From Linux to OSX - 1 Year Later

Interesting. I actually love the Command key. I see it as a Control key for GUI operations, leaving my actual Control key free for doing things in my Terminal. This is actually a big sticking point when it comes to trying to work on Linux workstations like we have at work -- GUI and console stuff end up munged under the same modifier key (and this is harder to change than you'd think, even with a lot of xmodmap work).<p>That said, I've also ditched my Caps Lock key entirely and turned it into a second Control key. Control-A has never seemed difficult to me, at least with this arrangement, but I'm not a home row typist (or an Emacs user -- I just use the Emacs bindings in text boxes and terminals).<p>Otherwise this more or less mirrors my experience, although mine was ~7 years ago (so the Linux desktop environment was even less mature at the time). I haven't found a need to shop around for as many alternative applications. In particular, you can have Terminal.app when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

I value free, open source software more than convenience. For this reason, I will not use OSX or any other non-free operating system no matter how convenient they may be to use. That convenience comes at a great cost that I am not willing to pay.

I'm a hardcore Linux user, a sysadmin, developer of some kinds and an humble desktop user. For some IOS projects I have to use an hackintosh.<p>The experience is - in one word - disgusting. It lacks common denominator keyboard shortcuts and keyboard bindings. It lacks sane default simple applications like a decent terminal emulator. ( Yes Windows lacks is too). unavailability of a great package manager - all of us knows it, homebrew or macports doesn't cut it - makes me vomit. Unfamiliar key bindings makes me think twice or thrice before typing , "Which key should I use for this? Apple or Option? How can I skip to end of line? Why I'm at end of file now?" Also some desktop choices are not ok for my liking; switching to full height windows instead of full screen windows with the maximize button? Why on earth I would opt-in for loosing screen real estate? So many details.<p>Most of the time I can't help myself to stop restarting into Linux. I get slower and distracted. I have to install Mozilla Stack (Thunderbird and Firefox).<p>This may be only me but, I hate OsX. And I'm not starting on the "wanna be walled garden-ness."

<p><pre><code> You need to install a giant lame IDE just to get a bunch of command line development tools? </code></pre> That hasn't been true since earlier this year. If you login to developer.apple.com, you can download the "Command Line Tools for XCode" from here:<p><pre><code> https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action </code></pre> No "lame" IDE required. But you might think that IDE is not so lame the first time you use Instruments...

Within the last year I have moved my work desktop (iMac) to Windows - RDP(actually Remmina/FreeRDP are looking good on Linux recently), VPN etc. just works better there - and development laptop (MBP) to Linux.<p>More and more as Linux matures and OS X gets buggier/fancier, I don't see the need to use OS X. I am running KUbuntu 12.10 beta on my 2010 MBP and it is pretty pleasant to work with - boots fast, nothing crashes, wi-fi connects and stays so, suspend resume works, no proprietary drivers needed. I did have to do some little hackery to do an EFI install and disable the Nvidia crap and that gives me very good battery life.<p>To get me to stick to OS X - Apple needs to do significantly better. Each release gives me new headaches and no features I need - bad battery life, Wi-Fi issues, graphics glitches - I can at least try to fix those with Linux.

What annoys me about OSX is the whole "copy app to install"<p>"please wait while 500 megs are being copied". Oh hi non-shared libraries.<p>I also don't see what's so great about iTerm2, some lights would be interesting. Otherwise I'll claim Konsole is the best termminal emulator in the world, bare none just like that too :)<p>Finally I do agree that OSX gets Spotlight right. The Linux look alikes for this feature plain sucks. But that's probably the only thing I can see.

Regarding the Control key - you can swap that with the absolutely useless "Caps Lock" key: <a href="http://thehelpfulhacker.net/2012/02/15/killing-caps-lock/" rel="nofollow">http://thehelpfulhacker.net/2012/02/15/killing-caps-lock/</a><p>Now you can do CapsLock-a, CapsLock-e, etc. all day, which is much easier.

..and you've swapped from using an open OS to buying an OS from a company that fires patent lawsuits left and right. You've also bought that company's hardware.<p>I grant you it's convenient in many ways to use OS X, but supporting companies that commit patent mayhem is not good for our industry.<p>(Yes, yes, I know the competition isn't clean either, blah blah. But you switched from <i>Linux</i>.)

&#62;&#62; <i>iTerm2 is the ultimate terminal emulator. It alone warrants the purchase of a Mac.</i><p>This is quite a strong statement and caught me a little off guard. What particular features does iterm2 offer that make it so stellar? I'm genuinely curious, as I haven't ever felt the burning need for a "better" terminal emulator on OSX (or Linux for that matter).

Alfred[0] has to be one of the most valuable (as far as $/usefulness) pieces of software I've ever bought. Besides the Spotlight-style file/app search, can also manipulate files/dirs, does pasteboard history[1], and one-shot terminal commands; without having to drop whatever I'm doing for another window.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.alfredapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.alfredapp.com/</a><p>[1] not part of Alfred, but pbcopy/pbpaste in the terminal are your friends.

perhaps macports is better, but AAPL will f* you over with time, after the honeymoon. And this applies to OSX updates too, even if you fork over the money<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4433082" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4433082</a><p>back to linux. (it has ruby too.)

I turned Spotlight indexing <i>off</i> on my Lion install to stop regular bouts of unresponsiveness on my 2011 Mac mini (with hard drive, not SSD).

&#62; Programs like launchctl (for instance) are not exactly fun to work with, but they do get the job done.<p>One thing I like about launchd is that on OS X, there is one standard way to launch daemons. On Linux, there are a thousand ways to launch daemons. launchd also has a bunch of features, one of which is to start services on demand, upon connection to a socket, something Ubuntu hasn't had until the latest 12.04 (<a href="http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/natty/man8/upstart-socket-bridge.8.html" rel="nofollow">http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/natty/man8/upstart-socke...</a>). I do agree, however, that OS X shouldn't be used for anything more than a desktop workstation.

What is so great about the OS X Desktop? (Honest question; As a long term Mac OS (X) user who switched to Linux about a year ago I am really wondering...)<p>Also, has a heavy computer user I mainly switched to Linux/FreeBSD because of the much improved customization possibilities. While the default OS X experience might be superior to GNOME/KDE, I now get a lot of things done a lot faster since I could make my machine exactly fit my needs. I really cannot imagine why any (not platform depending) programmer would ditch Linux for OS X just because the defaults work better.

Sorry, how did this get so many points? Most of it is rubbish. All I hear is "Wah wah wah I like the control key, I don't understand the command key wah wah". And some of it is factually incorrect.

OSX is good for developers with families. The wife and kids are happy and you're pretty happy too. Win-win all the way around.