From Linux to OS X: 1 Year Later

Prelude

A little more than an year ago I wrote my rant post The Linux Desktop Experience is Killing Linux on the Desktop and for the first time in 8 years I wasn’t a desktop Linux user anymore. I spent about a month wrestling with Windows 7, but let’s face it - Windows is ill suited for professional Ruby programmers like me (and it’s ill suited for most programmers, except maybe Java & .Net I guess).

Anyways, it was never my intention to stick with Windows - I was just doing my Mac due diligence. Now with 1+ year of OS X usage I’d like to share a few things about my experience thus far with you.

From Linux to OS X

The transition was initially painful - I felt very odd dragging app icons to the Applications folder to install them. To be honest I was quite puzzled what was I supposed to do the first time I had to install an app this way (it didn’t have those helpful hints with the arrows most apps do). The Linux distro package management is definitely infinitely better, or at least it seems so from where I’m standing. Luckily for me most of the tools I use are available from the third-party homebrew package manager for OS X. It’s like an extremely basic version of the mighty Gentoo portage, but it generally gets the job done.

On a more positive note - I was impressed with the quality and responsiveness of the OS X desktop and the fact that Emacs keybindings are used by default in its editor toolkit (and strangely puzzled by the lack of right control key - how is one supposed to hit Control + a I dare ask?). One app in particular - spotlight, blew me off the water, especially after having dealt on Linux with crappy clones like beagle in the past. Spotlight can truly find just about anything, was it’s own SQL-like query language and is blazingly fast.

I quickly found a good terminal emulator (that would be iterm2 - it’s actually the best terminal emulator in the world IMHO) and most of the command-line apps I used from day to day were already lying around (after all OS X is Unix) - to my great surprise even stuff like PostgreSQL (only on OS X Server) and zsh came preinstalled. Most of the other apps I really needed had native OS X ports; the others - worthy alternatives.

Having hated OpenOffice.org for many years I was very pleasantly surprised by quality of apps like Keynote & Words.

Being a keyboard chap preaching in the church of Das Keyboard I was a bit underwhelmed by the whole multi-touch mumbo-jumbo at first, but after a while I came to the conclusion that Apple have the only trackpads and mice that are actually worth using (even though I still like using the keyboard way more).

To sum it all up - I got up to speed fairly quickly, but it was a bumpy ride.

Here’s a bit more details…

The things I love about OS X

The Desktop

It’s pretty, it’s quick, it’s stable. It makes KDE4 and GNOME3 look like school projects in comparison. And did I mention that the fonts on OS X are even prettier than the ones in Windows?

The OS X flavored apps

Sparrow is the first desktop mail client I ever liked (shame on you Google for killing it).

iTerm2 is the ultimate terminal emulator. It alone warrants the purchase of a Mac.

Keynote is the best presentation program I’ve come to use thus far.

Parallels Desktop is light years ahead of VirtualBox and KVM (as far as desktop virtualization is concerned).

I could go on a lot like this, but I’ll stop now.

It’s obvious that Mac users have developed a taste in extremely refined software.

Hardware compatibility

If something is supposed to work with OS X - it works superbly out-of-the-box. I’ve almost forgotten now the days of constant battle with crappy hardware. Sleep & Wake just work. Battery life is exceptional (due to very advanced power management capabilities).

Certainly controlling all of the hardware an OS will run on helps a lot, but we still have to acknowledge Apple’s achievement.

Stability

One year, three Macs - only two or three system crashes. For a developer that likes to tinker a little bit more than he should - that’s impressive.

That having said I had some Linux desktops that used run for more than half an year without reboots (and the reboots were often caused by power outages or distro/kernel updates). Linux stability on a (fairly new) laptop? Well, that’s a whole different story…

The things that are OK

The default apps

The apps bundled with OS X are not bad at all, but they aren’t particularly great. Still - Safari is a very good browser, Mail is a much better desktop client than Evolution/Thunderbird, Calendar is a good organizer (but a bit buggy when it comes down to Google Calendar integration), Messages is so-so.

The bottom line is - you can go a long way with the bundled apps, but they aren’t exactly perfect. My advice - shop for alternatives (both open-source and proprietary).

Mac App Store

Decent way to distribute proprietary apps, but with all the restrictions on the app sandboxing there aren’t many interesting apps out there. Hopefully it’ll get better in time. The ability to upgrade your OS X by purchasing the new version from the App Store is very cool (for a proprietary OS of course).

Emacs

The Cocoa port of Emacs is a bit immature and there are some visual glitches here and there (try out M-x linum-mode for instance), but they are forgivable. I’m also missing the deep integration Emacs had with Linux. And who the fuck designed all the official Mac keyboards without a right control key? I finally understood why so many Mac users where on vim

Btw, remapping the Caps to Control is not the answer. I do it now, I did it on Linux as well. You simply not supposed to hit Control + any other key with the same hand. It’s disruptive to your typing… But then again - you should probably do most of your typing will a full sized keyboard

Software Development

OS X doesn’t nurture software development as much as Linux does, but it comes pretty close in second place. All the tools you know and love are available, but their installation & setup is a little bit more involved on OS X. There is a reason why the screenshots in most programming books show OS X.

System administration

Definitely a step back from Linux. Programs like launchctl (for instance) are not exactly fun to work with, but they do get the job done. I’d never use an OS X box for anything more than a desktop workstation. Setting up a sensible $PATH is not as trivial as it was on Linux either (/etc/paths and some plist I forgotten come to mind).

The things I hate

The special keys

Not exactly an OS X feature, but still…

One year and I still hate Command and Option - option is basically Alt on a strange location and Command is totally useless IMHO. I’d probably wouldn’t have hated them as much if there were room left on the Apple keyboards (expect of course the old wired Apple keyboard) for an addition control key. Luckily for me I use an external Das Keyboard Ultimate most of the time…

Command and Option do have some value, I’d probably would have appreciated it if they didn’t come at the cost of my beloved right control (which I guess only Emacs users are missing anyways).

No standard all mighty package manager

On Linux I had aptitude, yum, portage and pacman - all amazing at what they do. On OS X - homebrew is a decent option, but it’s a far cry from the might and magic of the Linux package managers. Still, homebrew is better than it’s alternative, so beware!

Ugly XML config files

Here and there in OS X you have to write some appalling XML config files. I thought I’d never see the likes of those again after I put Java development behind me.

XCode

You need to install a giant lame IDE just to get a bunch of command line development tools? That’s one of the most annoying things I’ve encountered up-to-date in OS X.

Yep, I know about the tools being available separately for couple of months now, but requesting an Apple developer registration just to get them seems a bit to much to me.

Epilogue

Am I happier now without Linux? Definitely! Is OS X a better OS than Linux? Absolutely not! It does have a much better desktop experience and since I spend most of the time on a computer interacting with the desktop - that’s a big win for me. Of course I wouldn’t mind seeing Linux achieve this level of desktop maturity and stability.

Should you dump Linux and join me in darkness? How the hell should I know? I’m just sharing my two cents - if you’re happy using Linux you should definitely stick with it. Obviously I wasn’t and there weren’t that many alternatives lying around.

Not having to deal with hardware problems and immature desktop apps is like a breath of fresh air and it more than compensates for the few shortcomings of OS X. Nothing compensates the lack of that right control key on most keyboards, but after all that’s not an OS problem.

There is great vibrant hacker community gathered around OS X and it’s one of the main driving forces of the OS. There is unfortunately a lot of corporate pressure from Apple as well, but as you already know by now - there are never perfect things, there are always compromises. I’d rather use a proprietary OS that stays out of my way, than a free OS into which I bump at every turn.

Soon I’ll blog a little bit more about the practical aspects and implication of the migration. Cheers, mates!

Note: I’ve updated the original post a bit to reflect some of the initial feedback I received.