Mac Users Thread

IMO, the “Mac OS feel” that developers love comes down to:

1. Control over the UI,
2. Consistent user experience, and
3. Dev-friendly choices.

Windows controls the desktop, but only has so-so consistency (many windowing toolkits in evidence in the OS). And the choices aren’t dev-friendly (more below).

Linux has nearly zero control over its own UI: The Chrome browser, for example, refuses to follow standard keyboard shortcut for Quit and other functions. Built-in apps like the Gnome Software store don’t support Page Up/Down correctly, and also have issues with Quit and Close Window (!). Various versions of KDE Linux gain, and then frustratingly lose, the ability to adjust the mouse scroll speed. Finally, Linux copies Windows’ anti-dev-friendly UX designs.

MacOS, on the other hand, stands out above these:

1. Like Windows, MacOS has absolute control over the machine, in design and function. Chrome Browser responds to gestures and keyboard shortcuts just like Safari.

2. 99.99% of apps behave in the same predictable ways. It’s rare (or impossible?) to find a user-level difference due to toolkit changes.

3. MacOS provides an extremely friendly dev experience: It’s the only OS that provides Bash(emacs)-style keyboard shortcuts in every text input field in every app. (A weaker, not as usable version of this can be enabled on Linux via Gnome Tweaks app.) It’s the only OS that provides Quit, Copy, Paste, etc. keyboard shortcuts across every app, including the terminal. It does this by smartly, in an opinionated manner, using e.g. Super-C for copy everywhere, instead of the Ctrl-C / Shift-Ctrl-C pair used by Windows and Linux. This frees up Ctrl key in terminal for dev and coding uses.

   Another example is the global shortcuts for next tab / previous tab. The MacOS choice keeps your fingers close to the home position: Super-} and Super-{. I find this much more consistent and comfortable than the Windows & Linux keys, Ctrl-PageUp and Ctrl-PageDown. Those always make me stop and hunt for the right keys, especially on a laptop.

Now, me personally? I’m typing this on a Dell XPS tower running Fedora, heavily modified to act like a Mac with AutoKey and a keyboard whose keys I’ve slightly re-arranged. I have global mappings for Super-C, etc., and a separate set of mappings for obnoxious apps like Chrome. Further, I use the imwheel hack to adjust the mouse wheel scroll speed. It’s a fragile setup, but this is what fits my budget at the moment.

Started 12 years ago as a Ruby developer. Mac support was really good for Rails, also there was TextMate. This editor is so good, I still use it daily. Also for webdev I needed Adobe apps.

In general I think the quality and design of Mac apps is unbeatable. And also I‘m too invested now in Apple ecosystem to even think about switching.

After three months in, I’m still happy and don’t miss mac. But ask me again in a few months

I feel that my RAM demands are significantly smaller on Linux. On Mac, I was constantly struggling with 16GB, while these days I rarely go above 8GB. To be fair I’m working on different projects, so this comparison is really shallow. Either way it feels that 32GB should serve me fine for the next few years.

In any case, the new MBP looks great, and I’m happy to see that Apple is going back to producing quality stuff If the docker experience on macos is improved, I might consider moving back at some point