Working on a Mac

For the last few months, ever since I started my current internship in late January, I have been using a Mac at work. This may seem like a fairly minor and common occurrence, but this is the first time that I have ever used a Mac for more than a few minutes, and the first time I have ever had to develop on and for an Apple device.

Specifically I have used two devices:

• 2013 Mac Pro (the old Trashcan one)
• 2017 Macbook Pro

The switch was due to issues that I had with the Mac Pro, which I'll get to in a minute.

For comparison my own personal devices are a custom desktop PC and a Lenovo Thinkpad T470s. Both are running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma, and I am very happy with them both.

2013 Mac Pro

I actually rather liked this machine. It was compact, quiet, and very powerful. Technically in the scheme of Macs it's on the dated side, but it worked wonderfully for my needs.

But there was one problem: It crashed. Increasingly so. At first it was once a week (strangely usually on Wednesday) but then it was suddenly three times in one day and it was impeding my productivity enough that it had to be replaced.

I never did figure out why it was crashing. Part of me thinks it was overheating, but I never found proof of that. The system log just said that the system just... crashed.

2017 Macbook Pro

After the Trashcan started crashing more than I could work around, I switched it out for this machine, which the IT department apparently had lying around. My coworkers were actually quite enthusiastic about this switch, with those who used the same machine calling it "wonderful" and such.

To be honest I liked the Trashcan more, even with the crashes.

Both machines have poor thermals, but on the Macbook this is a much larger problem since it is a fairly thin laptop. The fan curve has Apple's seemingly signature style, where it seems to only exist in "off" and "full blast" states. Even with that the machine gets hot to the touch and thermal-throttles easily.

Battery life is also rather mediocre, but I give it a pass since this is a second-hand machine that has seen heavy use, so the battery has likely degraded to some extent.

The screen is pretty nice. Though the color profile is a bit cold for my taste. I've tried fiddling with this in the settings, but I could make neither heads nor tails of the various color profiles available.

Having only 2 USB-C ports and a headphone jack is one of the signature traits of modern Mac laptops. As a casual observer I considered this annoying, but I didn't really internalize just how much of a problem this really is. I cannot plug in Ethernet or a mouse without a dongle, which I don't have, and plugging the laptop in to charge takes up a whole port. Which when there are only two is a big problem.

Not to mention that one of the two ports on this laptop ceased working. It can accept power... but that's it. It will not output to a display or otherwise perform any of the things one usually expects from a USB port.

And finally, last and certainly least, is the keyboard. The infamous Butterfly Keyboard.

I can't say I like it. To be honest I think I would prefer having no keyboard and at all and typing on a flat touch-screen. The Butterfly keyboard is exactly the right depth to be awful. The keys are entirely unsatisfying to press, there is no tactile feedback other than the thwack of the key bottoming out after a millimeter or so. It is simply unpleasant and uncomfortable to type on. I pine for the long travel and tactile bump of my Thinkpad.

MacOS

MacOS (or OSX) itself is actually quite nice. The general desktop is consistent and well thought out, the settings are flexible and allow for a good amount of customization.

And the default applications are fantastic. Some like Mail and Calendar are exactly what I think a pre-installed application should be. Simple, consistent, and well integrated with the rest of the system. Finder is also very nice, powerful and with a lot of great features.

Spotlight is a key feature of MacOS, and it's something I've come to use very heavily. I'm thankful for Krunner on KDE Plasma since that mirrors it so closely.

Overall I would describe MacOS as a very well put together operating system on the surface level. It is probably the best desktop-tailored OS available. However I am still a Linux fanboy at heart, but that's just me.

Developing on a Mac

Developing on a Mac is generally an... alright experience. It's not as nice as developing on Linux, but it's a lot better than developing on Windows.

Homebrew is a capable package manager, and I have relatively few complaints about it. I have not tried MacPorts or Nix on MacOS yet, and I honestly don't have much reason to other than curiosity.

Having a proper terminal and shell experience out-of-the-box is quite nice, and iTerm2 is a very good terminal emulator as well. The choice of ZSH as the default shell for MacOS Catalina and on is an interesting one, but I always switch to FISH anyway.

The trouble only starts when you are trying to develop for MacOS. Apple's vendor lock-in means that attempting to build for MacOS on anything other than a MacOS device is an exercise in futility. And it constantly seems like if you're not using XCode then the system is fighting you. And as an Emacs user this is... frustrating.

Verdict

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading. This has rambled on for quite a while...

Overall I find using and developing on a Mac to be a reasonably pleasant experience, and one that I am content with seeing that it's a workplace-mandated decision.

But compared to developing on and for a Linux or BSD machine, it's just not as pleasant. But of course that may just be my personal bias. I've been a full-time Linux user for years now, and I've gotten very comfortable with it.