You know, when Cory Doctorow stopped using MacOS in 2006, this was news. This is not news, there is nothing in this article that is new, or technical, or interesting. Engineering is a series of trade-offs, the MacOS vs FreeBSD tradeoffs are well known, and not secret. At this point, every time I see an article like this, I’m thinking to myself “Don’t go away mad, just go away”
I dunno, there is a bit of value in folks sharing their experience like this. Nothing ground shaking or crazy, and it certainly isn’t “news” but it’s a bit of insight.
Well, when I wrote the article I was not expecting people to read it and be “woah!”, just to give my simple view that macOS is not Unixy anymore, forensics is impossible and it’s not Just Works(TM) anymore.
My take away from this will be the statement “forensics are impossible”. That’s my primary issue with both Windows and, of late, macOS. The ability to go through the logs to find out what broke is an essential feature.
It would be more palatable if there was an element of novelty in even a subset of these “I changed OS” stories, but most of the time there isn’t much differentiation outside the “rant” or “personal story”. Even a “why I left plan 9” would be more interesting at this point than someone moving away from Windows, or MacOS, or even Linux. I could see a case for it being noteworthy if someone famous moved from a mainstream OS (eg. If Bill Gates moved to Linux, for instance).
I think the choice of tags on these articles is also instructive. They generally don’t fit well will into any tags outside rant, and/or the relevant OS tags. If there was an “i-changed-OS” tag, I would certainly just filter it and get on with my life!
Off the top of my head, I came up with this list of common items in the “changing OS story”:
typically contains a rant of some kind, either as a pre-hoc of post-hoc justification for the move
notes about apps that the user looked for in the new OS, found, or did not find
a few notes about configuring the destination OS (eg. the “technical move” portion)
possibly some notes about still using the previous OS, but in special cases (eg. gaming, post production, etc)
callout to makers of previous OS, with what changes they could have made to retain the user, or changes which may presage their return
I rarely see this migration path (macOS -> FreeBSD). Most of the times its like (macOS -> Linux Distribution) or even (macOS -> Windows) when gaming is involved.
Culture dies when people stop talking about it, and to tell other people to stop talking about the things that you already know is to advocate for the death of your entire body of knowledge. Seems counterproductive.
I think there’s a difference between saying “this has come up in various forms many times in the last decade and a half without much new being said” and advocating for the death of the entire body of knowledge in the area.
I’ve seen quite a few of these (while undertaking my own move), and I think most of the blogs are personal blogs where people are just posting their general stuff. I think it gets picked up and posted here by other people. As long as people here think it ads value they’ll post and upvote it. @pushcx could always add a tag for setups with a -0.25 hotness weighting if it gets out of hand. In the meantime if it bugs you hitting the hide button may help.
just a data point, but I don’t know who Cory Doctorow is, have been writing code professionally since 1983, including in a FAANG for years, and so even whoever that is having personal tastes was not news for some of us. Just like this is not news now. I guess it’s hard to determine what is newsworthy, and what is just data?
I’m really a Linux guy since basically forever, but I’m actually contemplating buying myself a MacBook once the M1X chips will come out. One can state disappointment about the macOS system itself, but the ARM-based chip is kind of a big deal, at least for me.
I have the lastes Macbook Pro 16 with 32GB of RAM. This is provided by work. I’m one of those Docker guys working with Kubernetes and Go. My setup is mostly configured by Nix so it’s all setup and ready now.
Now, my experience with this computer is worst than my experience with my previous one, which was worst than the previous one… all the way back 10 years. It seems each iteration of a Macbook was worst than previous, not beause of hardware, but software. The hardware is pretty decent (best in class I have to say), but software and OS-wise is inclined to bells&whistles, homogeneity with iOS and the “apple” experience: “product managers over engineers”.
I still think this is the best developer machine, and I’ve using that for a decade. However 10 years ago, thinking about using Linux as your main work laptop didn’t make much sense, because of the set of enterprise crap that you have to use back then, which was not compatible with your OS most of them, but now, even Zoom works “fine” (it works as bad as in every other os, so we are fine), and besides these client apps, all the rest is webapps which are compatible with Firefox.
These days I don’t mind moving to Linux (not FreeBSD though) and I know I would enjoy the ride. Maybe something to try on Christmas week?
I always get a lot of value out of articles like this. It’s great to learn what another kind of user cares about.
You know, when Cory Doctorow stopped using MacOS in 2006, this was news. This is not news, there is nothing in this article that is new, or technical, or interesting. Engineering is a series of trade-offs, the MacOS vs FreeBSD tradeoffs are well known, and not secret. At this point, every time I see an article like this, I’m thinking to myself “Don’t go away mad, just go away”
I dunno, there is a bit of value in folks sharing their experience like this. Nothing ground shaking or crazy, and it certainly isn’t “news” but it’s a bit of insight.
Well, when I wrote the article I was not expecting people to read it and be “woah!”, just to give my simple view that macOS is not Unixy anymore, forensics is impossible and it’s not Just Works(TM) anymore.
My take away from this will be the statement “forensics are impossible”. That’s my primary issue with both Windows and, of late, macOS. The ability to go through the logs to find out what broke is an essential feature.
It would be more palatable if there was an element of novelty in even a subset of these “I changed OS” stories, but most of the time there isn’t much differentiation outside the “rant” or “personal story”. Even a “why I left plan 9” would be more interesting at this point than someone moving away from Windows, or MacOS, or even Linux. I could see a case for it being noteworthy if someone famous moved from a mainstream OS (eg. If Bill Gates moved to Linux, for instance).
I think the choice of tags on these articles is also instructive. They generally don’t fit well will into any tags outside rant, and/or the relevant OS tags. If there was an “i-changed-OS” tag, I would certainly just filter it and get on with my life!
Off the top of my head, I came up with this list of common items in the “changing OS story”:
Did I miss anything?
I rarely see this migration path (macOS -> FreeBSD). Most of the times its like (macOS -> Linux Distribution) or even (macOS -> Windows) when gaming is involved.
My progression was:
Windows (3.1) -> FreeBSD -> OS X -> macOS
If macOS continues on the path its on, my next step will be back to FreeBSD/KDE.
I really liked OS X 10.6 and 10.7.
Pity that now that Apple has the best possible hardware (M1) the software went south so much …
Culture dies when people stop talking about it, and to tell other people to stop talking about the things that you already know is to advocate for the death of your entire body of knowledge. Seems counterproductive.
I think there’s a difference between saying “this has come up in various forms many times in the last decade and a half without much new being said” and advocating for the death of the entire body of knowledge in the area.
I’ve seen quite a few of these (while undertaking my own move), and I think most of the blogs are personal blogs where people are just posting their general stuff. I think it gets picked up and posted here by other people. As long as people here think it ads value they’ll post and upvote it. @pushcx could always add a tag for setups with a -0.25 hotness weighting if it gets out of hand. In the meantime if it bugs you hitting the hide button may help.
just a data point, but I don’t know who Cory Doctorow is, have been writing code professionally since 1983, including in a FAANG for years, and so even whoever that is having personal tastes was not news for some of us. Just like this is not news now. I guess it’s hard to determine what is newsworthy, and what is just data?
I’m in the same boat. Looking forward to seeing the config blog post.
I’m really a Linux guy since basically forever, but I’m actually contemplating buying myself a MacBook once the M1X chips will come out. One can state disappointment about the macOS system itself, but the ARM-based chip is kind of a big deal, at least for me.
I have the lastes Macbook Pro 16 with 32GB of RAM. This is provided by work. I’m one of those Docker guys working with Kubernetes and Go. My setup is mostly configured by Nix so it’s all setup and ready now.
Now, my experience with this computer is worst than my experience with my previous one, which was worst than the previous one… all the way back 10 years. It seems each iteration of a Macbook was worst than previous, not beause of hardware, but software. The hardware is pretty decent (best in class I have to say), but software and OS-wise is inclined to bells&whistles, homogeneity with iOS and the “apple” experience: “product managers over engineers”.
I still think this is the best developer machine, and I’ve using that for a decade. However 10 years ago, thinking about using Linux as your main work laptop didn’t make much sense, because of the set of enterprise crap that you have to use back then, which was not compatible with your OS most of them, but now, even Zoom works “fine” (it works as bad as in every other os, so we are fine), and besides these client apps, all the rest is webapps which are compatible with Firefox.
These days I don’t mind moving to Linux (not FreeBSD though) and I know I would enjoy the ride. Maybe something to try on Christmas week?