An SSD can breathe life into old computers

It’s a well known trick that installing a SSD in place of the conventional Hard disk can breathe new life into very old machines. My mid 2010 Macbook Pro is one such example, being over 8 years old.

In particular, within Emacs - mu4e responds much more quickly and there is significantly less lag in searching / accessing emails and HTML rendering.

The other advantage of using a Mac over Linux is that installation and setup instructions are more often available out the box for the Mac OS (though this is changing). I have access to dedicated apps including Evernote, Dash, Spotify, Whatsap, Slack etc on my Mac. This is in addition to several other high quality apps on the App store.

I do love using Arch Linux and Antergos and the packing management and rolling OS upgrades are totally cool. However, a little bit of elegance in the user interface and hardware (being available out of the box) does ease up the mind and progress. It takes quite a bit of effort to achieve that unless you are at the level of purely using Emacs as window manager.

On the Mac, it is easy to move around virtual desktops and use the magic track pad to rapidly switch between applications as well. I’m sure many of these ‘gimmicks’ may be setup with diligence and due time on Linux through solutions with varying levels of quality.

However, as of today : it’s likely I would have struggled with some aspects on Linux that are readily available on other systems. Evernote is an example. After hours of searching for an alternate (and acceptable) solution for software packages that are not yet ported to Linux, I would quite possibly end up making a compromise. Typically, the compromises would mean using Electron or Web based versions of apps, which are often not as powerful as the desktop app, not to mention inconvenient. A prime example would be Evernote, on Arch Linux. Some other examples are apps like Word, Pages, Outlook and Excel and so on, which are more critical.

Ultimately, my preference would be to use a Mac as my daily driver and play around with Linux on a back up computer. In any case, multiple Linux distros can be run on Virtual Box within the Mac.