Same all around. It's my first 'do you have any questions for us?' at every interview. My company now is starting to hint at clamping down the screws, and I was honest in saying I'd just go elsewhere before being forced to use a gimped Windows laptop daily. We'll see.

I've used desktop Linux for a long time, and it's really, really good now. I cannot even remember the last time something didn't just work out of the box(probably my laser printer).

Still working on the last part. Parents buy and use tax software each year for some odd reason, and I don't feel like even trying to navigate through WINE.

I would not even attend an interview if it's not clear that I can work on Linux in that company. I was forced to use Windows daily for 8 years. After that I got a chance to move to Linux development. I'll never want to go back. Not that Linux is free of problems. But the feeling of being in control cannot be replaced. If I don't accept the wart I can patch it. If I don't want to invest the effort to patch it I live with it. The choice is always mine.

> not that I would ever recommend that for a company who wants their employees to be productive.

As someone who has moved to Linux from MacOS (Gnome 42, Debian Bookworm), it has been a near seamless transition.

I expected it to consume a lot of time in overhead maintaining it - but it hasn't. It has been great so far. MacOS is still more ergonomic in a lot of ways by comparison to Gnome, but Gnome 4x has come a long way in the last few months.

At this rate it, by the end of the year I would think it the best desktop environment offered by any platform.

I'm in a similar boat, but I turn down jobs that require osx use. my current job I was told I was able to use osx, windows, or kubuntu, whichever I prefer. I chose kubuntu, and was handed a mac on day 1 because of chip shortage. it was the worse 3 months of my professional career, finally my Dell came in and I could actually get work done. I don't understand how people use them, I don't consider them a viable alternative to a nic environment.

all you people here surprise me, I consider windows + wsl a better development environment and more nix like than osx. but maybe I'm just hurt in the head and missing something...

Really interested why you felt that MacOS wasn't unix-like and wasn't productive? Assuming you have administrative control over your computer, you can use the terminal for everything. Open the terminal and you're literally dropped into a unix-y shell (zsh is the new default, but GNU bash and a POSIX-compatible sh are shipped as well, all right out of the box) and all of your favorite *nix commands will be available. The filesystem is like any other unix file system. There's several package managers available (Homebrew, MacPorts) for installing software - I virtually never use the Mac app store or even download .app images directly from vendors.

Mac OS is not just Unix-like, it is a certified Unix-compliant operating system.^1

Apple prefers to keep this fact far away from the average mac consumer, but if you want to use them, the Unix/BSD underpinnings are right there. There are plenty of things to criticize about MacOS, but not being Unix-like is not one of them.

[1]: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3678.htm

The only thing that feels UNIX like is the terminal and even then zsh is different than most are used to and the included bash is essentially ancient. Even basic things like getting to your home folder with Finder is more trouble than it needs to be on a stock modern macOS install. They really go to lengths to hide it. If all that feels *nix-like is the the terminal why bother? WSL can do that too but if I want apt I can use that.

I feel like there's no integration between the macOS UI stuff and the Unix underpinnings.

From a technical/programming perspective, there's just so much that MacOS (unix) does right: things like file permissions, the layout of the file system, and having industry-standard tools like vim, make, gcc, ssh, bash (even if older versions) built in. I haven't used Windows for anything other than playing games for almost 10 years, but I remember things like Ruby (especially Rails) and Python programming were a complete PITA in Windows versus Mac (Unix) or Linux. Maybe that's changed...I honestly couldn't tell you.

I agree that it's annoying how much apple tries to hide the Unix nature of the OS. I have no idea why they hide the home folder from Finder by default, it's on my list of "things to change immediately" when I do a fresh Mac install/setup, as well as things like installing newer versions of Bash, Vim, etc (via Homebrew). But overall I think the pros of the OS vastly outweigh the cons. For the most part, all of the things I don't like about the OS can be turned off or tuned. And I value how things work under the hood too much to give that up.

I will admit I have never tried WSL - because I've never had a need to. I've considered trying it, but then I just tell myself I'd rather just use Linux.

> [...]Even basic things like getting to your home folder with Finder is more trouble than it needs to be on a stock modern macOS install. They really go to lengths to hide it.[...]

Open finder then cmd-shift-h or cmd-shift-g, "~"

Both of these work right out of the box, what would you rather macOS do to be easier?

Super discoverable.

Put Home on the sidebar by default like Thunar, Nautilus, Dolphin, Caja, earlier versions of Mac OS X...

I mean you're not wrong, but at the same time I figured that stuff out on day one of using my Mac simply by just googling around a little bit and from then on I knew it... You only have to learn these things one time so this feels like a pretty minor nitpick.

MacOS is missing the common use of the control button.

I just need control, alt, and a meta button ("Windows" button).

What is this option and command nonsense?

That's what the default Mac keyboard layout has been for decades. Just because Microsoft/IBM won the desktop OS wars and forced everyone to use their keyboard layout doesn't mean Mac users have to comply.

I'm used to switching between Mac and PC layouts every day, but I personally prefer the Mac keyboard layout. Command is easier to press with a thumb compared to Ctrl, which requires the pinkie. Option allows you to input special characters with far more ease compared to any PC operating system (e.g Opt + Shift + - for an em-dash compared to some crazy incantation on Windows). Control is still available as an additional modifier if you want it.

A great side-effect of using Cmd as the primary modifier is that shortcuts inside your terminal become simplified. E.g Cmd + C to copy rather than Ctrl + Shift + C, or Cmd + T to open a new tab rather than Ctrl + Shift + T.

In an ideal world, Windows would switch to using the Win key as its primary modifier instead of Ctrl. That would make life so much simpler.

That was one of the hardest things for me to get used to when I moved primarily from Linux --> Mac (and it still makes switching between Mac and Windows annoying). Keyboard remapping helped at first but I was getting tired of inconsistencies so I just forced myself to relearn the modifier keys.

Funnily enough, the command key and many of those popular shortcuts (eg cut copy paste) predates windows by several years. The story goes that windows wanted to use the same shortcuts, but PC keyboards lacked a command key - so they used control instead. Since windows was backwards compatible with lots of hardware, they couldn't require a key that didn't exist on most keyboards.

Prior to that of course, Control has a long history of interacting with command-line based applications in Unix/family (eg Ctrl-C to cancel a running CLI app). Of course those same things still work in MacOS like they did in the older Unixes.

> GNU bash

From 15 years ago!

> all of your favorite *nix commands will be available

Except that they are the BSD variants, not the GNU ones.

Yes the included Bash is very old, but installing an updated version is trivial. I'd rather have something included than nothing.

Does BSD varient vs GNU varient matter when we're considering if something is unix-like? No one would say that the BSD distributions are not Unix derivatives. As they say, "GNUs Not Unix..."

If you want to please corporate, maybe suggesting Suse is a good idea. I have a VM for remote desktop with OpenSuse and it has been good so far.

> I'm debating convincing my employer to let me have a Linux machine

Could you just install Linux on your mac? That way you could also dual boot in case you need macOS on occasion.

Depending on how recent the model is, it can be somewhat tough. Generally it takes a bit of time after a new model appears before there are working drivers for wifi, which quite often is a deal breaker. Sometimes a driver will be working a bit earlier but not be released yet, so you can compile your own kernel with it patched in, but even as a daily Arch user that's more effort than I'm willing to go through on a regular basis. I know there's progress being made on a distro that fully supports the new ARM macbooks, but my understanding is that most distros will not work on it right now. I think "everything works out of the box" is mostly true for most non-Apple laptops nowadays for Linux, but I'm not sure it will ever be the case for macbooks (unless Apple decides to make sure it's the case, which seems fairly unlikely).

> I think "everything works out of the box" is mostly true for most non-Apple laptops nowadays for Linux, but I'm not sure it will ever be the case for macbooks (unless Apple decides to make sure it's the case, which seems fairly unlikely).

My understanding is that "everything works out of the box" is still restricted to very specific products line when it comes to laptops and linux. And that the new Apple Silicon macbooks might actually make this situation a lot better because most of the hardware is Apple's and they seems to keep a more or less stable binary interface between hardware components even across hardware generations (presumably for their own benefit when writing their own firmware). So while the support isn't there yet (well, it's in Alpha), once it is there we might expect Apple laptops to have some of the best linux support going forwards.

I guess I can only speak to my own experience, which is that any non-Apple laptop* I've bought in the past six or so years has had working wifi, trackpad, bluetooth, etc. out of the box when I've installed Linux on it, and this has been without doing any sort of research beforehand to make sure that it would work with Linux. The last time I tried to put Linux on a macbook was with an early 2015 Macbook Pro, which at least through the summer didn't have a working wifi driver by default on Linux. I did find a working driver that was yet to be included by default in Linux around the summer, and by a year or two after the macbook came out (I don't remember the exact amount of time), it was available by default in Linux releases.

* The one exception was when I tried to buy an ARM laptop shortly after all the news about Spectre/Meltdown came out and I was frustrated with Intel's PR response to it. I never did actually figure out how to install Linux on it due to the bootloader being locked down, but that's either my own fault or maybe the manufacturer's and certainly not Linux's.

There is no production-ready Linux distro for recent Macs.

Yes - I made this "discovery" for a three year old Mac I have - it freezes on the first screen of the Ubuntu install :(

True, but asahi Linux for the curious

Only helps for M1 macs. Intel T2 laptops are in a particularly bad spot when it comes to Linux support and things haven't really gotten better. You still need to add drivers to get the keyboard/trackpad working (AFAIK not supported on all kernels either), you can't have audio AND suspend just one of them, WiFi is a pain. I tried on my 2018 just had freezes every five minutes on the 1/3 of times it would boot correctly.

What workflow do you use to target Windows builds from Linux? For myself I've used mingw64 to compile, then NSIS as an installer. Only problem is that quite a few Windows anti-malware systems automatically flag NSIS compiled based packages as suspicious.

Also, any good guides for targeting Windows APIs for Linux programmers?

The problem has nothing to do with NSIS, instead you must sign your application with a ev cert that requires a hardware device to use.

>> not that I would ever recommend that for a company who wants their employees to be productive.

That's a little odd to read considering you've got your whole family on it. I could imagine a lot of work going into internal software for the most part, are there other reasons you'd advise against it these days?

Not OP: Companies of any size are already enmeshed in the security/deployment/productivity flows offered by 'enterprise' software, which I don't see Linux as matching currently. Is there anything comparable to Office + $whateverEndpointProtection + $whateverImaging that Linux could use to make IT jobs easy/fast?

I can't get my brain to use a mac with a windows/Linux style keyboard

In keyboard preferences > modifier keys, remap so that alt is cmd and win/logo is option. I do this on several non-laptop Macs and it feels right enough.