Due to recent changes in my living situation, I decided to do something bold and expensive, and buy a mac mini to sit on my computer desk along with some other equipment. I was pretty excited, as apple has very shiny and sleek looking products, and i have never owned an apple desktop or laptop product. However, despite all the things people say about apple being faster, better performing, and more secure than windows, I immediately started running into problems.
First of all, when i was buying the thing and the parts at Best Buy, I wanted the lady to open up the case with the keyboards and mice (they are all "magic"), just so i could figure out how the general compatibility works with these things and was met with the "i can't do that for you" resistance. I was glad to know that the mini uses HDMI, which means they are compatible with monitors i already have, but this employee was only able to give me assurances about how "easy" it was to use the "magic" peripherals, and assured me that they would work. After I got back home and tried to set up my new desktop computer, I discovered that the mouse worked and connected to the mini like the lady said, but the keyboard required a lightning connection, which they have phased out on the current new models of minis. So I spent about 40 minutes back at best buy exchanging the products and getting help from different employees, even though the lady was nice in helping me get to the right person to tell me what was wrong.
Then, I finally was able to set everything up with the cloud and explore the software and the z shell. I was a little confused when trying to set up the screen saver and suspend defaults, even though I eventually figured everything out, and then at some point I messed around with the command line and scripting. Unfortunately, you need to use "sudo" to shutdown, suspend, and restart the computer. This is really annoying, as there's no "sudo" lock for the off button....why should my largely safe user action, of shutting off the freakin' computer, be protected by the mac internal security? The magic mouse and keyboard were hurting my hands too. Then, suddenly, the graphical "sleep" selection button no longer worked, and after I kept researching this, I eventually found a stack exchange post that stated you can fix this through the command line, and i think what happened was I somehow changed the internal settings when I was messing around with the z shell suspend command. DOH!
Don't get me wrong, in some ways i have enjoyed the mac journey, and I do think linux devs could integrate the aspect of "mission control" (the desktop configuration app) where you can bind certain applications to specific desktops, even though i'm just fine with the more free form and 4-Desktop configuration of the mate desktop environment. Macs also do come with intriguing apps, and they let you integrate your text messages with your desktop if you have an apple phone. However, my general irritation and disgust with apple has now reached a fever pitch now that today I tried setting up a coding environment. I decided that I would try using microsoft visual code even though I already had vim installed (my obvious fave) with the copilot extension, as this appears to be a favorite among professionals. Plus, my experiences with MVC were disappointing on both windows and linux, so maybe copilot would guide me through the entire process and things would be okay.
I got to part where I learned the keyboard shortcut for the integrated terminal and i had already told copilot to write a simple z shell script which i hadn't named yet, but copied into MVC, and when I was about to name and run it, copilot told me i had to enter the keyboard shortcut to get back to the integrated terminal, but once I had trouble switching back to copilot, THE MOUSE STOPPED WORKING ACROSS THE OPERATING SYSTEM IN GENERAL. Time to shut down and reflect on things for a while.
I've seen a lot of microsoft hate on linux forums, but the process of using apple is no less masochistic than any other operating system, unfortunately. Computing is a lifelong adventure in frustration and dealing with annoying people on the internet, there's no way out.
First of all, when i was buying the thing and the parts at Best Buy, I wanted the lady to open up the case with the keyboards and mice (they are all "magic"), just so i could figure out how the general compatibility works with these things and was met with the "i can't do that for you" resistance. I was glad to know that the mini uses HDMI, which means they are compatible with monitors i already have, but this employee was only able to give me assurances about how "easy" it was to use the "magic" peripherals, and assured me that they would work. After I got back home and tried to set up my new desktop computer, I discovered that the mouse worked and connected to the mini like the lady said, but the keyboard required a lightning connection, which they have phased out on the current new models of minis. So I spent about 40 minutes back at best buy exchanging the products and getting help from different employees, even though the lady was nice in helping me get to the right person to tell me what was wrong.
Then, I finally was able to set everything up with the cloud and explore the software and the z shell. I was a little confused when trying to set up the screen saver and suspend defaults, even though I eventually figured everything out, and then at some point I messed around with the command line and scripting. Unfortunately, you need to use "sudo" to shutdown, suspend, and restart the computer. This is really annoying, as there's no "sudo" lock for the off button....why should my largely safe user action, of shutting off the freakin' computer, be protected by the mac internal security? The magic mouse and keyboard were hurting my hands too. Then, suddenly, the graphical "sleep" selection button no longer worked, and after I kept researching this, I eventually found a stack exchange post that stated you can fix this through the command line, and i think what happened was I somehow changed the internal settings when I was messing around with the z shell suspend command. DOH!
Don't get me wrong, in some ways i have enjoyed the mac journey, and I do think linux devs could integrate the aspect of "mission control" (the desktop configuration app) where you can bind certain applications to specific desktops, even though i'm just fine with the more free form and 4-Desktop configuration of the mate desktop environment. Macs also do come with intriguing apps, and they let you integrate your text messages with your desktop if you have an apple phone. However, my general irritation and disgust with apple has now reached a fever pitch now that today I tried setting up a coding environment. I decided that I would try using microsoft visual code even though I already had vim installed (my obvious fave) with the copilot extension, as this appears to be a favorite among professionals. Plus, my experiences with MVC were disappointing on both windows and linux, so maybe copilot would guide me through the entire process and things would be okay.
I got to part where I learned the keyboard shortcut for the integrated terminal and i had already told copilot to write a simple z shell script which i hadn't named yet, but copied into MVC, and when I was about to name and run it, copilot told me i had to enter the keyboard shortcut to get back to the integrated terminal, but once I had trouble switching back to copilot, THE MOUSE STOPPED WORKING ACROSS THE OPERATING SYSTEM IN GENERAL. Time to shut down and reflect on things for a while.
I've seen a lot of microsoft hate on linux forums, but the process of using apple is no less masochistic than any other operating system, unfortunately. Computing is a lifelong adventure in frustration and dealing with annoying people on the internet, there's no way out.
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