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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.

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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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