What 20 Years on Windows Didn't Prepare Me For (When I Switched to macOS as a Sysadmin)

 


  I spent over two decades managing Windows workstations. I knew every shortcut, every quirk, every Group Policy edge case. Then, in 2020, the pandemic sent everyone home — and I realized my Windows laptop's three-hour battery life

  wasn't going to survive eight hours of remote work on the couch.


  That was the start of a transition I didn't expect to be permanent. Three years later, I haven't touched a Windows machine since.


  ---

  Why the Switch Happened at All

  

  The pandemic changed the calculation for a lot of IT professionals. At the office, battery life is irrelevant — you're plugged in. Working from home, on calls, moving between rooms, occasionally from a café — suddenly the hardware

  matters in ways it didn't before.


  I needed two things: real performance for SSH sessions, terminal work, and code editing, and a battery that lasted a full workday without anxiety. I'd been running RedHat and Ubuntu on servers for years, so macOS — built on a Unix

  foundation — wasn't a leap into the unknown. It was more of a lateral move with a better chassis.


  The MacBook Pro M3 I picked up in late 2023 settled the question permanently. Eighteen gigabytes of unified memory, a battery that genuinely lasts all day, and a chip that runs cool and quiet under sustained load. After twenty years

  of hearing fans spin up the moment anything demanding started, the silence was disorienting.


  ---

  The First Weeks: Everything Is in the Wrong Place


  I won't pretend the transition was frictionless. It wasn't.


  The menu bar is at the top of the screen, not attached to the window. That sounds trivial. For the first two weeks it felt like someone had moved all my furniture at night. Window management works differently. Keyboard shortcuts that

  were muscle memory for two decades suddenly did different things — or nothing at all.


  The application ecosystem is different too. Not worse — just different. Some tools I'd relied on on Windows didn't exist on macOS. Others existed but worked differently. The first month involved a lot of looking up "macOS equivalent

  of X" and accepting that some things would need to be relearned from scratch.


  The Linux background helped more than I expected. The Terminal on macOS is real Unix — not a compatibility layer, not a simulation. The commands I'd been using on RedHat and Ubuntu for years worked identically. SSH, bash scripting,

  file permissions, process management — all of it transferred directly. For a sysadmin, that's a significant advantage over a pure Windows-to-Mac transition.


  ---

  The Daily Workflow: Two Tools, Everything Else Optional


  My core sysadmin workflow on macOS now runs through two applications.


  Termius handles all SSH connections. It's a purpose-built SSH client with session management, host groups, and a clean interface that works consistently across macOS and iOS. When I'm managing Oracle Linux and Ubuntu servers — which

  is all I manage now — Termius is open all day. It replaced the patchwork of PuTTY sessions and remote desktop windows I'd accumulated on Windows over the years.


  VSCode handles everything else: editing configs, writing scripts, reviewing logs with the terminal panel open alongside the editor. The integration between the editor and terminal in VSCode is something I underestimated before

  switching. For infrastructure work, having your file tree, editor, and SSH session visible simultaneously in one window changes how you think about the work.


  Everything else is secondary. The two-tool workflow covers 90% of what I do daily.


  ---

  The Thing I Didn't Expect: Losing the Mouse

  

  This sounds like a small thing. It isn't.


  I haven't used a mouse in three years. Not because I made a conscious decision to eliminate it — because the MacBook trackpad made it unnecessary without me noticing.


  I'd used laptop trackpads for years on various Windows machines. They were functional. They were adequate. None of them were good enough to replace a mouse for extended work sessions. The MacBook trackpad is categorically different —

  in responsiveness, in gesture support, in the physical feel of the surface. After two weeks, I stopped reaching for the mouse. After a month, I'd forgotten where I'd put it.


  For anyone who spends most of their day in terminals and text editors, this matters more than benchmark scores. The input device you use for eight hours a day shapes the physical experience of the work. Getting it right — finally —

  was something I hadn't known I was waiting for.


  ---

  The End State: No Windows, No Regrets


  All the infrastructure I manage runs on Oracle Linux and Ubuntu. My workstation runs macOS. There's no Windows machine in my workflow anymore — not a VM, not a spare laptop, nothing.


  I mention this not to be prescriptive, but because it surprised me. After twenty years, I expected Windows to remain necessary for something. It hasn't been. The combination of macOS for the workstation and Linux for everything else

  covers every professional use case I've encountered.


  The transition cost two weeks of friction and one month of adjustment. What it returned was a machine I don't fight — one that handles remote work, battery life, and terminal-heavy workflows without compromise.


  Sometimes the pandemic forced decisions that turned out to be right.


  ---

  This article was written with the assistance of an AI writing program.

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