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Comment by bouke | Hacker News Reader

My setup would take weeks to reproduce, I think. So many small tweaks, configuration and extensions that I have accrued over the years. I would dread starting over, which is why I’m very happy with Migration Assistant that helped me migrate to various new machines over 10+ years.

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I use Ubuntu Linux for my personal machines, and my entire setup can be reproduced in a fully automated fashion with a script that I maintain, so I can wipe and start fresh pretty much any day I feel like, go have lunch, and come back to a desktop with all my customizations, all the way down to the order in which I have my pinned icons.

It's kind of amusing that Mac users have to go through so many GUI hoops to configure the system, yet for some reason the vast majority of devs seem to still prefer Macs (?)

Mac users don’t have to. My many Mac settings are fully configurable with a shell script. Likewise, you can do everything mentioned in this post in a shell script.

And us devs who prefer Macs like the stability and not needing to fiddle with stuff all the time and just want to get work done.

I also always maintain a couple Linux desktops and while it’s great, it’s always been flakier than macOS. We find that macOS has more polish. Linux is a much better OS than Darwin though.

FWIW, I started using Linux back in 1992 in its pre-1.0 days, long before I ever used the current thing called macOS ,or MS-DOS/Windows, for that matter.

They don’t have to, everything can be done by CLI if you’re feeling particularly nerdy

I’m a Mac user of 10 years now and the total amount of times I’ve had to wipe and start fresh is exactly zero. So while you’re right about macOS taking some time to set up, it also doesn’t really matter [to me at least].

You can migrate your settings from another macOS install. No need to feel jockular.

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