I've been a GNU/Linux user in my personal life since around 2006/7, though my first encounter came a couple of years earlier, I remember burning a Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog) Live CD and nervously booting it on the family PC, half convinced I'd destroy something in the process. I didn't, obviously. It's a Live CD. Online back then every other person who seemed to know what they were talking about was running Linux, and it felt like a new frontier. The first proper install was Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) on my laptop at uni. Prior to all of that I was a Windows user going all the way back to 3.11 for Workgroups. Making the leap to Linux felt like a significant lifestyle change, and for most of the following decade-and-a-half it remained my computing home.

Work is what pulled me toward Mac. I've been using one at the office for nearly ten years now. The appeal is obvious: a Unix-like OS that let me stop mucking about with drivers and configuration and just focus on getting work done. Enterprise software support matters too: VPN clients, MDM solutions and the first-class apps for the usual corporate toolkit all just work on Mac in a way that requires considerably more patience on Linux.

That work experience gradually wore down my resistance. Around the early 2020s, with the arrival of Apple Silicon, I made the switch in my personal life too. The M-series chips are frankly astonishing. The performance and battery life are in a different league entirely. For a while, I had no complaints.

But things have been slowly souring. The announcement of macOS Tahoe with its Liquid Glass redesign crystallised something I'd been noticing for a while: Apple has been drifting from its "it just works" ethos toward form over function. The sentiment is widely shared. Recurring complaints about deteriorating software quality, bugs that persist across multiple releases and now a visual overhaul that prioritises aesthetics over usability. Others have documented it better than I can. The reaction on Hacker News says it all. The hardware is still extraordinary. The software is letting it down.

This got me thinking about going back to Linux. I picked up a Geekom mini PC with a Ryzen 5 processor for the purpose. I've always been a bit of an AMD fanboy and the Ryzen platform has solid Linux support, GPU drivers included. I've been running Debian on my home servers for the past decade without complaint, but for the desktop I decided to try Arch Linux this time. I'd briefly used it years ago on a netbook but never as a primary machine. The rolling release model appealed to me, always on current software without adding backports repos or hunting down dodgy PPAs. To be fair, Debian upgrades have always been painless for me, and I ran Debian Testing for a while to get more recent packages, but I seemed to be the only person doing it. The Arch community, particularly the forum, is considerably more vibrant, and I've never been one for Flatpak or similar workarounds. Arch just gives you the latest versions. The installation, which once required a multi-hour rite of passage through the wiki, was surprisingly painless with some help from Claude and the still-excellent Arch Wiki.

For the desktop I went with KDE Plasma 6. I did consider going back to a lightweight window manager. I've spent time with Openbox, Fluxbox, spectrwm and i3 over the years, but honestly I no longer have the appetite for that amount of configuration. Time is money (especially as I have a young family now) and I want something functional with sane/attractive defaults from the moment I log in. KDE fits that bill nicely.

And I have to say, I was impressed, and apparently I'm not the only one. Out of the box it feels solid and looks decent. The only thing I needed to change was the display scaling (from the default 125% down to 100%). That was it. Everything else just worked and I didn't feel the urge to "rice" it or spend hours tweaking appearance settings. The only thing I changed was the wallpaper settings. KDE can pull fresh wallpapers automatically from sources like Bing Picture of the Day or Wikipedia, with no third-party tools needed. I was genuinely impressed.

What I appreciate most is that KDE sticks firmly to the traditional desktop metaphor. Unlike GNOME, which has become increasingly opinionated and minimalistic to the point of frustration, KDE gives you a proper taskbar, a sensible application launcher and sane defaults. I was a GNOME 2 user back in the day and the transition to GNOME 3 is what originally drove me away, first to Xfce, then to lightweight window managers like Openbox and Fluxbox, and eventually to tiling setups with i3 and spectrwm. KDE was going through its own rough patch with the 4.0 transition at the time and I wasn't interested in MATE or Trinity. KDE never lost the plot the way GNOME did, though. It just stumbled for a while.

My tools of choice have always leaned FOSS and cross-platform, deliberately so, as it turns out. Zsh, Neovim, tmux, WezTerm, podman, KeePassXC, Transmission, LibreWolf, VLC (and recently Claude Code and Opencode) and they all work identically on Linux and make living with a foot in each camp surprisingly painless. There are some Linux-specific wins too: sshfs, for instance, which has become an increasingly painful exercise on recent macOS releases, just works. And while I don't have Homebrew on Linux, the AUR covers what I need. The one persistent irritant is muscle memory. I reliably reach for the wrong modifier key on whichever machine I'm on. I can't see that improving anytime soon.

One thing worth mentioning: I couldn't get suspend working reliably. The system would go to sleep fine but come back unresponsive, both via keyboard and over SSH. I didn't spend much time investigating it (life's too short) and in the end just turned off suspend in KDE and the SDDM login manager. On a laptop that would be a dealbreaker, and it's exactly the sort of hardware integration where Macs genuinely excel. On a desktop mini that doesn't move, it's a non-issue.

I'm not suggesting this is the right move for everyone. I still have a MacBook Air for portable use, and whatever Apple's software problems, they remain in a league of their own on the hardware side. But if you're dependent on enterprise software, specific professional applications or the broader Apple ecosystem then a Mac remains the pragmatic choice. For a desktop though, and for someone who spends most of their time in a terminal, a browser and a text editor, Linux in 2026 with KDE Plasma 6 is a compelling option. If macOS Tahoe is the direction things are heading, I don't see myself going back any time soon.