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I got Mac OS back

I have a shiny M1 mac that I got in January/February of 2022. I wanted the power and the power management and I have not been left wanting for either. It has been so/so for regular software use. Docker under Mac OS makes use of Qemu so it does a pretty good job and has a decent selection of software to play with.

But that’s just sort of a plus. I wanted it for the ability to play a handful of games and because a Unix shell is a first class citizen. And after a few months I found the UI to be less than ideal. I typically use BSPWM (with Sxhkd, Rofi, and I’m on the fence as to whether I prefer kitty or URxvt for a terminal). There are some pretty terrible implementations of tiling window managers for Mac OS, but the OS gets in the way and it’s a lot like that time I tried to make FVWM do tiling.

FVWM/BSPWM Backstory

I switched to BSPWM a few years ago from FVWM. I love to tinker and create and FVWM was the best window manager I had used for out of the box support to do all the window managery things a window manager should do (stuff most people don’t think about, but being able to set up focus policies to prefer mouse or keyboard, sloppy focus vs focus follows mouse, click to focus, and the ability to apply arbitrary styles to windows based on any number of attributes…) I found the default configuration to be the ugliest thing I had ever seen, but it was soo easy to change, I just needed to look at other window managers to see what looked good and I could make FVWM look good, too.

But it’s not just looks, I was regularly touring other window managers to find features I like in order to script them back into FVWM. There was a time when people were setting up widgets for weather, for example, so I incorporated weather into my desktop menu. There was a time when people were making RSS feed readers, so I incorporated those into my menu. And there was.. you know, it doesn’t matter, the takeaway here is that I liked to visit other window managers, check out the nifty widgets, and if I liked a feature, I’d make a script to incorporate it into FVWM. It’s super powerful and it was pretty easy to do.

And then a few years back I had a new co worker, and I told him about the cool stuff FVWM could do and suggested he try it out. He did, and then he went back to what he had been using. So I tried out what he had been using. After roughly 20 years of FVWM, I stopped using it. It turns out that despite my initial uncomfortableness with Ratpoison many years back, I really like a tiling window manager.

I spent a few weeks in denial and trying to find a way to make FVWM do tiling, but they were half-assed hacks. I really liked the look and feel of FVWM, but BSPWM didn’t bother with any look and feel. Sure, there are window borders if you turn them on, but no decorations and no menus. I miss the pretty window decorations, and my awesome menus, but I like the functionality of BSPWM more. It stays out of my way, despite the lack of things to tinker with, and I get a lot of work done.

I had already been using Vim-like key bindings for window navigation, so the transition to BSPWM was extremely easy for me… in fact, the keyboard-based navigation was so much more predictable that using FVWM after using BSPWM was awkward.

Back to Mac

I kind of knew what I would be getting into, I did have a 2011 MacBook Air. And I used that for quite a while before I started dual booting it. When I stopped being happy with OS X back then, I was very happy with how Linux ran on it. I would have been happy to continue using it as just a Linux laptop, but eventually the battery started to bulge and all of a sudden, eight years later the thing died.

Needless to say, for what seemed like an obvious and inevitable disappointment with the Macintosh operating system was balanced against the quality of the hardware and the expected lifespan for the computer.

I considered getting a new battery, and I still kind of think I might, but Apple was doing something new again and switching to ARM. The last few years I’ve been having a lot of fun running Linux on ARM (RasPi, RockPro, Asus Tinkerboard, PineBook, PineBook Pro, PinePhone, PinePhonePro, OnePlus 6…) and the M1 was powerful enough that I could still run the few Intel-cpu based games I play (Shroud of the Avatar being the main one).

I got annoyed with Mac OS faster than expected. It was super awkward to use, the UI got in the way, I couldn’t figure out how to turn various features off, and then Asahi Linux made it all better. After a few weeks of tinkering with Asahi, I stopped booting into OS X, except for the occasional game or to play with software like Obsidian. And my foray into Obsidian was a bit like how I use to visit other window managers, find features, and incorporate them into FVWM.

But I digress. The reason I’m relaying this, is what happened next. I spent a lot of time in Linux. I would occasionally use Mac OS for Discord, Teams, Obsidian, and Steam. But I’d pretty quickly venture back to Linux. The only downside to Linux was the power management wasn’t as good and the extremely high DPI isn’t quite straightened out. Many programs have very small fonts. I notice it most when browsing the internet. Page font sizes are easy to bump up, but the little link hints that pop up seem to stay very very small. (I like to use vim-like bindings to following links it usually accomplished by tapping f and then whatever hints pop up next to the link I want to follow.)

Anyway, I rebooted into Mac OS, saw there was an update, and tried to apply it. My best guess at what went wrong is that the update was signed with a certificate that expired before I completed the update. I don’t know how long the download had waited for me to apply an update, but I have been without Mac OS for over two months because the Ventura upgrade refused to boot. I forget exactly what it said, something about not finding the operating system that it expected to find.

Attempting to reinstall the entire operating system from the recovery system just resulted in failures. It spent a lot of time trying to download stuff, ultimately would fail when it couldn’t get something, but it would take about 16-20 hours to get to the point where it failed.

Well, for the last few weeks, I really wanted to use FaceTime to reach out to a friend and I’ve been trying to locate installation ISO images and such, but not being very successful. Most of the solutions require being able to run Mac OS.

Last night I found a 12 GB “InstallAssistant” or some damned thing. What a huge pain in the ass it was to get over to the Mac OS side. I ended up formatting an external drive for Fat32 because it was the only common thing between Mac OS and Linux that I could find. I ended up splitting the damn package file and then cat it back together in a terminal under the OS recovery.

This is where I found via pkgutil that the certificate for the install assistant was expired. And that set of keywords got me thinking. I downgraded the security of my Mac OS disk and told it to boot any system that has ever been trusted by Mac ever, and it cheerfully booted into Ventura. I’ve just applied yet another update, so now it’s time to reboot and see if I can put it back to full enforcement and find out if it can continue to boot into Mac OS.

But also I now spend most of my laptop-using time sshed into my PinePhone and I can’t use alt as a modifier from Mac OS (it’s the trigger for Dead keys here?) and I need to tell Profanity that I want it to switch to a different MUC window.

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