I thought the same until I saw my boss with a basic MacBook setup move around his OS, programs, and IDE faster than me. The only difference was he didn’t spend 20 hours setting it up at every new dev job.
Custom OS’s are a complete waste of time, and you’re just fighting an uphill battle. I’d take my 20+ hour battery life MacBook Pro over anything else all day everyday.
This comment doesn't track at all. Trying to get a fresh macOS machine to include everything a new hire needs to do basic development work in a Kubernetes environment requires a bunch of Jamf intervention, brew scripts, and dot files. And even then the first week you're constantly needing them to go to their security settings to allow "untrusted" programs to run. Meanwhile someone with a bone stock Fedora Workstation install is 99% of the way there. Yes, you can bikeshed all day get lost in your custom.el, .vimrc, or window manager options, but you can do that on macOS too.
For most dev machines Fedora + vscode gives you RTR productivity while maintaining a respectable level of free-as-in-freedom.
So basically, the advice is to install another OS as a virtual machine to make MacOS usable for actual work? In a thread where people complain about the MacOS usability?
My wording may have confused you. When I said "in a Kubernetes environment" it probably would've been more clear to say "to deploy in a" or "for a Kubernetes environment". So I'm talking about installing things like podman or docker, awscli, tfe, jq, your editor of choice, kubectl, all the stuff you need to push to a pipeline to be deployed on k8s.
Completely agree with that, Kubernetes is for deployment, not for development. I have no idea why you would ever need a "local Kubernetes". IMO if you need that, you're doing it wrong.
I've worked with K8s for a few years and not once have I thought "damn a local Kubernetes would be so helpful"
Because of the @ sign ? That and many things regarding Macs are quite odd. When I as a programmer has to google how to enter [ | and ~ I am about the throw the thing out of the window....
That and it is right beside cmd-tab. One fat finger away from force quitting whatever you’re working on. Thank god for auto-save. I’ve lost more work from fat fingering than should be reasonable.
Where they usually are right? Or look down at the keyboard if it's a different layout? Or did you setup a keyboard layout that doesn't match the physical keyboard?
I use an a pretty standard install of i3 for my window manager, the OS is almost nothing. At least on my OpenBSD machines, the OS is so simple and well-documented, I can run `ps -aux` and know what literally every process does. This hasn't been the case for me on Mac/Win in like, 15 years or something.
I use Windows at work. It's no faster than when I'm working on my BSD laptop, but I also am not doing extensive development on my laptop. I have done a bit (like building my personal website) and I didn't do anything special to get it going. I have so many different machines, I've got a streamlined setup pretty much down pat, so I can get up and running on anything super quickly. The other thing is: dotfiles. I've got my OpenBSD dotfiles and my Linux dotfiles. Copy from one machine to the new one, done deal.
Oh, I should add, it's definitely not an uphill battle, or at least it sure hasn't been for me. I just checked and I installed this OpenBSD install on Oct 14th 2021, so I just passed the 1-year mark. It's practically unchanged since I got it set up... there's no battle at all, it's the most boring, unintrusive OS I've ever used in my life. The updates are nearly effortless and they don't break my software. I've never been more satisfied with an OS to be honest. (That said I'm not doing music production on this machine, but I'm doing almost all other "everyday" computing tasks and a bit of coding/tinkering, etc.)
> I thought the same until I saw my boss with a basic MacBook setup move around his OS, programs, and IDE faster than me.
Could you tell us how he does it? Every time I have several windows of the same app between two displays, or one window being in the full-screen mode while the other not, I find that I can't move between them quickly or at all with keyboard shortcuts. Can't stop thinking that there must be something I haven't discovered, because the experience is miserable.
This is one of the things I'm not a fan of in Mac OS. CMD + Tab cycles through applications, but not windows within the same application. You can cycle through windows of the same application with [CMD + `]. There are some third party app switchers as well that you could try.
Wow, thanks for that. I never knew that command-digit worked that way. I might not be a typical user, though; my work is mainly done in terminals so the keybindings I use most are those for zsh, tmux, vim, etc.
Problem scenario: Open two windows of a single app and place them on two different screens. Now open another app and focus on it. You want to jump between this second app and the last window of the first app, which happens to be on the other screen. Oops, you can't (or at least I can't). Command+tab will focus you on the window that's on the same screen as the window of the other app; not on the window you were focused on last.
> Command+`: switch between windows of the currently open app
Problem scenario 1: Open three windows of a single app. Now, suppose you want to cycle just between two of them (focus on one window, do something, return to the other window, do something else, return to the first window, etc.). Oops, you can't. Command+` will cycle you through all three windows.
Problem scenario 2: Open two windows of a single app, and expand one of them to full screen. Now you can't reach it with Command+`.
Problem scenario 3: Open two windows of a single app, and minimize one of them. Now you can't return to it by simply pressing Command+`. It has become inaccessible from the keyboard.
>Oops, you can't (or at least I can't). Command+tab will focus you on the window that's on the same screen as the window of the other app; not on the window you were focused on last.
Yes, and I wouldn't have it any other way. When I create multiple screens / spaces, it's because I want to focus on one or the other.
I agree with you about all of these. To get a little more specific:
>Command+tab problem scenario
You have to use control + arrow key here. I completely agree that this is an annoyance though, and have mostly stopped making my apps full screen because of it.
>Problem scenario 1
Agreed. Ironically, I might consider full-screening or minimizing the window I don't want to loop over xD
>Problem scenario 2
Agreed again. And again, there's control + arrow key.
>Problem scenario 3
Command+` no longer works, but if you hover over the app you want while in the command+tab screen, and then press the down-arrow-key, you can select which window you want to open, and this includes minimized windows. I actually have never used this and just found out about it because your scenario made me curious.
I have a couple friends who live pretty off-grid and the colossal 10gb+ XCode updates was one reason they abandoned Apple ecosystem. It's just not sustainable when your entire month's data allotment isn't enough to download the update for a single piece of software you require to do your work.
I live semi-rurally with really crappy ADSL available. Starlink was a god-send. The number of projects that require extremely good connectivity is really surprising. In particular, I was surprised by how much docker pull struggles on a poor connection.
> They’re a big download but beyond that it’s only few minutes to extract them.
That's your privilege speaking. "a big download" (xcode size) can be VERY expensive (relative to typical income) and VERY slow in some countries.
As an industry we kinda suck about assuming that just because we have a lot of bandwidth and cheap data, everyone else does too. We impose a lot of unnecessary cost on poor people in 3rd world countries because of our lazyness with regards to bandwidth, CPU usage, RAM, etc., and or disregard of their financial and infrastructural realities.
I don't know, what App store is doing during the install, but using it to manage Xcode has always been extremely irritating.
It's a lot easier to manually download Xcode from Apple's dev portal. The download speed always maxes out my internet connection, and installing is just a question of unpacking the archive, which doesn't make more than a few minutes..
They take forever but it’s only once in a while. If you’re just trying to support newer iOS versions you can just yank them from here instead of updating.
Get Xcodes.app. Installing and updating becomes one click. You still have to wait on th download, but it will spaurate your network connection unlike the App Store updates. Installing multiple versions side by side also just works using this method.
iStat Menus has a thing where you can put the current power draw in watts in the menu bar, and it's easy to run at 4-5W with an M1 Pro while just surfing and text editing. With just a couple spikes for compiling, installing, etc. you can very easily hit close to 20 hours for many coding workflows if that's your goal.
I like a bright screen, so I usually get closer to 10 hours, but it charges fast — about 50% in 30 minutes if it's low. (The last 20-30% runs a little slower because battery chemistry.)
Depends on what you're doing. Webdev and I can get 10-15 hours on my 16" M1 Max MBP. Java dev is on the lower end. I also use iStatMenus and pay attention to anything using significant power - a runaway browser tab for example.
Custom OS’s are a complete waste of time, and you’re just fighting an uphill battle. I’d take my 20+ hour battery life MacBook Pro over anything else all day everyday.