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Comment by i_am_a_peasant | Hacker News Reader

I ran archlinux for 10+ years and then switched to macos... macos is a lot of suck but I have spent a considerably less amount of time configuring my workstation. Although today with LLMs it's a different story. If I want xorg to behave in any niche way I could just ask codex and it'll just do it... No more looking through forums.

I also use software that just runs better out of the box on macos than on linux..

The integration with the iphone is pretty nice, I copy something on my phone, I paste on my macbook, you can probably do that with android + linux but idk how.

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> I have spent a considerably less amount of time configuring my workstation

Complete opposite for me.

On NixOS I enable KDE with i3 and rofi, and there's little to adjust.

On MacOS, I need yabai, karabiner, raycast, shottr (costs money), one of those hideous tray management tools that work by capturing your screen (facepalm)... For yabai I need to disable system integrity protection. With every update my setup breaks, and I need to spend countless hours debugging and setting everything up again... And it's still subpar to what I could have in Linux.

Interesting, I know several Arch people (including myself) that were forced onto Mac for work and absolutely detested it. I'm the type of Arch user though that sets it up the way I like it and leave it alone. Are you a continual tinkerer?

An employer tried to make me use MacOS once. I tore it down to the Darwin kernel and shell tools and then built X11 and my window manager of choice and a typical Linux toolchain until it was MacOS in name only.

They finally gave up enforcing software rules with me and I became the one exception allowed to install Linux.

AKA “I chased OCD down the rabbit hole on my employer’s dime”.

They wasted their own time by thinking they know what tools an engineer will be productive with better than the engineer. Such thinking is insulting, and deserves to be undermined.

Also once on the other side of this transition, I was by far the most productive engineer in the company. Did the initial rewrite of their entire product that their entire team built over years, by myself, and that new code is still what they use today.

They gave me their strongest allowed counter-offer to try to keep me when I left. Left anyway because there was nothing left for me to learn there.

Good on you man.

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