u/Fantomaxxa

My Yoga 7’s motherboard gave up after about 2.5 years, right when I needed it most. Super frustrating, especially since I’d done all the research before buying it and genuinely thought it would last me through my thesis.

Honestly, I went with a Mac because I was tired of the whole laptop drama. I went for a 13-inch MacBook Air with the M3 chip, 16 GB of RAM, and 512 GB of storage. Eight months later, the biggest difference is that it mostly just works. I’m writing, running SPSS, keeping up with my references, and the laptop rarely bothers me. No troubleshooting and no weird slowdowns after updates so far.

Notion has become the main place where I organize my thesis. I have one dashboard with all my chapters and use simple statuses like “Not started,” “In progress,” “Needs revision,” and “Done.” Each chapter has its own page where I keep the outline, supervisor feedback, questions I still need to answer, and the next deadline.
I also have a reading database where I track the author, topic, publication year, whether I’ve actually read the paper, and which chapter it might be useful for. It’s definitely not a sophisticated academic system, and the “To read” view keeps getting longer, but it stops useful papers from disappearing among dozens of open tabs. I still write in Word and manage formal citations separately, so Notion is mostly the control center for the project rather than the place where everything lives.

One thing that did surprise me was how quickly the usual clutter started building up again. My Downloads folder eventually filled up with duplicate PDFs, old SPSS exports, installers, and several slightly different versions of the same chapters. I used cleanmyymac once to see where the space was going and removed a few old apps and files I’d forgotten about. I could probably have done most of it manually, but the overview was helpful. Now I check my storage every month or two instead of waiting until it becomes a problem.

If Citavi is a must-have for you, that’s the big thing to figure out before making the jump. Parallels does the trick, but opening Windows just to deal with references is a bit of a hassle. Definitely try the setup before you switch, not after.
Other than that, for the usual thesis work, the Mac has just been much less stressful for me.

For those using Notion for a thesis or dissertation, do you keep your sources and reading notes there too, or only use it for planning?

For data people specifically, the accumulation seems worse than average. Raw datasets from projects that shipped two years ago. Intermediate outputs you kept "just in case". Model checkpoints from experiments that didn't pan out. Downloads from a rabbit hole at 1am that felt essential and never came up again.
I finally did a proper audit after wrapping up a particularly brutal project last month and honestly the number surprised me. Months of untouched files just... sitting there.
Tried the Space Lens feature in CleanMyMac to actually visualize where everything was living and it clicked for me in a way that just running du -sh in terminal never quite did. Kept all the real project work, but cleared out a pretty embarrassing pile of old downloads, stale installers, duplicate exports, and cache bloat I didn't even know had accumulated.
I'm curious whether this is a data people problem specifically or just everyone. Feels like we probably hoard worse than most because everything might be useful for the next project.
What's your number been when you've actually looked? Mine was higher than I could expect.

I spent two weeks replacing CleanMyMac with vibecoded tools. Here's my actual, boring, honest report.

Background: I've been using CleanMyMac for many years. Not an evangelist, I just liked having one place for everything tbh. But I kept seeing people mention the vibecoded alternatives, and I got curious enough to actually try them. The stack I ran:
Mole (CLI deep cleaning and uninstall)
Quitty (background process management)
Stats (system telemetry)
Filenest (Downloads routing)
MacOS Desktop Declutter (exactly what it sounds like)

What genuinely worked:
Mole recovered 6GB on a Mac I thought was already clean. I ran it after a cleanmymac pass and it still found things!! Mostly app leftovers from software I'd uninstalled months ago. For terminal-comfortable people, this is a genuinely powerful tool.
Stats is excellent for what it is. If you just want to see your RAM usage without opening another app, this is the answer.
Desktop Declutter is fast and oddly satisfying. I moved through about 200 desktop screenshots in maybe ten minutes. The Tinder mechanic is a gimmick that earns its place.
There's something peaceful about not having to deal with it manually.

Where things got complicated:
Mole has a dry-run flag. I almost didn't notice it! And without it, the default behavior is live deletion. Not a dealbreaker, but it's the kind of thing that makes you slow down and read more carefully than you expected to.
Filenest missed a file type I'd added a custom rule for. I didn't catch it for four days. Not catastrophic, but it was the moment I realized I was now the QA engineer for my own cleanup pipeline.
The real friction wasn't any single tool failing, no. It was the mental overhead of running a stack. Checking that Quitty hadn't killed something cleanmymac would have flagged as an active workflow first. Remembering which tool owned which domain. Noticing that Stats shows me data but doesn't tell me what to do with it.
There's a phrase that keeps coming back to me: data without action is useless. Stats surfaces that problem cleanly. It's a beautiful read-out, although staring at a RAM graph at 89% doesn't free the RAM fr.

The moment that settled it for me:
A minor macOS update dropped in week two. Filenest's routing rules needed a tweak. Nothing broke catastrophically, but I spent forty minutes on something I'd never thought about before. And I realized: if I'm running five tools, that's potentially five conversations with five GitHub repos every time Apple ships something.

Conclusion, as un-hypey as I can make it:
The experiment was worth doing. Mole is legitimately impressive and I might keep it around for occasional deep scans. Filenest's concept is smart. But for day-to-day use, I want one thing that knows what's safe to touch, checks that nothing active is in the way before it touches it, and works exactly the same way after an OS update as it did before.

CleanMyMac stays because maintaining a personal toolchain is itself a task, and it turns out I'd rather spend that time on other things.

Happy to answer questions if anyone's thinking about trying the same experiment.

Actually played on my Mac for 6 months straight.

I've been running CrossOver on my M4 Air for six months now for games like It Takes Two, Ready or Not, a bit of Helldivers 2, and my verdict is that it’s totally playable.

So from my personal perspective, there are several nuances worth mentioning:

1. Thermal throttling is real, but it's not the whole story! Yep, the MacBook Air has no fan (ironically isn’t it). After 20-30 minutes under load, it will throttle inevitably. However, I've had solid 45–60 minute sessions on medium settings before things got choppy.

2. CrossOver compatibility is genuinely good right now. Ready or Not runs fine on DX11 (set it in Steam launch options, not from the CrossOver menu, and that defaults to DX12 and eats resources). Helldivers 2 is the messiest!! Occasionally freezes every few minutes, seems CPU-bound, and even M4 Max owners are reporting the same weirdness.

3. Background apps are the real boss fight. This is where I see most people lose frames and blame the hardware. Discord, browser with 15 tabs, iCloud syncing mid-session, background updaters, they take their cut of RAM and CPU before the game even loads…

So, I started running CleanMyMac's Performance module before longer sessions. Fortunately, it kills background processes and login items I didn't even know were running. The difference on a fanless Mac is noticeable. I get fewer stutters, more stable temps, and win time before throttle kicks in.

Mac gaming won't replace Windows, cause it’s too much effort for my after-work time killers, but I’ve navigated the way to make it work, and work even better.