The latest version of the Mac operating system has begun to feel . . . off, somehow. Hello Linux

I BOUGHT a Lenovo Thinkpad X220 today. After a few years’ foray into the world of Macs, I’m moving back to using Linux as my desktop.

There are multiple factors in play, all entirely subjective and arbitrary. The most arbitrary is that I spilled coffee on the Mac keyboard, so MacOS suddenly started feeling more unresponsive and squelchy than usual. I cannot blame Apple for that.

Another, mostly unconnected with the Mac, is that a Microsoft Exchange email server I hang out with lost a bunch of emails. Apple’s Mail application, having done some sort of intra-multinational deal with the devil, cached these emails and showed them in my email search, but permanently deleted them a second after I click and look at them.

This was heartbreaking. I would find a ghost of an old email, only to see it vanish in front of my eyes. Watching emails evaporate, a victim of powers out of my control, made me miss “Mutt”: my ancient, infinitely configurable Linux white-on-black text email program. Mutt looks like something out of an Eighties hacking movie, but it would never do that. Apple made me hanker for a far-off and probably illusory sense of control I once had.

Very few people miss windowless, touchscreenless, bang-on-the-keyboard programs like Mutt. (It involves you never having used Mutt, for one thing.) But that emotion was real. I have a irrational bond with my favourite historical applications.

People have these feelings all the time. Apple mostly benefits from them, but they do cause flight and recriminations. The internet is full of people ping-ponging from one platform to another for the most frivolous of reasons.

Beyond spilt coffee and nostalgia, for me, the latest version of the Mac operating system has begun to feel . . . off, somehow. The software grinds madly on my computer, slowing and burping to a halt a few times a day.

It has this new, multi-screen window-hiding system that enables me to run 15 applications at the same time, and still not be able to find any of them, nor drag two given windows in to the same place. New applications fill the screen except when I want to watch movies on my external monitor – which is the only time I ever previously wanted to full screen anything, ever. Maybe I’m getting old, but its new features throw me off kilter.

And I keep finding features as decrepit as I feel, preserved in aspic in musty Mac corners. I keep running into Dashboard, a little feature of MacOS that throws up mini-applications like clocks and diaries in a separate window.

I loved Dashboard for five minutes seven years ago. Now it is going to be around forever. The Mac also has an App store and an iPad-like Launchpad. I don’t think they really work, but I do know they will hang around too. MacOS is beginning to fill with stuff that will just hang around.

At this point, Apple fans will be itching to post explanations or justifications, or denials about all of this. They will surely be right. It is indeed easy to avoid Dashboard. If you ignore the new versioning feature, which is a useful thing, files save just the way they used to. My lost email was not Apple’s fault. It was a hard drive failing. These things happen, even to self-righteous and pious Linux users.

But I don’t care if I’m wrong. I used a Mac because it made me feel good, not because it made me feel right. That is the Apple dream. I bought it because it looked pretty, would actually go to sleep if you closed the laptop and doesn’t come with 16 kinds of crap on it.

It promised me totemistic brand-bonding, and I got it. We bonded! I got to be a consumer. My Mac and I were friends!

Now, I find myself stuck in a relationship with an operating system whose emotional support framework is all over the place. When I have lost a file and need to find it in my backups, I, like everyone in the world, am close to tears with fear. It is the worst moment in anyone’s relationship with a computer, because it ate my file, or I pressed a “delete” thing, or I spilled coffee on the keyboard, and now I need something that is no longer there.

It takes some serious failure of empathy to decide that it is at this moment I need to be shown my windows zooming around in space like they’re hanging outside of Ten Forward in Star Trek. But this is what Apple’s data restoration feature, Time Machine, does. It is like having the doctor tromp into my child’s hospital room with a Disney-themed defibrillator. It is not reassuring. Especially when the files do not come back.

I don’t have a good reason to leave the world of the Mac. But no-one needs a good reason to leave. They just need a reason. My bonding with MacOS was emotional and aesthetic. That’s the Apple way. But it’s surprisingly easy to fall out of love when it’s all about fancy looks and quick feels.