10 Reasons Power Users Are Switching from macOS to Linux in 2025 Fed up with macOS window tiling, App Store lock-in and slow Homebrew builds? See why developers and power users now choose Linux Mint & Fedora for peak productivity.

There was a time when every device on my desk had an Apple logo. I carried successive generations of the iPhone, collected a rainbow of iPods, hauled a MacBook White to every meeting, ran an iMac as my main workstation, and evangelized the iPad long before tablet sales took off.

As a former Windows stalwart, I loved the stability, design consistency, and polish that Apple’s ecosystem offered. Over the past decade, however, Apple and I have slowly grown apart. I now spend most of my day as CTO of a food-tech start-up, and although only 10 % of my working hours involve active coding, I still do code reviews and need every minute of that time to be friction-free. The more my workflow matured, the more macOS put sand in the gears. Eventually I moved to Arch Linux on my personal machines and Debian on the company’s development laptops.

1. Window Management Still Trails the Competition

For years, macOS offered only rudimentary window controls: a green zoom button that behaved inconsistently, plus Mission Control for manually shuffling windows. Apple finally shipped Window Tiling in macOS Sequoia (version 15, released October 2024), allowing users to drag a window to an edge or use the Option-key shortcut to snap it into halves or quarters. It is a welcome improvement, but it remains limited compared with Windows 11 Snap Layouts or Linux tiling managers such as i3 and Sway. Complex grid layouts, automatic tiling, and keyboard-only workflows still require third-party utilities like Rectangle or Moom on macOS. Power users therefore end up maintaining extra software just to replicate features that are first-class citizens elsewhere.

2. The Cmd/Ctrl Schism Creates Needless Cognitive Load

Apple’s decision to place common shortcuts on ⌘ (Command) instead of Ctrl made sense in the 1980s, but it creates daily friction for developers. In the Terminal, POSIX signals such as Ctrl-C (interrupt) and Ctrl-Z (suspend) cannot be remapped to Cmd, so your muscle memory must constantly switch between modifier keys depending on context.

Linux and Windows, by contrast, use Ctrl consistently across both GUI and shell, eliminating that mental tax. Karabiner-Elements can simulate a unified layout on macOS, yet it introduces compatibility quirks and is unavailable in Safe Mode or at FileVault’s pre-boot login screen.

Also note that while there may be hacks and configs that accomplish remapping, it ends up being a pain to then use someone else’s Apple laptop.

3. Terminal-Centric Workflows Are Smoother on Linux

Developers who live by the command line expect the OS to expose every knob in text form. On Linux I can sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade to patch the entire system, rsync a config folder for backup, or script my user-account provisioning. While macOS has gained softwareupdate --install --all and a modern zsh default shell, many preference panes are still opaque binaries inside /System/Library. Editing them requires convoluted defaults write commands whose keys change every release, and some settings (e.g., window-server behaviour) remain completely hidden.

4. Homebrew Is Good—Until You’ve Used APT, DNF, or Pacman

Homebrew is undeniably the most polished third-party package manager on macOS; without it, developer life on Apple silicon would be miserable. Yet Homebrew must rebuild every library with custom paths under /opt/homebrew, doubling disk space and compile times. Binary bottles lag behind upstream releases, and mixing Homebrew with language-specific managers (Rust’s cargo, Python’s pipx, Node’s pnpm) often leads to rpath headaches. On Linux I can combine the system manager (APT, DNF, or Pacman) with flatpak or nix without worrying about sandboxed runtimes colliding with global libraries.

5. macOS Already Has “Connect to Server”—But It’s Still Clunky

Veteran macOS users know that Finder’s Go ▶ Connect to Server… command (Cmd K) accepts the same smb:// or sftp:// syntax that Nautilus or Dolphin accept on Linux. The feature works, but throughput over SMB remains inconsistent, and auto-mounting shares at login often fails unless one resorts to scripting or third-party launch agents. Multiple forum threads from 2024–2025 report Finder hanging on large directories and silently dropping connections. Linux file managers such as Thunar or the terminal-level sshfs mount behave more predictably, and because the entire stack is open source, bugs seldom linger across releases.

6. Legacy Capitalised System Directories Signal an Aging Unix Layer

The presence of /Users, /Applications, and /System—capitalised because they date back to NeXTSTEP—might seem trivial, yet it reveals that Apple’s POSIX underpinnings evolve cautiously. On a case-sensitive filesystem, typing cd users fails, whereas Linux distributions default to lowercase directory names (/home, /bin, /usr), reducing surprises in shell scripts and Dockerfiles. You can format APFS as case-sensitive, but several flagship apps (including Adobe Creative Cloud as of 2025) will not install.

7. Limited Hackability Hinders Creative Automation

macOS includes Shortcuts and AppleScript, yet both are high-level abstractions gated by entitlements. I routinely write small Bash or Python scripts that tweak OS settings to make my life easier. Doing the equivalent on macOS often collides with System Integrity Protection (SIP) or requires disabling features that keep the OS secure. On Linux, I can run an Ansible playbook and have a fresh install configured—dotfiles, SSH keys, editors, fonts—in under ten minutes.

8. A growing sense Apple doesn’t put users first

As a publicly traded company Apple’s fiduciary duty is to maximize shareholder value, and its record-breaking services revenue (US $26.6 billion last quarter) shows how central monetization has become. Marketing still highlights privacy and “user-first” design, yet decisions such as steep iCloud pricing tiers and a 15–30 % App Store commission primarily serve investors.

9. A long-running tug-of-war with the open Web

Apple’s Safari team has historically lagged in shipping modern Web APIs, and iOS blocks alternative browser engines outside the EU. In early 2024 the company briefly disabled Home-Screen Progressive Web Apps for European users, citing Digital Markets Act compliance, only to reinstate the feature after regulatory push-back. Two years on, open-Web advocates argue that the new “engine freedom” remains hamstrung by geofencing and onerous terms.

10. Deepening lock-in across Apple-only features

Continuity Camera, iMessage’s blue-bubble encryption, Vision Pro spatial video and the Apple Watch’s exclusive pairing all work best, or only, inside Apple’s ecosystem. The U.S. Department of Justice cites this design philosophy in its 2024 antitrust complaint, and analysts note that the Apple Watch alone dissuades many users from leaving the iPhone. The more Apple-exclusive hardware you own, the higher the practical cost of switching platforms becomes.

When I Still Reach for a Mac

1. Creative Workloads

Until recently, I kept a Mac around exclusively for Adobe Photoshop and DJ software such as Traktor. Today, browser-based tools like Figma, Photopea, and Penpot cover 90 % of my design needs, while Mixxx satisfies the amateur-DJ itch on Linux without the licensing hassles.

2. Travel-Friendly Hardware

Apple silicon laptops remain the gold standard for battery life. Independent reviews of the 15-inch MacBook Air with the M3 chip recorded 18–20 hours of continuous video playback—all while the fans stayed silent. The new M4 model, released in March 2025, pushes longevity even further and finally supports three external displays. If my primary goal for a three-day conference is editing slide decks on the plane and note-taking in sessions, I still pack an Air.

Final Thoughts

No single operating system is perfect, and Apple continues to excel at integrated hardware, acoustic performance, and resale value. However, as a power user who values transparent configuration, reproducible environments, and low-friction scripting, I find Linux offers me a more direct path to productivity. macOS Sequoia’s window tiling narrows one long-standing gap, but other issues—heterogeneous modifier keys, uneven command-line integration, and opaque system layers—remain. For mainstream consumers the differences may never matter, and for creative professionals with Adobe or Logic Pro dependencies a Mac is still the path of least resistance. Yet if your workflow resembles mine—heavy on terminal automation, lightweight containers, and remote-server orchestration—you may discover, as I did, that modern Linux distributions have matured into a compelling, user-friendly alternative.