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by xianwen 1582 days ago
It seems some FreeBSD developers use macOS themselves, instead of FreeBSD. I found this quite peculiar.
4 comments

I'm a FreeBSD developer and run FreeBSD on my desktop, and MacOS on my laptop. I have not had a great experience with any *nix other than MacOS on a laptop.

My main objection to MacOS & why I don't run it on my desktop is that I can't configure window management exactly how I want it, like I can with KDE or LXDE. Most of what I can't do centers around muscle memory for window management tricks involving mouse buttons and modifier keys. This goes away on a laptop with a trackpad, since the muscle memory is different with a trackpad than with a mouse.

I used FreeBSD on desktop for a number of years and switched over to OSX and I've been through some of the window management pain. I generally do as much as I can with keyboard hotkeys but I do have a trackpad connected to my desktop now as well.

As far as window management, I use contexts for my switcher, rectangle for hotkey-based window management, and stay for automated per-app & per-display window management

https://contexts.co

https://rectangleapp.com

https://cordlessdog.com/stay

There's also alternate window managers for OSX such as Yabai or Amethyst

https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

Would you board an airliner where you wrote the navigational software? /just kidding

I guess there are devs who spend quite a lot of time in macOS in order to work on things like https://airyx.org/.

This has also been true in Linux developer conferences. About 10 years ago, it was difficult seeing anyone running desktop Linux, and even more difficult seeing non-Apple hardware. Last 5 years situation changed significantly.
People like to spend less time fighting the OS? That's the norm, not peculiar.
"Fighting the OS" you develop may lead to you fixing the errors and deficiencies of the system that annoy you and possibly annoy other people too.