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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

At work we can choose between Apple laptops or Thinkpads, I choose thinkpads, using Windows and WSL.

Previously either VMware Workstation or Virtual Box.

Also I am not speaking from a position of no experience, as some projects require being assigned Mac Books, that I gladly return after delivery.

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One thing Windows did right is keyboard based navigation. Most of the general public does not know or appreciate how close to productivity nirvana the alt key brings you.

Same is possible in KDE. Combined with hot corners, you can become "blazingly fast".

Once a colleague seeing me work looked at my screen, lifted his head and pointed to my colleague saying "Have you seen how this guy work, he's a maniac!".

Mastering the tool you have always brings speed and smoothness into your process, one step at a time.

I don't feel like I've had much issue with keyboard driven workflows on any OS.

Any app can has its extensive set of keyboard shortcuts, but when it comes to DE itself, it's not always the case.

Microsoft has Meta+ and Alt+ combinations dime a dozen, and it's consistent across versions. KDE has extensive programmability which allows you to design you own. Both allows you to pack so many features into a small number of keys and work across applications or in general without thinking.

A terminal? It appears. A window? You call it without thinking. Ran out of space, a new desktop is just an instinct...

On macOS you can also assign a keyboard shortcut to any tool menu the app exposes. This works without the app knowing about it.

I’m a Mac dude through and through but its shortcuts don’t hold a candle to windows alt shortcuts. In windows, alt shortcuts are progressively revealed to the user and the entire UI is operable without having to memorize a series of hand cramping shortcuts.

I'm slightly aware of that, but I'm not sure how this works in real life where almost half of the "native" applications in macOS are Electron apps.

It's alright, but a step down from tiling window managers that you can use on Linux.

WSL is such a pain compared to just using a unix os from the get, which is of course what macos is. People forget that it is in fact a unix distro.

a UNIX distro which interfaces well with Linux. A fact which makes life way easier in the interoperability department.

No, people don't.

It's just that mishmash of OSFMK (with BSD APIs of 1991 or so) with random additions of newer APIs does not necessarily make it a great Unix to work with in 2026

People really get hard up about it shipping with some older versions of some tools. But if you are really that much of a unix nerd then you'd also know that is solved in 5 mins with a brew one liner.

I am enough of a nerd to know that people will come with assumptions about libc based on Free/Net/OpenBSD and get burned because no, you can't fix the system libc with brew oneliner

If your work is so dependent on a certain libc version then congrats, macos is already a better thin client for connecting to a remote dev box host than windows out the box. You already have ssh and scp and rsync and tmux out of the box and the laptop is genuinely the best in the market from a hardware standpoint. I code like this. Computer can probably chug for 16 hours without hurting for a charger just running an ssh connection.

SSH and co are part of Windows for quite some time now.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...

As for tmux, I know UNIX since 1993, went through Xenix, DG/UX, Solaris, NeXTSTEP before GNU/Linux started to take off, worked across Solaris, HP-UX, Aix, OS/X before GNU/Linux really took off.

To this day I don't care tmux exists, just open a couple of terminal windows.

If you are going to mention jobs across sessions, nohup does the job.

If I wanted 16 hours for just SSH, I would have went with X-series thinkpad already back in 2015 or so when it easily reached 26 hours without suspend in my friend's testing. As a thin client it also sucks, because keyboard, never figured if they fixed grounding of the chassis, the "let's make your doctor ask if you're suicidal" hard edges near wrists, and so on.

Unix certification requires things like case sensitive file systems, which MacOS can do, but doesn't so they had to supply a special configuration for certification.

So no. The MacOS you use is not Unix.

Except UNIX and GNU/Linux aren't the same thing, which is why so many folks keep complaining about their UNIX experience in macOS.

They buy macOS and then complain macOS isn't Linux, duh!

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