waving goodbye to windows - part 1

In this two-part series, I'm sharing some thoughts about the reduction of my interactions with Microsoft Windows in my life. I'm stuck with Windows for my work machine (for now), but I've worked to remove Windows from my personal life as much as possible.This first post is about my personal laptop.

🤕 aging hardware headaches

Okay, so the title might be a little misleading. I waved goodbye to Windows in favor of Linux (obligatory "I use Arch, btw") some time ago. Given that my personal laptop's hardware was of the 2016 era, I just couldn't run Windows very well any longer. Not that I wanted to anyway. I opted for an Arch-based distribution called CachyOS, set it up once, and didn't fiddle with it at all. It worked great! But as the aging hardware continued to cause problems, it became apparent that it was time to move on.

For a bit, I considered what laptop I would purchase and install CachyOS on again. But the more I looked around, the more I found mixed reviews regarding battery life across various Linux distributions. And that just wouldn't do. (But don't you worry, I'm not done with Linux at all. In the next post, we'll talk about my personal desktop.)

💻 new hardware, who dis?

Last week, I purchased a refurbished Apple MacBook Air M4 with 16 GB of memory. It's presently running macOS Tahoe 26.3. Now I've never much liked macOS, but what I have always envied is the beautiful and sturdy hardware, which includes impressive battery life. For years, I've avoided switching to macOS for the battery life purely because I don't like the operating system, despite its Unix roots. So why make the change now?

⤴️ abstracting away the operating system

As I've hopped around distributions of Linux over the past few years--never permanently--I have come to be much more aware of the fact that details of end user computing is becoming abstracted away. So little anymore does anybody really spend much time interacting with their operating system. With every new distribution I set up, I found myself interfacing with only a few things outside of my preferred web browser (Zen):

All of the above, save for the package manager, work pretty much identically and are available across nearly every operating system I've used and the bulk of my daily computer usage outside of writing PowerShell stuff that almost usually works is done from inside my web browser (though with the advent of GitHub Codespaces and vscode.dev, I suppose even that could be done in the web browser...

...but what about that last one? The package manager for installing those few non-browser applications?

I used winget quite a bit when I was on Windows, and relied upon pacman when I moved to CachyOS. macOS, on the other hand, didn't appear to have a native package manager CLI utility. While disappointing, I did find brew as an option and got that up and running quickly. Within another 10 minutes and I had everything I wanted installed on the new MacBook. And if anything else comes up, there's a good chance that its a progressive web app (PWA) that will run from my browser.

It's just interesting to me. I used to care so much about this operating system versus that operating system. And now? At the end of the day, if the OS is just a delivery vehicle for a web browser, then 'cutting the fat' means the hardware is a bulk of what's left.

Maybe the future isn’t a better OS—is it just a thinner client?

The next post of this series will be about my migration from Windows 11 to Garuda Linux on my personal desktop computer and how I'm feeling nearly a year later.