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Comment by bitshepherd | Hacker News Reader

OS X isn't a huge cultural shock. It's mostly getting your head wrapped around the dock and some hotkeys, and it mostly Just Works. I made the switch a couple years back after over a decade of hardcore Linux or BSD on the desktop.

Once you get a terminal to your liking, it should make things less obtuse and let you get a feel for the operating system.

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Ditto. In fact, I switched because I grew envious of how much easier everything was to do on the MBAs used by my daughter and wife than on my Ubuntu laptop. I'd sit at one of their machines, use the trackpad for a moment, just a moment, and miss the gestures on my DV7.

One day, in a moment of frustration, when Libre or Open or Braindead Office got too much in my way, I slammed the lid down, yelled "I'll be back in an hour", had my own MBA set up and working to my liking 90 minutes later, and haven't looked back.

I did the same and actually felt kind of bad that we live in a place where we are able to go kill two grand just like that.

However, I felt bad for only about two minutes, and then forgot about that until I read your comment.

sigh

Although I don't use OS X more than a few hours per month, this person has it right. The key thing to keep in mind is that OS X is UNIX. Sure, the command-line tools it comes with don't always support GNU extensions -- fine.

And the package mangement is iffy, at least as far as GUI applications go. For the command-line, a lot of people swear by package managers like Homebrew, probably because they also help resolve the "no GNU extensions" problem. While I don't use OS X enough to have any experience with this, I think this would be the key area for me to investigate to before I'd be comfortable using OS X as an everyday system. The rest is just getting comfortable with the keybindings/modifier key layout.

To elaborate on the modifier keys, from the inside out: Command key for GUI shortcuts (⌘C, ⌘V); Option (same as Alt); and Control. Both Option and Control are rarely used by themselves (though the Option key can be used for special characters and the Control key can be used for Emacs-style editing shortcuts) and can pass through in Terminal -- this is where the separate Command key really shines.

Oh, and the window manager. Coming from Linux, one of the strangest things about OS X is probably the application-oriented focus model (rather than window-oriented). As the parent mentions, this manifests itself in both the dock (clicking on an icon in the dock raises the whole application) and the hotkeys (Command-Tab to switch applications, Command-Backquote to switch windows within an application). This takes some getting used to, but like with the keyboard shortcuts, it should only take a day or two. On the other hand, the OS X implementation of workspaces is very good, especially if you decide to run a VM.

So to summarize, OS X is still a real UNIX system with a real command-line (and development tools are literally one click away -- type gcc or make or git into Terminal, and then click Install). It just has a slightly odd desktop environment on top, but that shouldn't be too hard to get used to.

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