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> 3 days to setup macOS? Yes, it took me at least 3 days, keep in mind that a setup is not just installing software, it's also dotfiles, shell environment, automout (I use NFS a lot), PGP/GPG-alike keychains, the OS keychain, Firewall (pf in my case), privacy settings, company-related software, etc. So yes, it takes time, which I am okay with. My problem with macOS is the fact that updating/upgrading the system crashes a lot of configuration.

I do get frustrated when other people jump in to in effect say "jeeze, three days, what are you doing wrong?"

I sent my work Macbook into Apple for a keyboard replacement, which naturally means they have to wipe the SSD, as one does with keyboard replacements. Setting it up again meant replicating three years of cruft that I had long since forgotten about. Its been a month since I did this, and I'm still not up to the level it was before.

Password manager, check. Both the native 1Password and browser extensions. Speaking of browsers, need to install both Firefox and Chrome for testing. Brew? Ok. AWS, gotta configure new access credentials there, now lets install the aws-cli, oh its not available in a package manager, cool. Node, Go, Rust, Elixir, ok now maybe my git repositories? Oh, git isn't installed, lets install xcode, and there's a system update, that'll take about 25 minutes. Didn't I have a command to quickly switch kubernetes contexts? Lets see if I snippeted that somewhere, actually I guess i need to install eksctl and kubectl now. Don't forget email sign-in, calendar sign-in, gotta install slack, iterm, VSCode, jeeze I remember VSCode being a lot more productive, yup I'm missing about twenty extensions.

This stuff is really, really hard to automate; not because its technically hard to automate, though in some cases it is, but its shit I do, like, once every three years. No one automates things they do three times a decade. Cloud or local server system image backups can help, but I'm not giving Apple a full system image for Time Machine to use, there's too much sensitive data on this machine. Its just hard! And that's ok.

is it really that hard to automate things on macos? I would have thought you could put most of the install instructions for everything you listed into a bash script? is macos locked down in some way?

why is logging into things an issue if you have a password manager to auto fill things?

on linux I just make a backup of the firefox folder so I don't have to reinstall the extensions on my new computer. all the settings files I want to keep are kept in syncthing folder then i have a bash script to create softlinks where those settings are supposed to be.

doing all that manually every 3 years would be my idea of "really, really hard". with a script you just add the instructions once and then you can keep reusing it without any effort

Can I make a suggestion?

1) Before sending your Mac in for repair, use Carbon Copy Cloner [1] or SuperDuper! [2] to make a clone of your system drive to a spare SSD.

2) When your Mac is returned to you, if the system drive has been wiped, then use the same software to restore your backup.

Both these programs are free (gratis) for the described use, and have a reputation for reliability. The spare SSD drive will cost about $80 (how much is your time worth?).

[1] https://bombich.com [2] https://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescriptio...

I'll definitely do something like this the next time. This one just caught me by surprise; I should have done the research, or listened to him when he asked if I'd backed up my data (they always ask that, even if there's little chance of an SSD wipe), but apparently the SSD encryption module (touchid) and keyboard are all the same unit, so replacing the known defective 2016-2018 keyboards wipes everything. True world class engineering from Apple, but what can you do, there's plenty of blame on my side as well.

I admire people who write and publish in non-native languages, I don't have the guts to publish in my bad German.

It's clear you're non-native, but it's not "bad English". :) Thanks for sharing it with us! I like hearing about the range of experiences that highly technical people have with macOS. I'm still trying to use it as my daily driver, even though it takes a few days of setup (compared to the old days of building a preconfigured image), because my alternate option (Linux, for me) also takes a similar amount of time. You're right about Windows being a trash fire.

PS: "outside of the box" is the end of the idiom referring to "thinking outside of the box" (thinking differently about a problem). I think the one you meant to use in your article was "out of the box", which means the first experience with a product when it's opened or unwrapped (think: "taken out of the box"). I hadn't even noticed how similar these two are until today.

Hi, curious about battery life on your laptop. My impression is that many devs run Windows or Mac for their good power management.