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So, if you're willing to drop 2k on an experiment, i'd say go for it. I'm leery of the new models because i use vim, and my fingers get cold and sweaty. Touch d
by jfoutz 10y ago
So, if you're willing to drop 2k on an experiment, i'd say go for it. I'm leery of the new models because i use vim, and my fingers get cold and sweaty. Touch devices don't respond perfectly and i have fear about `esc` working reliably.
I've gone through my own versions of your frustrations, but i'll spare you the war stories.
my 2 cents. macos is bsd, hacked up in odd ways. if you want to edit something in /etc, you're doing something wrong. It's a little off putting figuring out where stuff is. /Library/Frameworks is common. There's no C compiler, without installing (part of) xcode.
You've got 2 choices for package management. macports is a shared nothing approach, everything is compiled against libraries compiled to /opt/local/. Or homebrew. brew tries to share everything with the built in libraries. Just be consistent, i lost some time to libiconv, postgress and haskell the other day. If i'd been consistent i'd have avoided the problem entirely. I've never used brew seriously, but lots of people like it. I swear fealty to macports.
The biggest loss for me was no tiling window manager (although i think some hacks exist to get the same effect).
osx is different. it will trip you up from time to time. a whole bunch of stuff is reliable in ways that were not reliable for me in linux. (take that with some salt, i haven't used linux as my desktop in quite a few years, and i think things have come a long, long way).
If it sucks, you can always go back to linux. That touchbar support might take a while to work right though, and no esc key till it does. ctrl-] will probably be your friend.
You're looking at a different set of tradeoffs. you're a programmer, odds are very good everything you want is there. You can always run a VM if you get stuck. But it's not all sunshine and rainbows. I do think rainbow free days are a little less frequent than either windows or linux, so it has generally been a win for me.
- notalaser 10y agoI had (well, I still have it) a Mac Mini and used it between 2007 and 2009. I was pretty dissatisfied with its performance (then again, that was around the time when Tiger got obsolete and the Leopard moved in, and the Mini was already slow and old by that time) but, overall, I think it's the most productive platform I used, short of my old WindowMaker setup which has aged too much to be useful by now. So I know what to expect right now. Frankly, what I'm afraid of is that I don't know what to expect next year. 2K for an experiment is ok if I could run it for three or four years. Right now, it looks like if Apple has a document called "Roadmap for Mac Computers, 2016-2020", there's a good chance that it's a four-page summary of another document called "How to convince all our customers to just get an iPad already for fun and profit".
- jfoutz 10y agoThe hardware is solid. I have zero complaints about build quality. You are not obligated to upgrade to the latest OS (but you probably should...). I feel really comfortable saying you can get 4 years out of a mbp. If you really need the out, just in case you need to install windows or linux, wait 2-3 months, just to make sure other people have done it reliably. There is always risk it's not the "optimal" choice, but it's certainly not the "wrong" choice. MacOS is fine. If you hate it just install something else. (but the brand new stuff might be flakey under windows/linux for a while)
- notalaser 10y agoThanks! It's reassuring to hear this sort of things in the middle of the current zomg MPB bad rage.
- ixtli 10y agoJust read this thread and I'm also comfortable recommending the hardware for three or four years easily. Also, the top level comment describes a small amount of what I went through about 10 years ago that made me switch back to Apple, though I built a hackintosh instead of a laptop.