> The window manager. I'm not a fan of all the animations and needing to gester between screens (and yes, I've been down the hotkeys rabbit hole). To install a 3rd party window manager, you need to disable some security setting because appearantly they work by injecting into the display manager and calling private APIs.

Specifically for this, there's Aerospace (https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace) which does not require disabling SIP, intentionally by the dev.

For using the vanilla macOS workspaces though, if you avoid using full screen apps (since those go to their on ephemeral workspace that you can't keybind for some stupid reason), if you create a fixed amount of workspaces you can bind keyboard shortcuts to switch to them. I have 5 set up, and use Ctrl+1/2/3/4/5 to switch between isntead of using gestures.

Apart from that, I use Raycast to set keybindings for opening specific applications. You can also bind apple shortcuts that you make.

Still not my favorite OS over Linux, but I've managed to make it work because I love the hardware, and outside of $dayjob I do professional photography and the adobe suite runs better here than even my insanely overspeced gaming machine on Windows.