Comment by matwood
16 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.
> 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".
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.