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macOS has a lot of faults but I agree, 3 days to set it up is an odd statement. I have a reasonably convoluted setup with VMware Fusion Windows and Linux guests

macOS has a lot of faults but I agree, 3 days to set it up is an odd statement. I have a reasonably convoluted setup with VMware Fusion Windows and Linux guests, a few different developer toolchains (vanilla clang, rust, go, etc) and two dozen developer tools along with all the usual applications and it took me a little over two hours to do a clean install of Big Sur on my MacBook Pro the other week. Homebrew manages 90+% of installations the the few that it doesn't do coming from the App Store or manual download and install. The rest of the work is simply restoring my config files and copying over data all of which is done via a shell script. Windows and Linux (Fedora in my case) is mostly the same with just a little extra work on Windows to manually change some settings that never seem to stick if done another way. Not saying switching to BSD is the wrong thing for this person but having used BSD in the past I wouldn't say it is any quicker to setup than macOS or pretty much any other OS these days. In fact with hardware issues you are likely to run into it can take a lot longer to get an equivalently working system. They even say how WiFi and Bluetooth still isn't as functional or performant as it is elsewhere so who knows how much time they have spent trying to sort that. But as long as the author finds their environment works better for them that is all that really matters. However I feel when people throw out things like 'macOS took 3 days to setup' it weakens their argument as I know that is not "normal" so I wonder if perhaps they are just making up things to justify (to themselves) the switch. I see it a lot when people switch from Windows to macOS or Linux. People come up with all kinds of "reasons" as to why they are doing it and a lot of the time it is more emotional than factual which is fine providing you admit that rather than come up with nonsense claims.

kitsunesoba 6y ago
Anecdotes and all, but yes this has been my experience too. macOS is by far the fastest to get up and running on. Linux distros probably come in second, with the caveat that it's easy to get sucked into a time-burning black hole of fine-grained tweaks if I don't make a point of keeping things close to default. Windows is downright frustrating because even after spending considerable time on setup, there are things that just don't work correctly — for example, changing virtual desktops independent of monitor is not possible with the built-in implementation.
passthejoe 6y ago
The idea of running BSD and it going well is one thing, but in practice you have to really want it. FreeBSD and OpenBSD are better (and easier) than ever, but you still give up a lot in comparison with the average Linux distribution, where more things just work. The BSDs are often great if you stick to the base system, but once you start adding software, things break way more often than with Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. This is especially true if your hardware is not-a-Thinkpad. I always wanted to run OpenBSD as my main OS, but for "production" desktop use, I can't deny how much easier/faster it is to get and stay running with Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora.

kitsunesoba 6y ago

Anecdotes and all, but yes this has been my experience too. macOS is by far the fastest to get up and running on. Linux distros probably come in second, with the caveat that it's easy to get sucked into a time-burning black hole of fine-grained tweaks if I don't make a point of keeping things close to default. Windows is downright frustrating because even after spending considerable time on setup, there are things that just don't work correctly — for example, changing virtual desktops independent of monitor is not possible with the built-in implementation.

passthejoe 6y ago

The idea of running BSD and it going well is one thing, but in practice you have to really want it. FreeBSD and OpenBSD are better (and easier) than ever, but you still give up a lot in comparison with the average Linux distribution, where more things just work. The BSDs are often great if you stick to the base system, but once you start adding software, things break way more often than with Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. This is especially true if your hardware is not-a-Thinkpad. I always wanted to run OpenBSD as my main OS, but for "production" desktop use, I can't deny how much easier/faster it is to get and stay running with Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora.