[busterarm]

Mac OS X only works for this due to herculean community efforts. The base system is fundamentally unusable for this purpose without Homebrew, Macports (oh hey, BSD ports!), or pkgsrc (oh hey, BSD ports again!).

The base packages get upgraded on a timescale approaching lolnever. They should be ashamed of themselves for shipping machines with Bash 3 still and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

OpenBSD is so simple for me and it takes me a fraction of the time to configure a new OpenBSD system than a new Mac.

[riffraff]

AFAIR, the reason for bash3 is that Apple refuses to use more recent packages due to GPLv3.

[intertextuality]

> Mac OS X only works for this due to herculean community efforts.

For programming, yes, although I don't know if brew would be called "herculean". For battery life and ease of use, no.

I've setup BSD on linux on personally modded thinkpads (putting in faster cpus, new wifi cards, etc), and you have got to be joking when you say it's simpler or faster than turning on a new mac and installing brew. It's infinitely more customizable for sure, but it's not simpler or easier. Especially when it comes to tuning battery life.

And for highly used programs like adobe photoshop, illustrator/affinity design, premiere, etc, forget it. Even Sketch isn't available on linux.

And this doesn't account for physical clunkiness either. My t430 was so bulky. The x220 was nice but the display wasn't that good, nor the cpu.

[emgee_1]

Highly used programs: emacs, vi, Tex , latex, R, python, lisp’s, awk, sed.

Yes No multimedia programs, cause I am a mathematician and for pdf I use pdftools; so no Adobe also; started with Slackware in 2007 after an abysmal windows period from 1991 till 2007; now I use openbsd and emacs simply rocks and is rock solid on openbsd.

[busterarm]

I think the parent poster has unreasonable expectations for what linux/bsds can do as far as laptop battery life and is talking about an entirely different use case than the parent I was originally responding to.

I also think they're vastly underestimating the amount of stuff that needs to be configured on a new mac host.

My office workstation (Arch Linux) and home desktops/servers (all OpenBSD) can be installed and configured repeatably in ~5 minutes flat.

I literally have an ansible playbook that pulls in my dotfiles and installs a list of the packages that I want. That's a hundred times simpler than setting up my work laptop (Mac) for development, where not only do I have to install xcode dev tools and homebrew and the packages that I want, but most of the packages that I install need additional configuration applied to work correctly.

[anthony_doan]

I have openbsd on an old thinkpad been sitting and gathering dust. Rstudio isn't on OpenBSD and it'll take a bit of the down time to emulate it with tmux and vim... so I never got around doing it... too busy trying to finish my thesis.

How is your R setup in OpenBSD? Like what software do you use in tandem when coding R?

[taborj]

> I've setup BSD on linux on personally modded thinkpads (putting in faster cpus, new wifi cards, etc), and you have got to be joking when you say it's simpler or faster than turning on a new mac and installing brew. It's infinitely more customizable for sure, but it's not simpler or easier. Especially when it comes to tuning battery life.

This is not an apples-to-apples comparison. You're comparing highly modified laptops with questionably supported mods to a stock Mac. Of course the highly modified laptop isn't going to install BSD smoothly. It's unlikely to install anything smoothly, at least compared to a Mac where the hardware configuration is locked down.

[ris]

> without Homebrew, Macports (oh hey, BSD ports!), or pkgsrc (oh hey, BSD ports again!)

The only thing that makes macos at all usable for me is Nix.

[pjmlp]

It might seem surprising, but OS X is pretty fine for programming without dealing with Homebrew, Macports or whatever.

That is not what matters to developers invested into Apple's ecosystem.