Using Windows Again

I’m using Windows again since macOS 12.3 has made my Mac a pain to use. It’s really not the end of the world, but not being able to turn my monitor off when I step away, because it won’t come back on again, has been a real pain.

I’m using my gaming rig with a Ryzen 5 3600, 16GB of RAM, and a Nvidia GTX 3060, and there’s a stark contrast in desktop performance I’m seeing with 4k monitors over my sluggish 2018 Mac mini.

Spinning up my Hugo blog for local development wasn’t difficult, I just installed hugo-extended via Chocolatey and cloned my repo. No need for WSL or Node with my current Hugo setup.

I have a custom editor set up in my config.toml for authoring Markdown files (Typora), which isn’t installed so Hugo threw an error on creating this post from an archetype template, but other than that, I have had zero errors. I’m also not running anything that requires Node though.

The rest of my work is either in Webflow or WordPress, both of which just need a web browser and my preferred graphics tools, Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer.

Using Windows again has brought to light some of my old frustrations though, most notably involving font rendering. Fonts with weights of 300 or less are nigh unreadable on Windows if you use a browser that uses the Blink engine. This has been an issue for over a decade at this point.

Scrolling is choppy in so many apps, and in the browser, too. Webflow for example had smooth scrolling on macOS, but on Windows the editor scrolls line by line.

I’m sorely tempted to buy a MacBook Pro. The M1 Pro’s performance looks sick, although definitely overkill for my needs. I’m trying to justify it in my head with maybe getting into Swift development for macOS and iOS, plus I’ve been wanting a more capable laptop.

A MacBook Air would probably be more than capable for what I need, but the small screen (compared to the 14" Pro) and the fact that the current model is about 2 years old now is turning me off of it.

I want a laptop because I’d to get out of the house more and go sit in a coffee shop or somewhere quiet, like the before-times. Or just work from my living room. Change up the scenery.

Giving Apple more money because they broke my current Apple computer is ironic though.