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Comment by _sojh | Hacker News Reader

You aren’t being downvoted for telling people to have full control over the OS. You can do that with SIP enabled, or boot to recovery, disable, modify, enable, and have full control over your OS. How often are you needing to modify low level OS config that you’d rather make your entire machine vulnerable to root exploits than dance around SIP a couple times a year if that? That’s why you’re being downvoted, for advocating folks make their machine way less secure to save 3 minutes worth of reboot time a year, if that. Bump the hard limit once and you never need to touch it again.

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3 minutes worth of reboot time a year for this, 2 minutes worth of reboot time for that, 1 for something else and 2 extra for no apparent reason. My previous company switched everyone to Mac and the second biggest reason I quit that job was that Mac was a horrible OS to work on. Constant reboots, crashes, no configuration for basic things like scrolling or window placement. Apple builds great hardware but the OS is only good to make presentations and edit video, not for software development.

A large number of extremely talented engineers might beg to differ. Everything you listed as an issue has a solution. Like any operating system, you have to spend the time to learn the intricacies of how it works and to customize it to your liking. For me, must haves are Alfred to replace spotlight, my dotfiles which change a ton of defaults in various apps like finder, the dock, etc, setup key repeat, iterm2 colors and profile, etc. divvy and magnet for window management. Caffeine to prevent sleep. Stats open source menu monitors to replace istatmenus

I’m sure there are newer equivalents to what I’ve listed. I’ve been using those programs for years.

Some jumping off points

https://github.com/jaywcjlove/awesome-mac

https://formulae.brew.sh/analytics/cask-install/30d/

I did find solutions for my problems on Mac, but the solutions were hard to find, poorly documented, subscription based or a combination.

Meanwhile on Linux it is generally fairly easy to find what you need in the documentation or in the forums. It can be a bit more involved when using some very niche tools but it's not worse than the average Mac app I had to deal with.

I am not a very talented engineer. I'm a normal engineer who enjoys his craft, tries to do quality work and tries to be efficient. My opinion is based on my experience using Mac and Linux alternatively for the last 5 years doing development professionally.

I have seen very talented devs using Mac, but also others that were just as talented and complained when they were forced to switch from Linux to Mac. Hell, the smartest most talented developer I have ever met (by a mile) developed drivers on Windows and he told me that for the type of development he did Windows was all right.

I have to doubt that there is any correlation between how talented a developer is and the quality of a OS because most developers I know use what the company allows them, and it's somewhat rare to be allowed to choose.

I will agree that recently, esp the last 2 major versions, the OS has gotten worse from a stability perspective. I have errors in my logs at a steady pace even on new machines and fresh, untouched OS install from the factory. They just never go away. The cloud services are always on and phoning home, even when you have everything that uses an Apple ID signed out. It’s becoming more intrusive and less configurable, but nothing beats the shortcuts or the mac keyboard layout, and the UI intuitiveness. I can’t go back to ctrl-s and everytime I’m on my Linux machine I struggle to do the ole carpal tunnel-s to save haha

Regarding your carpal tunnel comment. I started having carpal problems very young (in university). Then I looked into and went all in with an ergonomic keyboard, ergonomic mouse and ergonomic chair. It went away in a couple weeks and I haven't had a problem in 10 years, and I use the computer more than it could possibly be healthy. I've had younger coworkers complain and I always recommend getting a good setup because it pays off in health easily.

That doesn't work now.

The change in limits doesn't persist across restarts anymore like it used to in the past.

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