I've been using Linux for about six or so years now and five of those years have been with Arch Linux. I've customized my development environment a lot over the years and not to sound like a braggart, but I consider myself a power user. It was hard to imagine moving to a different operating system, because I had a very tailored development environment where I was very efficient.

Arch wasn't perfect, but it was close. If you aren't familiar with Arch - it's a Linux distro that's very barebones and requires the user to place pieces together to have a working system. It's like Subway - you choose all the ingredients. It's also a rolling release distro - meaning the app store almost always will have the latest version unlike Ubuntu or Debian were you will find versions that are older than 2 years. For that reason, Arch is known to be unstable but my 5 year old installation never let me down even with daily sudo pacman -Syu.

Pain of using a desktop machine

For the past year, I have been working exclusively out of my desktop machine. It has an Intel i9 14900k and 32GB of RAM and is seriously a beast of a machine. And before that I used to work from a 2019 Dell XPS 15 which I gave to my dad so the desktop is the only machine I was left with.

While the desktop is insanely powerful, it's not portable and susceptible to frequent power cuts. I live in a country where powercuts are a regular thing and my tiny UPS only lasts for about 5-10 minutes.

power cut created with: Gpt4o

What made it worse is that suspending was not working for me. It had something to do with NVIDIA drivers and I tried to troubleshoot it but never had any luck. So, every time there was a powercut, even for a few minutes, I would have to completely shutdown the machine.

The noise, although relatively quiter than other desktops, was still a bit too much for me. I prefer a quiet environment to work.

Beyond these challenges, the most significant drawback was the desktop's inherent inflexibility. My remote job offers complete freedom regarding when and where I work. However, I couldn't take advantage of this flexibility - working from cafes or during travel was impossible, and I couldn't even work from my own bed. I was essentially tethered to my desk at all times.

So, really the main reason for me to switch to a Mac was that I needed a powerful laptop that was also power efficient - and no one does it better than Apple. There are a few laptops with arm cpus that are probably more power efficient than Apple Silicon, but nowhere near as powerful.

It wasn't the OS that made me switch to Mac, but it was the hardware.

So eventually after months or even years of convincing myself that a Mac wouldn't be worth it, I finally decided to make that switch. Spoiler alert, it has been absolutely worth it.

macbook pro m4 pro