MacOS notes: MBP 2015 new user on Silverblue. Notes, comments and questions

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● fedora:fedora/39/x86_64/silverblue
Version: 39.20240312.0 (2024-03-12T00:38:29Z)
● fedora:fedora/39/x86_64/silverblue
Version: 39.1.5 (2023-10-31T22:06:37Z)

  1. If I keep key repeat enabled, occasionally a key gets stuck. I’ve increased the delay for now (edit: this hasn’t fixed it, and bounce keys slows typing) Is this a Mac keyboard driver thing? It sometimes seems laggy and can’t keep up with my typing sometimes. Perhaps it could also be firefox, but it also seems to affect the terminal. It seems to be related to wayland.

  2. gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences button-layout 'close,minimize,maximize:'
    Helps if you still use MacOS on another machine and you’re fighting muscle memory.

  3. systemctl status firewalld
    might help GitHub - GiovanniGrieco/bcm43602-linux-workaround: A workaround to control brcmfmac kernel module for the misbehaving BCM43602 network card.
    sudo rmmod brcmfmac_wcc ; sudo rmmod brcmfmac ; sudo modprobe brcmfmac can also help. It’s a hardware bug in a sense, but software should adapt to this.

  4. The Dash to Dock gnome extension gives a more familiar dock.

  5. I’m trying to how to swap the cmd & ctrl keys. There are fixes for Fedora, but not sure how to apply these to Silverblue yet. If you’re moving between linux and MacOS, it’s hard to switch.

  6. How do I keep a browser updated automatically, but keep the rest of the system manually updated? I need to be secure, but I’m on a slow connection and I can’t have it saturating the connection in the background without any warning. Unfortunately, some (obnoxious, but essential) sites refuse firefox, so I need a Chromium based browser like Brave.

  7. Because I’m still learning the command line commands for updating, I’m using the GUI for updating apps at the moment. Is there a way to make it more verbose? There’s no way to tell if it’s crashed while it’s actually downloading and working in the background.

While it’s slick other than this stuff, I’m also amazed to have all these problems. I thought they’d have been a blog post out there somewhere with exactly the same model laptop, plus I thought this laptop would be pretty common?

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I’m trying to how to swap the cmd & ctrl keys. There are fixes for Fedora, but not sure how to apply these to Silverblue yet. If you’re moving between linux and MacOS, it’s hard to switch.

That’s probably handled by something GNOME Settings or GNOME Tweak Tool? You should be able to follow the same instructions for Silverblue.

How do I keep a browser updated automatically, but keep the rest of the system manually updated? I need to be secure, but I’m on a slow connection and I can’t have it saturating the connection in the background without any warning. Unfortunately, some (obnoxious, but essential) sites refuse firefox, so I need a Chromium based browser like Brave.

You should use a Flatpak version of whatever browser you prefer; see Install Chromium Web Browser on Linux | Flathub or Install Brave Browser on Linux | Flathub

Because I’m still learning the command line commands for updating, I’m using the GUI for updating apps at the moment. Is there a way to make it more verbose? There’s no way to tell if it’s crashed while it’s actually downloading and working in the background.

I don’t know how to make the GUI more verbose or if it is even possible; for more verbosity, I would use the rpm-ostree CLI. Things like rpm-ostree upgrade or rpm-ostree status -v will give you more details about the upgrade operation and the system state.

It seems like most of what you have described is not necessarily Silverblue specific and could also affect “vanilla” Fedora Workstation. I would search around for solutions applicable to Workstation and see if they work with Silverblue.