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Comment by nicce | Hacker News Reader

I’m also long time Linux user and thinking for swapping to Mac on new MBP releases. Are you telling me that I can’t use same tools anymore than in Linux? I dont really care abot gui tools or gui tweaking. Terminal and browser is enough. I have lived with the illusion that almost anything with source code is possible to make work. E.g brew even automates this.

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I switched from Linux to an M1 MacBook Air when it came out. I just don't sign into iCloud or use the app store and I have a pretty great experience. The battery life is fantastic and I just install applications from developer's websites.I use FireFox for browser, built in Terminal, Enpass (password manager), Parallels Desktop (VMs), Thunderbird, and Joplin for notes. That's really all I use. So no need for any of the other Apple ecosystem. I do use brew to use stuff like tmux and a few other cli tools.

The shipped userland is either out of date or uses BSD (not GNU) tools. Install updated GNU tools using brew.

Be forewarned that brew is slow and unreliable compared to apt or dnf. The compiler Apple ships also has weird defaults; you may need to reconfigure your builds.

Alternatively, just build in docker (but beware that docker performance is worse than Linux).

> Install updated GNU tools using brew. Be forewarned that brew is slow and unreliable compared to apt or dnf.

Time to port apt-get to the Mac?

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