Ask Lemmy

26858 readers

1667 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]

Rules: (interactive)

1) Be nice and; have fun

Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them

2) All posts must end with a '?'

This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?

3) No spam

Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.

4) NSFW is okay, within reason

Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].

5) This is not a support community.

It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.

Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Is it possible to be comfortable with two desktop OSs (e.g. shortcuts, mouse) (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

38 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've been a linux user for 20 years (mostly on KDE). I just started at a new job, and they gave me a mac. I found out later that I could have got a linux machine instead, which is a bit annoying. Still, I know there are some nice things about a mac, and I figured I'd give it a try for a while.

I'm pretty quick moving around my desktop environment, and I'm finding picking up the mac is not too bad. BUT I use keyboard shortcuts a lot, and they are all every different on a mac. So whenever I switch back and forth between my work machine, I end up stumbling a bunch and wasting my time, and getting annoyed. It's mostly keyboard shortcuts, but the trackpad buttons and scrolling are annoying too.

So, question is: is it possible to regularly use two OSs with wildly different control surfaces, and be comfortable with it? e.g. either MacOS + Linux, or I guess MacOS + Windows? Or will it be annoying forever?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I changed all the KDE shortcuts to be like on Mac (because I like those more). I have a keyboard with Mac layout for my Linux PC and have swapped meta and ctrl via the keyboard settings (i.e. you press ⌘C but software receives ctrl+c), because a lot of non-KDE apps are way worse about remapping shortcuts so if they really want ctrl I at least want it to be on the ⌘ key, and also because the meta key behaves weirdly at least in Qt, for example it doesn’t block text input when held down unlike ctrl.

These are the big annoyances with this that do trip me up:

Terminal (since I’ve switched ⌘ and ⌃, the standard shell keys such as ⌃C are now ⌘C instead because that is unremappable in Konsole, and I’ve had to put copy/paste/etc. on ⌃C etc. instead)
Text navigation in Firefox — while I remapped the bindings for KDE/Qt, it’s impossible to do that in Firefox which means ⌥◀︎ is “navigate back” instead of “move caret back one word”. This is the most awful because it keeps making me reload pages when I’m editing text and don’t pay attention
Text navigation in KDE/Qt apps — it’s so close to good but I can’t remap the “extend selection word left/right” keys from ⇧⌘◀︎/▶︎ to ⇧⌥◀︎/▶︎ to be like the “move caret” keys (⌥◀︎/▶︎). Same for the select to start/end of line keys.