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Twoish years ago I moved from Linux full time to Windows at home and whatever the Apple OS is called at work. The Apple one was a pain. Command line tools are

Twoish years ago I moved from Linux full time to Windows at home and whatever the Apple OS is called at work. The Apple one was a pain. Command line tools are almost but not quite right (zcat in particular just doesn't work) and I found the user experience pretty annoying at first but passable after that. Still don't really understand how "installing software" is supposed to go, and lots of struggle against Homebrew and lots of other software packaging. Windows had WSL when I got my laptop. Real Linux command-line, nice. Filesystem performance was crap, and they didn't have postgres at first, but it was probably a better dev environment than my Mac, with one exception: no Docker in Windows 10 home. Explorer started getting a bit slow and unstable after a while, but I was on preview releases. A couple of months ago I quit my job, and yesterday I formatted my home laptop to install Linux again (decided to put my hobby project onto a Docker-heavy workflow) and oh my God it's lovely. Installing packages is fast again, software compatibility goes without saying, and Unity was surprisingly pleasant (though I did drop it for i3 because I'm a masochist.) Hard to say how much of that experience is "Linux is nice" and how much is "I'm a Linux person" though.

jonathankoren 8y ago
> The Apple one was a pain. Command line tools are almost but not quite right (zcat in particular just doesn't work) That's because it's BSD, and are you sure you don't want gzcat?
umanwizard 8y ago
> zcat in particular just doesn't work ? I used `zcat` on macOS just today. What issue do you have with it?
- lgbr 8y ago
  The issue with Apple's unix environment is that it comes with BSD tools. A lot of functionality that you'd expect to work doesn't end up working, which can be frustrating. You have to go through some pretty annoying steps [1], which are more involved than the steps required to get a Linux environment on Windows [2]. 1: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/69223/how-to-replace-mac-os-x-utilities-with-gnu-core-utilities https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/69223/how-to-repla... 2: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10
  - umanwizard 8y ago
    The zcat that comes with macOS works fine. Learning how to use the BSD tools is not that hard. Also, you mean GNU environment I guess, not Linux environment.
terminalcommand 8y ago
Linux doesn't cut it for me after I've tried a BSD. It isn't as bad as Windows, but BSDs have a certain kind of elegance. And because the things you can do on them are limited (browsing and coding) and there aren't as many packages you are much more focused.
noway421 8y ago
The fact that MacOS/Darwin has BSD utilities instead of GNU is a common gotcha. Not a showstopper though, `brew install coreutils` will get you the tools you are used to!

jonathankoren 8y ago

> The Apple one was a pain. Command line tools are almost but not quite right (zcat in particular just doesn't work) That's because it's BSD, and are you sure you don't want gzcat?

umanwizard 8y ago

> zcat in particular just doesn't work ? I used `zcat` on macOS just today. What issue do you have with it?

lgbr 8y ago
The issue with Apple's unix environment is that it comes with BSD tools. A lot of functionality that you'd expect to work doesn't end up working, which can be frustrating. You have to go through some pretty annoying steps [1], which are more involved than the steps required to get a Linux environment on Windows [2]. 1: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/69223/how-to-replace-mac-os-x-utilities-with-gnu-core-utilities https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/69223/how-to-repla... 2: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10
- umanwizard 8y ago
  The zcat that comes with macOS works fine. Learning how to use the BSD tools is not that hard. Also, you mean GNU environment I guess, not Linux environment.

terminalcommand 8y ago

Linux doesn't cut it for me after I've tried a BSD. It isn't as bad as Windows, but BSDs have a certain kind of elegance. And because the things you can do on them are limited (browsing and coding) and there aren't as many packages you are much more focused.

noway421 8y ago

The fact that MacOS/Darwin has BSD utilities instead of GNU is a common gotcha. Not a showstopper though, `brew install coreutils` will get you the tools you are used to!