the App Store.
2. Install by dragging n *.app bundle onto your computer. Uninstall by deleting the bundle. Works fine unless the app installed some stuff outside the bundle.
3. Install by executing a *.pkg file. No way to uninstall whatsoever unless the developer provides a separate uninstall mechanism.

Really, this is beyond ridiculous. There is no way of uninstalling software that has been installed from a *.pkg. How the heck am I supposed to use my computer without uninstalling software? Seriously, Apple? Is this a joke?

(So as a rule, I will only install *.pkg if there is absolutely no other way. Most of the time, I use or abuse homebrew to mitigate this problem.)

So the Mac comes with this awesome backup solution called Time Machine. Just plug in your external hard drive, and it will magically keep all your data save, at all times. Better yet, buy a Time Capsule and this will happen over the wireless network so you don't even need to plug in that hard drive any more. Magic!

Except, every few weeks the Time Machine icon in the menu bar will have a small exclamation point, which indicates that something went wrong. Usually, it means that Time Machine somehow lost track of what it was doing and silently corrupted all backups beyond repair. This happens across several computers and Time Machines. The only solution is to delete all backups and start anew.

So, backups that are not backing up. How amazing is that?

OS X is this astonishingly modern operating system, where all your email, contacts, calendars and settings are synced in the cloud, accessible from anywhere and any device or service you use. In theory.

Synchronization is cool. I used to live within the Googleverse, and all my contacts, calendars and email accounts would sync through Google to all my Apple devices. Life was good! Until things started to go bad. At some point, Mail.app lost an email or two. Not a big deal. Then iCal would not connect any more, and would need to be restarted every other day. And finally, Address Book deleted all my contacts from Google. Actually, it did not delete the whole contacts, just all the information inside them, and leave empty husks with only a name and maybe a partial email address.

I wish I was making this up. I tested this quite thoroughly. Whenever Contacts was set up to sync with Google, after a few days or weeks it would delete all my contacts. Of course, this being cloud backed, it would delete them everywhere on all my devices, without any backup or anything. Thankfully, Address Book on iOS seems to not have this problem.

Things can go wrong, I understand that. But deleting all my contacts? Not cool. Not. Cool.

My grandfather has this G4 PowerBook. He stores all his photos on it. So at one point, we just could not stand it any more to support his software problems and set him up with a newer MacBook (2007) just so we could at least roughly recreate his problems on our machines.

But to do that, we had to convert his old library from iPhoto 1876 to iPhoto 2008. iPhoto itself claims to be able to do that, and lo and behold, it magically imported the old library, started an update program, then another, then another, then another, then another, and updated the old library through the ages up to the most recent version. And everything seemed to work fine, all the albums were there, all the thumbnails looked right, just perfect. Except if you opened any image, it would only show black. I mean, I can understand that an import of a library that old does not work. But at least tell me so. Don't silently corrupt everything!

And then there was my own library, started in late 2007 and handed through different revisions of iPhoto to today. It countains about 25 Gb worth of photos. Funny enough, its size on disk is actually 65 Gb. What. The. Heck?

At this point, a giant thank you to the iPhoto Library Manager by Fat Cat Software, which saved both my library and my sanity! Those guys rock!

The newest and brightest in the land of Apple is OS X 10.7 Lion (at the time of writing). This amazing piece of software has a life-changing new feature: It friggin breaks one of the oldest tradition in computer history: Saving files.

Now normally, I would applaud this. Just save everything automatically and give me a sensible undo mechanism instead. Great!

However, in a stroke of genius, they also got rid of the possibility of save as…, which is just an easy way of duplicating a document. Say, because you received it in an email and want to file it somewhere else on your hard drive. Or because the document is saved on a thumb drive and you want to copy it over to your hard drive. No sir, you have to navigate to the document in the finder and copy it by hand from there. Thank you for your patience.

But the worst offender is Preview. Every program on the Mac has this very handy proxy icon in the window title. Whenever a window is representing a file on your computer, it will show that very file in the title, so you can drag and drop it somewhere else. Except preview won't give you the actual document. Instead, it will give you an alias to that document. Which is worth nothing at all if you drag it into an email, your Dropbox or a thumb drive.

Or try to enable File sharing on your local network, which works sometimes, but not all the time. Or Internet Sharing, which might share your internet connection, or break your DNS settings. Or take Bluetooth, which for the life of me, I can not make work for tethering with my iPhone, even though the same works just fine with the iPad and other Macs. Or take networking in general, which every once in a while just completely breaks down on my company's network and just refuses to send or receive any data over the Ethernet cable until I reboot my computer.

I could go on. Let's just say that Lion increased my WTF-per-minute rate significantly.

Lets talk performance. I can't really complain here. In my MacBook Pro I have four cores, eight Gb of memory and a fast, Apple-sanctioned SSD. Life is good. Except that I happen to use virtual machines a whole lot and regardless of whether I use Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse) or Windows (7, 8) on there, they feel faster.

I mean, you don't feel the pain of starting applications much on OS X, because in general, you simply keep your programs running all the time. But even so, Firefox starts up on Windows in, like, no time at all, but takes noticeable time on OS X (same configuration and plugins). I have an SSD, so I mostly don't care, but still.

Or take boot times. Even in a virtual machine, both Windows 7 and 8 and Ubuntu 12.04 and Fedora 17 boot up in less than half a minute. In comparison, OS X Lion takes significantly longer, sometimes minutes. Again, you usually don't feel that pain too much because you don't reboot your Mac all that often (unless you run Bootcamp for gaming regularly). Still, OS X boot and shutdown times are downright shameful these days.

Lets run a few virtual machines. I have eight Gb of memory. Lets boot up a Windows VM and give it two Gb. Do anything you want, run Eclipse and Visual Studio and Firefox with loads of tabs and Steam. Windows will do just fine. Those two Gb are plenty for anything except gaming and photo/video editing. Do the same thing with Linux, same result. In fact, Linux will work just fine with even less memory. But OS X? Don't even think of running it with less than two Gb. Four Gb will give you a workable system if you don't run too many memory intensive applications. But start up XCode and Eclipse and you are done for. This is a huge waste.

And lastly, let's talk HFS+. Did you know that HFS+ has a global lock that prevents any program from accessing the hard drive while another program is doing so? That explains why OS X is so friggin slow on non-SSD drives. And did you ever notice that HFS+ is slowly corrupting your data, even if there are no power failures or anything? I fire up Disk Utility every so often and it will always find some file system corruptions. It rarely breaks stuff, but really, the file system is the very last part of my system I want to see failing randomly.

With all this love, why am I still using a Mac? Well, for one thing, the hardware is seriously great. I would love to see some laptop manufacturer build something equally sturdy, light and good looking as a MacBook Pro. I would love to see someone build a great touch pad into a non-Apple device. I would love to see Retina displays everywhere¹. But I don't.

And then there is software. Where is Tower for Windows or Linux? Or Sparrow or Tweetbot or Reeder or Pixelmator or iPhoto? I'm not saying there are no alternatives, but I certainly have not been able to find any that were really up to the same level of polish.

That said, I have recently been playing around with Windows 8, Ubuntu 12.04 and Fedora 17 and I must say, I am quite taken with them. All of them. As for the next computer I am going to buy, I am doubtful if it will be an Apple computer again.