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Comment by dlivingston

20 hours ago

> what advantages macOS offers for a power user

The serious answer is that you get an "it-just-works"⁺ Unix-like operating system that gives you a development experience on-par with Linux.

If you are doing sysadmin stuff: you will not like macOS.

If you care about configuration for your window manager, desktop environment, or systemd services: you will not like macOS.

If you are a graphics engineer or a kernel engineer: you will (probably) not like macOS.

If you are a C++/Rust/Python/JavaScript/Java/mobile/desktop engineer who wants a rock-solid developer environment and doesn't care about the above: you will like macOS.

You get all the Unix tools you could ever want, whatever shell you want to use (Zsh, Fish, even PowerShell), clang/LLVM, etc.

Does that answer your question?

⁺: caveat being "it just works" is getting less and less true with every macOS release.

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dlivingston

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matwood  18 hours ago

This would be my answer, though I also do sysadmin stuff from macOS just fine. I've used OSX/macOS for a long time, I understand how it works and how to move around, and the ecosystem integration is nice. Adobe products, MS products also all work without any hassle along with any software development I want to do. Then there's the hardware which Apple Silicon has been great for. I bought an M1 Max 64gb laptop on release and it still never feels slow. Battery life is great, trackpad works great, etc...

And I say all this knowing that someone can likely get similar use out of a MS or Linux laptop. At this point, just pick what you know and get on with it.

  • zbentley  13 hours ago

    > I also do sysadmin stuff from macOS

    MacOS is fine as a client/dispatch node for SSH/Ansible/Terraform/whatnot; I think they meant that you cannot sysadmin MacOS itself as a target with many of the same tools/techniques you would sysadmin a Linux server.

    I wish that weren't true, as someone who struggles with a lot of cross-platform Puppet tooling that I wish behaved better on Mac. No, Nix doesn't help; not when the goal is "configure other people's machines to a baseline but don't otherwise prescribe how they should use them".

    • matwood  7 hours ago

      Good point. We all end up with different definitions of sys admin. I’ve managed fleets of Linux servers just fine with a macOS as my only client computer, but I’ve never managed other clients. Maybe a Linux client would have helped in that case if sys admin was my singular job, but even then I may have just created a Linux client in my vps to use as the management node.

thewebguyd  19 hours ago

> If you are doing sysadmin stuff: you will not like macOS.

Even then, that's debatable. Should say if you like doing sysadmin stuff on your own machine.

I am a sysadmin, and my daily driver is an M4 macbook pro and I wouldn't have it any other way. I admin other machines, I don't want to play sysadmin for my own. But its mostly for the hardware more than any other reason.