As of April 2024, the Windows 10 operating system running my home desktop computer has less than 17 months to live. In mid-October 2025, Microsoft will cut off support for Windows 10, including critical security updates.

I cannot simply install Windows 11, as my computer dates back to 2017, and Windows 11 doesn’t support its Intel Core i7-6700 central processing unit. That CPU is still no slouch, but Microsoft chose to limit how many generations of processors it would support. I could force-install Windows 11 and probably fiddle around with drivers to get it to work, but I would then be vulnerable to instabilities or having my system disabled.

That computer will be eight years old in September 2025, and the longest I’ve ever used a desktop computer was its immediate Windows predecessor, which I used for eight years from 2009 to 2017. So I’m not upset about the situation, merely disappointed.

This post documents my first day of attempting to shift at home from my Windows desktop to an Apple Mac Mini. I share this in the style of the late Jerry Pournelle’s Computing at Chaos Manor column in the long-defunct Byte magazine. He would document his struggles and failures in the hopes that others could benefit. He often wrote: We do this stuff so you won’t have to.

My Operating Systems

I have owned 13 computers that ran Windows: nine desktops and four laptops, starting with a Tandy Model 2000 back in 1985. As documented in my computer history, I also owned some Apple computers. I had a 2010 Apple Macbook Air that ran OS X, I have a Mac Mini, and I have bought six iPads. I have also bought four Chromebooks, and I used a couple of 8-bit Radio Shack Color Computers back in 1982-1985. I also experienced Unix back in the 1980s on the University of Oklahoma’s engineering computers.

While I could buy a new Windows 11 computer, I’m not a huge Windows fan. I despised the early versions of Windows, sticking with the command-line DOS for most things, until Windows 95 came along. Windows 95 and 98 still had many shortcomings, and it wasn’t until Windows 2000 that I had a Windows system that was so stable that I could finally start to heal from years of blue screens of death, countless slow updates, and other Windows trauma. It was in 2000 that I finally stopped calling it Windoze.

Microsoft continued to release both fine and terrible versions of Windows, including low points that I happily avoided such as Windows Me, Windows 8, and Windows Vista. But my dependence on applications specific to Windows has waned as most of my computer usage for the past seven years has been in the cloud using the Chrome web browser or on an iPad.

I have a laptop computer at work that runs Windows 11, and it is so similar to Windows 10 that I barely notice the differences when switching between it and a Windows 10 desktop. So I wouldn’t expect to get much value from a Windows 11 machine at home.

The Obvious Alternative

The approaching death of Windows 10 revived my interest in the Mac Mini I purchased at the start of 2021. I bought it during my winter break of 2020-2021 when Wendy and I were unwilling to travel due to the COVID pandemic. My experimentation with it only lasted a few weeks, since the workload and stresses of the pandemic left me with too little time and energy to tackle learning to use the Mac Mini. So the little box sat unused below my monitor for over three years, while I relied on the massive Dell XPS desktop next to it.

Rather than buy another Windows desktop, I could save money by just using the Mac, so long as I don’t have to purchase a slew of new software. So I listed the standalone software applications I still use at home and their availability in macOS:

Application	Available in Windows?	Available for macOS?
Chrome web browser	✔	✔
Thumbsplus Pro graphics viewer, organizer, and editor	✔	NO
Adobe Photoshop Elements 2018	✔	✔
SplashID Safe password manager	✔	✔
iTunes	✔	✔
CyberLink PowerDirector 365 video editor	✔	✔
Epson FastFoto photo scanning	✔	✔

Well, well, well. While ThumbsPlus has been a mainstay for me for over 20 years, the developer stopped updating it six years ago. So switching over to my Mac was quite feasible. I was never a fan of OS X, but macOS will probably continue to support my Mac Mini for three to six more years. It would be interesting to see if I could be satisfied leaving Windows behind at home and benefit from the various integrations of my Mac with my iPhone and iPad.

I’m also quite willing to try free alternatives to Adobe Photoshop Elements 2018, SplashID Safe, and CyberLink PowerDirector. Maybe I can avoid buying their macOS versions.

Reviving the Mac Mini

So I reconnected my Mac to the second HDMI input on my ultrawide monitor, hooked up an ethernet switch to hardwire both it and my Windows machine to the internet router, charged up the remote keyboard and mouse, plugged in the power, and switched the monitor over to the Mac.

The Mac fired right up, and it was running macOS Big Sur Version 11.2.2 from February 2021, as illustrated by the view of Big Sur as the desktop wallpaper. I triggered Software Update, which indicated I could download macOS Sonoma 14.4.1. I had completely missed macOS 12 and 13, called Monterey and Ventura. It indicated it would take about a half-hour to download the 14 GB update.

While it was downloading, I started the Safari web browser and tried to login to WordPress to continue writing this post, but the login screen refused to let me type in my username, even though the keyboard worked fine for typing the wordpress.com URL in the browser. I had no idea of how to fix that, so I switched to the Google Chrome web browser, which worked fine. It used the Passkey capability of my iPhone to login to my Chrome profile.

I had taken the above shots of my Windows and then Mac desktops and combined them with the Pic Collage app on my iPhone. Getting shots from my iPhone to a Windows computer has always been awkward. Sometimes I send them as email attachments, sometimes I upload them to Google Drive, and sometimes I rely on the laggy iCloud sync. With the Mac, I just triggered Airdrop on the iPhone and poof, the photos were in the Downloads folder on my Mac Mini.

Apple Annoyances

Meador’s Law of the Conservation of Happiness then kicked in. After downloading most of the update file, Software Update told me the upgrade to macOS Sonoma had failed. Typically, it provided no explanation nor options. So I restarted the upgrade, which triggered a fresh download of the 14 GB file. Welcome back to the Mac, I thought. Some things will be far easier than on Windows, while others will be exercises in stumbling frustration.

A case in point is the painful experience I had recently of switching from a Series 4 Apple Watch to a Series 9. That was a frustrating hours-long process. I placed the watches close together to facilitate the switchover, but the switchover process mysteriously got hung up with no explanation. I then had to reboot the new watch and my iPhone and fight through a number of slow and confusing errors and glitches to complete the transition.

I persevered and was able to send the Series 4 in to be recycled. I do like the Series 9 better than the Series 4 because it is a bit smaller and has an always-on display mode. So I certainly don’t regret the upgrade, but it shouldn’t have been so difficult to complete.

Thus I went into switching over to my Mac at home knowing full well that there would be glitches. But it could also be fun to learn a different way of computing, with new tools for editing and organizing my photographs, and some exciting integrations of the Mac Mini with services and apps I use on my iPhone and iPad.

Thankfully, the second try to update to macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 was successful.

The Basics

Keyboard Shortcuts

My Mac Mini didn’t come with an Apple keyboard or mouse; I had instead purchased a wireless Clever IC-GK03 keyboard and mouse combination back in 2021. The keyboard has keys for CTRL, FN, WIN/ALT, and ALT/CMD, as it can be switched between Mac and Windows modes.

I’m used to cutting, copying, and pasting with the CTRL-X, CTRL-C, and CTRL-V keystroke combinations in Windows. I remembered from using the Macbook Air in the early 2010s that Macs use CMD-X, CMD-C, and CMD-V and the ⌘ symbol for the command key. However, the ALT/CMD keystroke combinations didn’t work, while WIN/ALT did. So I fumbled along until I could find time to download the manual for the Clever keyboard. That confirmed the keyboard was in Windows mode, and I had to press fn-Q to switch it into Mac mode.

SECOND-DAY UPDATE: The keyboard was back in Windows mode after I turned it off and on. I don’t like that, I don’t like its half-size up-and-down arrow cursor keys. So I ordered a Logitech MX Keys S keyboard and a palm rest. Those set me back $140.

Snapping Windows on a Mac

I use Dell Display Manager on Windows to quickly snap windows to preconfigured areas of the ultrawide monitors at work and at home, but my Dell U3417W monitor is not compatible with their Dell Display and Peripheral Manager for Macs.

In Windows, you can drag a window past the left edge of the screen to make it snap to fill the left half of the screen, and the same for the right, but I found that didn’t work on the Mac. An online tip said to hover over the green dot in the window controls and select Tile Window to Left of Screen. Well, that sort of worked, but when I tiled Chrome to the left of the screen, it minimized the window for another application, preventing me from selecting its controls to tile it to the right. So it didn’t work as expected, instead creating a Split View like Apple has for the iPad. I don’t like Split View on the iPad, but I do use it on rare occasions. I have zero interest in using it on the Mac Mini.

Holding down the OPTION key (labeled ALT ⌥ on my Clever keyboard) while hovering over the green dot changed the options to Move Window to Left Side of Screen and so on, which thankfully worked as expected.

SECOND-DAY UPDATE: I find it annoying to hover over the green dot and press OPTION to get the function I want. So I purchased the Magnet app for $5.

One of the weird things about Macs to me, as a 40-year Windows user, is how the active application’s menu bar is shown at the top left on the overall desktop, rather than having menu bars within each individual window. I’ll adjust, but it will take some time.

Screenshots

I use the Snipping Tool in Windows a lot to save selected areas of the screen, and I’m used to hitting the PrtSn or print screen key to save a full screenshot to the clipboard. The internet said that the default keystroke combination to take a full screenshot on a Mac is Shift-Command-3 and a selected-area screenshot is Shift-Command-4, and you have to add CTRL to all of those if you want to send the shots to the clipboard.

Those were far too complicated and arbitrary for me, so I fiddled with the Clever keyboard and discovered that its F12 key takes a full screenshot. If you actually want it to register F12, you use the fn-F12 keystroke combination.

To make it easy to get selected area screenshots, I edited the keyboard shortcuts on the Mac to make ALT-S save a partial screenshot to the clipboard, and SHIFT-ALT-S to save it as a file.

A native Mac user would instead call that OPTION-S and SHIFT-OPTION-S, and Apple often labels the ALT/OPTION key with ⌥. I had to look it up to realize that is supposed to represent a single pole double throw switch in an electrical circuit.

That led me to wonder about the oddball symbol for the Command key. The internet explained:

Apple’s Command key icon, ⌘, is a “looped square” that represents the abstract concept of “command”. Apple artist Susan Kare chose the symbol after Steve Jobs decided that using the Apple logo in the menu system would be an overuse. Kare found the symbol in a reference book. She chose it because “it kind of looked like a four leaf clover”.

That symbol is used in Scandinavia to denote places of interest. I’ve decided to think of it as a castle with four corner towers to help me recognize it as “command”.

What’s Next?

In future posts, I’ll document my efforts to find suitable free Mac software for organizing and editing photos, my experience with iOS-style apps on the Mac, its integration with texting, and so forth.

I’m actually having fun exploring new ways to do familiar computing tasks. Maybe all this will help someone else who is transitioning from Windows to a Mac. But in days long past I thoroughly enjoyed reading about Jerry Pournelle’s struggles with hardware and software I never expected to use myself. So perhaps some of my gentle readers will find these posts entertaining as well. Happy computing!