Is there someone here who migrated from Mac OS to Pop!_OS? If yes, what was your experience and what did you miss?
I miss the Mac trackpad and gestures. I miss the trackpad size and the surface itself. Wiring up libinput-gestures helps some things but you still don't get things like pinch to zoom in Chrome, for example, and the overall experience is not nearly as polished.
I miss Mac OS HiDPI support as well. Fractional scaling helps a bit, but switching from HiDPI to LoDPI and vice-versa (docking/undocking) can leave some apps scaled incorrectly, make a mess of your desktop, and I haven't been able to get a mixed configuration working where only my laptop monitor is scaled while my external display is not. I end up running this 1440p laptop screen at 1600x900 or 1920x1080 instead just to forgo the headache.
The VPN clients we use at work were much more pleasant to use on macOS. We have the option of using one of two different OpenVPN solutions as alternatives, and they're fine, but again, the polish isn't there (little things like automatically reconnecting to the VPN without my intervention would be nice).
I can't really think of anything else I'm really missing these days, though. Things I explicitly DON'T miss: Docker on Mac is a poor experience compared to natively running on Linux... Having a real Linux userspace by default is SO much more pleasant than dealing with Homebrew (which is great if you absolutely need it but I'm happier not having to deal with it at all anymore). I don't miss the Mac keyboard and touchbar. I don't miss troubleshooting things on macOS... it is incredibly opaque in comparison.
Overall, I don't think I'll be switching back any time soon, but would love to see more attention to the overall fit and finish as far as the desktop experience goes.
Recently started running arch on an X1 carbon and wondering what I can do to make the trackpad better.
But then again I don't use anything fancy beyond one- or two-finger gestures. If you want all the fancy gestures, I can't really say much about that.
I find the contacts/calendars/mail programs to be overall less functional than Mac OS. Not terrible, but it is taking some time to learn the sharp edges to avoid. Geary is their default mail client, but it doesn't support a unified inbox, and I have a lot of email accounts, so I bounced between a bunch of other clients before finally settling on Evolution. Evolution feels like a bad Windows business suite from the late 90s, but the fact is that it has the functionality I need, and I think I can learn to avoid its oddities.
Besides that, everything about it is very familiar to a mac convert. You can see clear areas where strong inspiration was taken from the Mac. It's honestly breathtakingly good, and it's free. I haven't looked back.
Overall, I'd say you should pick up a System 76 Laptop and give it a go. If the Darter Pro had been around when I was switching, I'd certainly have bought that.
The biggest thing I miss -- font rendering. Font rendering is all messed up in linux. It's painful to read pdfs, emails, browse the web. I've tried all sorts of configuration options and it's still broken. Really, it grates me. Things just look off.
On Pop! (old thinkpad), typing gives me joy, and I live in the terminal / use vimium browser bindings / snap windows around. I prefer this machine for editing code / hacking.
On Mac, swiping around is frictionless. I use hot corners, gestures, and have trackpad sensitivity at the highest. No need for vim outside of editing code, and I default to GUI workflows. The screen is much better, and prefer watching videos.
My VPN setup and all that jazz is just as easy on either machine.
Same. It's extremely satisfying for keyboard-centric workflow.
I'm hoping they tackle font rendering next.
Feel free to ask any questions.
Haven't thought of or used the touchpad much. Limited gestures, adequate size. I don't use it much.
Battery life feels comparable to that of the 2012-2015 Macbook Pros I've used. Can code, browse, and listen to music for maybe 4 hours a charge, and it recharges quickly.
Main reason for switching was better docker support/performance. Don’t really miss anything.
Some say Pop is the best for HiDPI screens, but personally I’ve disabled the entire HiDPI Daemon, with a triple monitor setup it was really buggy and slow so I decided to just take the shortcut and change the resolution of my laptop screen to make it readable.