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Comment by cpncrunch | Hacker News Reader

To be honest I'm not sure why you'd really want to do that. For a developer OS X gives you everything that linux offers that you would need, with the advantage of a better GUI. I only ever use linux on servers these days. OS X is a much more usable client-side OS for a variety of reasons.

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What are those reasons apart from having a "better" ui? (Which is highly subjective and if you use a tiling wm Linux is probably the better choice).

What turns me off OS X is the lack of a good package manager with up to date packages. Has this changed?

>What are those reasons apart from having a "better" ui? (Which is highly subjective and if you use a tiling wm Linux is probably the better choice).

- More commercial software available (photoshop, etc).

- OS X is required if you need to run xcode

- Easier to upgrade to the next version of the OS, without having to do a full reinstall

- Better binary compatibility. (Pretty minor issue).

>What turns me off OS X is the lack of a good package manager with up to date packages. Has this changed?

http://brew.sh/

> full reinstall

You need to fully reinstall your Linux install every upgrade?

That might be a symptom of Ubuntu usage, but many other distros handle upgrades gracefully. Arch is an example of this.

Perhaps it depends on the distro. You certainly have to reinstall to upgrade to a new version of CentOS (which is what I use on all my servers).

It's not all about usability. Some people care about having community-controlled software instead of company-controlled software.

Perhaps, but I think for most devs that isn't the case (except perhaps on HN).

> gives you everything that linux offers that you would need

Homebrew is dope, but it's still a bolted-on package manager. I also hate hate hate that Apple have removed the ability to theme the OSX UI (RIP Flavours). If I'm going to stare at my dev screen all day it should look how I want it to.

You are free to disable SIP and do whatever runtime injection or other modifications to binaries you please, provided you have the knowledge to do so. Just because they ship it in a default mode doesn't mean they stop you from cracking it open if that's your desire.

You're seriously suggesting that I should theme OSX manually using a hex editor?

Until the new equivalent of Flavours[1] is available, theming OSX is dead in the water.

[1] http://flavours.interacto.net/

I disagree. Linux has native docker and better vm support with kvm. Also much better display manager options

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