Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshmanders | Hacker News Reader

> Windows is still a nightmare, setting up macOS took me 3 days the last time, Linux takes way more if you’re building it from scratch. Setting up FreeBSD took me 3 days, however this meant that I will NOT need to change it again for a very, very, VERY long time.

What exactly is involved with "Setting up macOS" to take you 3 days?

I just pulled out my old 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro, reformatted the machine and installed Big Sur on it and got it in exact condition needed to continue my work that is on my main driver.... Took me 2 hours tops.

I keep all documents in iCloud Documents, so they sync to all my machines, and I install everything through Homebrew, so once I pull that in, I run `brew bundle install` and let it do it's thing...

View on HN

From the post

> Every time Apple pushed an updated, my pf.conf and automount configs got broken on macOS. They either got deleted or they moved somewhere. Well, the last 2 times it just got deleted.

I think the author was really, really integrated into the Darwin part, and not using the mac as just a throwaway VSCode machine.

From that perspective, sure macOS is far from being as well maintained and easy to integrate as it was on the 10.3 days for instance. That seems valid to completely move to FreeBSD from this point of view.

> What exactly is involved with "Setting up macOS" to take you 3 days?

Different needs for different people?

I mean, every time I reinstall Windows it takes some days to me to setup it too (removing all crapware/ads, changing settings in places that doesn't make sense to me, install all my programs without a proper supported package manager [1], etc etc). In my NixOS setup it takes literally minutes if you exclude the download/build phase.

[1]: Yeah, I know about and use chocolatey. Still isn't the same, since for example most programs still use their own update mechanism, installation of packages fail constantly (specially more complicated packages like NVIDIA drivers) and there is some other headaches.

Yep. I just migrated from a mishmash of windows and Linux to macOS and it took less than a day to sort it out including loading 50 gig of photos and videos into Photos app, migrating a couple of medium size spreadsheets to Numbers, getting set up on AWS, migrating credentials over, everything.

And with Catalina Apple has made it stupidly easy to install fresh now.

You used to have to create a bootable USB, now you can boot into recovery mode, reformat the drive and install any of 3 versions of macOS. The version that come with your machine, the last version of macOS compatible or latest version.

IME Recovery mode fails as often as it works.

At work we wound up just making bootable USB's, as they Just Work(tm).

Those aren't really pain points though.

How about getting VMs set up with port forwarding?

Also what a time to switch to Mac, the constant Apple news didn't scare you? Do you watch a lot of TV?

They are from the platforms I was coming from. It was a shit show. All my VMs are in AWS. I don't do any dev directly on this computer. I really hate doing that. All it takes is one slip up with some tooling and your entire control surface is covered with body parts and shit. It's like operating a lathe with dreadlocks and floaty sleeves on. I'm not living that life any longer. Nor am I lugging around 500gb of VMs everywhere. This is a very nice terminal node and I like that.

Which constant Apple news? You'll find if you look back through my post history I was very critical of Big Sur and the M1 but after taking time to understand it, measure it and use it I'm less concerned. When I put all the vendors on the table, including Linux, the tradeoffs were still in my favour with Apple.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com