I’ve been transitioning to Linux recently and have been forced to use github a lot when I hadn’t much before. Here is my assessment.
Every github project is named something like dbutils, Jason’s cool photo picker, or jibbly, and was forked from an abandoned project called EHT-sh (acronym meaning unknown) originally made by frederick lumberg, forked and owned by boops_snoops and actively maintained by Xxweeb-lord69xX.
There are either 3 lines of documentation and no releases page, or a 15 page long readme with weekly releases for the last 15 years and nothing in between. It is either for linux, windows, or both. If it’s for windows, they will not specify what platforms it runs on. If it’s for Linux, there’s a 50% chance there are no releases and 2 lines of commands showing how to build it (which doesn’t work on your distro), but don’t worry because your distro has it prepackaged 1 version out of date and it magically appears on flatpak only after you’ve installed it by other means. Everything is written in python2. It is illegal to release anything for Mac OS on github.
As someone who works fairly extensively with all three major platforms… You’re definitely wrong about macOS here. Almost everything on GitHub that works on Linux also works on Mac, aside from GUI applications which are often more OS dependent. The readme pages often just lump Mac and Linux together as they can be pretty similar, especially for things written for interpreted languages (python) where it’s often literally the same.
I recently bought a MacBook Air M1 and I came at it from a classic “ThinkPad with Fedora on it” Linux nerd perspective. I got given a Mac at work a couple of years ago, and I warmed to it. I agree that Macs are great tools for DevOps work. I used to think they were just for posers but I’ve been converted.
Just home brew everything?
I home brew installed most stuff, yeah. I’m lucky in that I don’t need a whole lot of stuff installed. Just a couple of JetBrains IDE’s, a couple of browsers, iTerm2 and a handful of popular CLI utilities.
I really miss a consistent package manager on Windows when I have to use it for work. The website download and install method just grinds on me. I guess some of this is still prevalent on Mac and for CLI stuff I guess home-brew comes in.
Do you miss any customizability?
Yep. I’m Linux at home but macOS all day at work. My employer won’t let us use Linux workstations (despite everything I work on being Linux…). Both are vastly superior to Windows.
My employer is the same and it drives me crazy. wInDoWs iS mOrE sEcUrE! Yet literally all of our software runs in Linux environments. We even tell people to build in Windows but target Linux. I had a M2 Max at one point because I finally convinced them to at least let me have that and was forced back to Windows because our stupid MDM software only really works properly on Windows. :(
Is it because they can’t run their spyware on a Linux machine ?
Of course.
Came here to say this. Just get home brew up and running. One you have gcc and your other basic tools installed, there’s very few Linux guides that won’t work on a Mac. A couple shell tools have different names, but that’s about it.
Between homebrew and nix, the amount of foss macs can run out of the box is pretty close to some generic Ubuntu (nixpkgs is technically the largest repo out there, but not all of the nixpkgs are available on mac).
And that’s just regarding stuff that’s distributed pre-built with a package manager. Truth is, if you’re down to build stuff from source, you can just follow the Linux guide and everything will work right out of the box far more often than not.