I finally remembered after a lot of “it must be in here somewhere” through each tiny little submenu of GNOME Tweaks that the “swap fn and ctrl” option is actually in Framework’s BIOS settings, not somewhere near “swap meta and super” in GNOME Tweaks.

I got so used to GNOME’s overview being under my thumb with only x percent of thumb curl instead of the pre-tweak y percent that the Framework 12 felt actively hostile. Now it matches my other Linux stuff and the slight change in the number of milimeters my thumb curls to invoke the overview/launcher feels like much less effort.

Now I’m eyeing the Mac Studio. It’s a first-gen M1 Max model and it is still going strong, but when I’m being realistic, my main tether to macOS is Lightroom, and my main tethers to Lightroom are a. it has 24 years of digital photos in it that and b. a few raw profiles I’d need to figure out how to replicate with another tool.

I like the occasional abrupt swerve into more Linux usage because it’s got that whole “slightly parallax world” thing going on. My mindset in front of a Linux machine is much less interested in hucking stuff on it than I’m willing to do with a Mac, and I’m less willing to keep stuff on it just in case. It’s a much more down to business or, at least, down to the task at hand mindset.

I remember being furious over the turn GNOME 2 took in the naughts, after Sun did a usability study and the team started unbolting shit and tossing it out the back of the plane. Years of configuration equity and tweaks went out the window overnight, and the project leadership just did. not. care. if you were mad about it.

Over 20 years later, though, when I sit down to a fresh GNOME instance where I haven’t yet had an opportunity to add “missing” features with assorted tweaks, I appreciate the mindset. It’s a very calm interface.

It’s not entirely the fault of Apple or macOS designers that macOS feels more and more busy to me these days. It’s that most macOS apps seem to feel entitled to taskbar real estate, so you spend a lot of time finding the “show in task bar” option as you realize your taskbar situation is out of control.

It’s clockwork predictable that after I set up a new Linux machine or start using one after time away I will go through my Macs and do everything I can to remove anything that detracts from a sense of a blank slate when I start a session.

If you asked me if, in the abstract, which desktop ecosystem would produce the more consistent, calm behavior on my part, I’d probably reason that the edge macOS has in uniformity would lead to more ordered behavior.

In practice, my Linux machines seem to be the more restrained ones, and a little time on one of them causes me to pare back the widget creep that happens on my Macs.

I wonder if some of that is that my formative years on Linux well preceded the iPhone era and the way it kind of “appified” the macOS mindset. Like, when I look at what’s in /Applications on a long-lived Mac, I wish my biggest problem was that I can never bring myself to drag Pages into the trash “just in case.” My biggest problem is that I’ve got a ton of unneeded single-purpose things it was easy enough to add and inoffensive enough to leave, letting the clutter pile up. I just don’t act like that on a Linux system.