I’ve been a linux user for 20 years (mostly on KDE). I just started at a new job, and they gave me a mac. I found out later that I could have got a linux machine instead, which is a bit annoying. Still, I know there are some nice things about a mac, and I figured I’d give it a try for a while.

I’m pretty quick moving around my desktop environment, and I’m finding picking up the mac is not too bad. BUT I use keyboard shortcuts a lot, and they are all every different on a mac. So whenever I switch back and forth between my work machine, I end up stumbling a bunch and wasting my time, and getting annoyed. It’s mostly keyboard shortcuts, but the trackpad buttons and scrolling are annoying too.

So, question is: is it possible to regularly use two OSs with wildly different control surfaces, and be comfortable with it? e.g. either MacOS + Linux, or I guess MacOS + Windows? Or will it be annoying forever?

  • 2xsaiko
    3•1 month ago

    I changed all the KDE shortcuts to be like on Mac (because I like those more). I have a keyboard with Mac layout for my Linux PC and have swapped meta and ctrl via the keyboard settings (i.e. you press ⌘C but software receives ctrl+c), because a lot of non-KDE apps are way worse about remapping shortcuts so if they really want ctrl I at least want it to be on the ⌘ key, and also because the meta key behaves weirdly at least in Qt, for example it doesn’t block text input when held down unlike ctrl.

    These are the big annoyances with this that do trip me up:

    • Terminal (since I’ve switched ⌘ and ⌃, the standard shell keys such as ⌃C are now ⌘C instead because that is unremappable in Konsole, and I’ve had to put copy/paste/etc. on ⌃C etc. instead)
    • Text navigation in Firefox — while I remapped the bindings for KDE/Qt, it’s impossible to do that in Firefox which means ⌥◀︎ is “navigate back” instead of “move caret back one word”. This is the most awful because it keeps making me reload pages when I’m editing text and don’t pay attention
    • Text navigation in KDE/Qt apps — it’s so close to good but I can’t remap the “extend selection word left/right” keys from ⇧⌘◀︎/▶︎ to ⇧⌥◀︎/▶︎ to be like the “move caret” keys (⌥◀︎/▶︎). Same for the select to start/end of line keys.