Greetings. I’m not sure if should ask this here or on a MacOS specific community, mods feel free to remove this post if necessary.
Basically I’m getting a new SRE job. At my current (future ex) SRE job, i had all the freedom to have a Archlinux KDE workstation, that is incredibly comfortable to use as i’m also dailying it on my personal workstation.
However this new company gave me the workstation choice between either a Windows machine without WSL (yes i know), either a Macbook m4. (Edit for clarity : i cannot change the OS because of central management software)
I chose the macbook for the battery life and being able to keep it at least Unix (with zsh always on hand), but i have no prior experience on using mac os.
What are the various software that you would recommend to a KDE user to have on its mac ? I know only about brew.sh the new apple container thingy, and some various fan control app. Is there a way to have Dophin as file manager, or something similar ? (IE a file manager with an integrated folder-following terminal ? General tips and tricks you may want to share?
Thank you for your attention and have a great day
xscreensaver of course! Note that this is not an option on Windows—jwz hates Microsoft, and any xscreensaver port to Windows is against his wishes.
I use yabai and sketchybar for a tiling WM feel. It’s nowhere as nice as my preferred i3, but it’s ok. Unfortunately it often breaks with major OS updates, so I’m sure to hold back updating my system until yabai is working.
IIRC
sshfswill work on macOS but it’s more work to install. Worth it if allowed by your IT policies and your work can benefit from it.Vim, tmux, and the usual *NIX stuff you might want.
The coreutils are not the GNU coreutils you typically find on a Linux system, so you may find a few differences. I believe
sedis slightly different, and the flags forlsmust be before the filename arguments, but I’ve found it’s mostly silly stuff like that (I used zsh before using macOS, so no problem there).Absolutely get the Brew and Port package managers. You are gonna feel much better and at home with them. Check company policies for third party software.
Also check out Nix. It’s a pretty weird package manager but has a lot of packages. Also allows you to configure your entire macOS install declaratively with a text-based config file, if you’re into that.
Watch the intro video when you first turn on the mac book. REALLY.
If you miss it, or whatever, find the current vid to watch. Before I did that, it felt like the touchpad was insane, and just doing random shit.
And get iTerm2. Its better than stock.
From there, its just a UNIX with a funny window manager.
Someone has made an MIT licensed open source file manager for MacOS, not that I’ve used it myself:
https://github.com/abdullahguch/folderiumI think that a good way to approach the OS switch is to focus on “what tools does this OS have and how do they work?” and figure out a new workflow from that instead of trying to bring your old workflow over.
Home-manager.
I guess you’ll not be able to install whatever you want because company policy. I suggest you to learn what you may and must not do with the workstation first. For the most of the software you’ll need an admin access to allow a special permission.
- VM, 2) docker (macos runs docker inside a VM, u run KDE inside of it as a fat container), 3) MacOS specific tooling - this will depend on what they let you install. homebrew is a start, nix env also exists.
+1 for VM
Honestly, you might have been better choosing Windows. I use all three for work and MacOS is more like an iPad nowadays.
Oh sorry, i have been unclear, but i cannot change the OS, as the workstations are centrally managed. Otherwise i wouldve gone regular workstation and linux install.
