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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

As someone who's been using OSX full-time for the past two years, and using it in conjuction with a Linux-based desktop computer for the previous ~5.

Yes.

Linux is insanely better for development. But OSX is just passable enough that the form-factor of an Apple laptop wins out and I can work. I don't want to go back to using two computers and OSX is _much_ better at everyday non-developer stuff than any Linux I've ever used so I make do with bad package managers and random compilation issues.

Pray god that I never have to wipe my hard drive though. Getting all the random libraries and whatnot that I've accumulated over the years would be a pain in the arse. (I've been dragging the same backups forward ever since I got my first mac)

PS: do start using Oh-My-Zsh. Your life will be better.

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>Oh-My-Zsh

No, I like bash (or fish sometimes) with my own personal configuration that I fully understand. If I were to switch to zsh, I would just use zsh, and not a giant bundle of stuff that someone else thinks I need.

Indeed. oh-my-zsh is a good way to end up with a shell you don't understand and is slow as hell.

Prezto is lighter, faster and simpler than omz, I'm a huge fan

https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto

I am also a friend of a self-configured shell. But projects like oh-my-zsh and Prezto are great to get some inspiration. I learned alot by browsing through their code.

> Pray god that I never have to wipe my hard drive though. Getting all the random libraries and whatnot that I've accumulated over the years would be a pain in the arse.

Something there doesn't sound right (and brings up questions about how do you even manage so many random libraries and whatnot).

Dependency and package management isn't that difficult and when I wipe my hdd/ssd it usually takes me some 30 minutes to get my generic environment bootstrapped and up to date (with a mixture of shell scripts and brew install `my-package-list.txt`). After that, each project takes few minutes to download all deps/libs with some dependency management tool.

Just the same way I would imagine that you've got your oh-my-zsh config version controlled (speaking of oh-my-zsh, I'd like to also mention prezto[0]!)

0: https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto

It's more about superstition. My laptop works right now ... mostly ... I don't want to poke at it unless I have a very good reason.

Because something always breaks and then you are in a world of pain as in this XKCD about setting up dual-booting with BSD http://xkcd.com/349/

I am actually the opposite. I have had brittle setups in the past and I found myself trying less and less because the past was becoming more precious.

Now I destroy and recreate as often as feasible. Never go more than a 9 months w/o a rebuild.

I do the same but with Ansible.

> Pray god that I never have to wipe my hard drive though.

You will have to, and sooner than you think. Hard drives do not last forever.

That's why instead of hoping to never reinstall an OS again, i decided to embrace OS installation and do it often, from scratch. This means:

- Reducing tweaks to the only necessary ones. - Keeping a "how to install" text file in bitbucket. - Having my home folder under git.

To be honest, everytime I install a new Ubuntu a cry a little, because they are going the wrong way. But I still reinstall regularly (every 6 months) and keep my "how to install" file up to date, so I only have to copy paste some commands and follow some step mechanically.

Oh-my-zsh was pretty wasteful on resources (theming and plugins). The stock config in archlinux is pretty decent (good completion) but avoid OMZ pitfalls.

I actually like the fact it has so many themes and plugins. Calling it 'wasteful' is over-board though. We're talking mbs at most here, if that.

Not space, CPU. OMZ theming abstraction consumes a lot (last time I checked it was full of redundancy) bringing latency.

No.

If I'm doing excessive amounts of stuff in the shell, I'm doing something wrong.

How do you figure? I spend pretty much all of my time in vim, the terminal, of the browser. And having been at this since the early days of the web, I'm pretty sure I've got the wrong and right of it figured out. I'm primarily a bash user, but it's merely a matter of preference.

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