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Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

lapwinglabs.com

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Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#141

Post by lelandbatey »

sanderjd wrote: post #130
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like PC's, Macs have entered the world of, what I call, "car guys." Car guys are always fiddling with things for a tiny performance or perceived security boosts without really thinking things through. In the Windows world you'll hear them tell you how you must disable the UAC, must install registry 'cleaners', must use $av_vendor_x because $av_vendor_y sucks, fiddle with some obscure registry change, use drivers…

This is a great analogy. In high school and college, I believe I was a Windows and then Linux "car guy". One of the things I liked when I (mostly) switched to OSX from Linux was that I no longer had to spend any time fiddling with stuff. I used to find it fun, now it just feels like there's way too many interesting things to be learning about and doing to spend any time tweaking crap on my computer!

I feel there's two levels of the constant fiddler, one where their fiddling is fruitful, one where the fiddling is not. The difference, I feel, basically comes down to how much you document, test, and automate what you do.

If treated like science instead of voodoo, messing with your computer becomes one of those "interesting things to be learning."

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#142

Post by mwfunk »

One of the most valuable skills someone can have, in my opinion, is not getting attached to really specific workflows or settings or tools. Instead I value being flexible and being able to adapt to whatever system I'm using.

In practice, this means that whenever I think about making some change to my software environment, my first impulse is to ask myself, "do I really have to change this?" This is a 180 from my old, college-age attitude, in which I not only wouldn't question the impulse, I would look for ways to automate making as many little changes and tweaks as possible. At the time I thought I was doing it because I was really increasing my productivity, when in fact I was just doing it because it was fun and fed into my self-image as a super l33t hacker guy. If anything, it was a distraction from whatever I was actually supposed to be working on.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#143

Post by oftenwrong »

habitue wrote: post #129
Igglyboo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love linux as much as the next guy, especially on the server, but definitely not as my daily driver. It's too unpolished, especially UI/UX wise. I'm hoping the year of the linux desktop will come eventually however.

The UX is amazing if you ignore gnome/kde etc, which are just imitations of windows and mac. I'd say the true linux UX is in tiling window managers. Just like the terminal and vim/emacs, tiling WMs have a steep learning curve and an amazing payoff where the computer becomes an extension of your will, rather than something you fight. I really recommend you try them. That being said, they don't look pretty, but they ma…

I disagree that tiling WMs necessarily have a steep learning curve. From experience I claim: Anybody can learn to use a WM like xmonad in its stock configuration in about 30 minutes, and be proficient enough to have a significant boost in productivity in a day or two.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#144

Post by adamnemecek »

leviathant wrote: post #110
swah wrote: post #46

Do any of you use Dock replacements? I'm faster with the Windows-style taskbar and uBar ( http://brawersoftware.com/products/ubar ) was the sponsor of the last episode of John Gruber's podcast.

Thanks for linking to this, I just picked up a copy. I switched to a MBP retina two months ago, and have made an effort to keep it fairly vanilla and figure out how to do things in OS X... without diving into OSXvsWIN, let's just say I'm super glad to have found this add on. It'd be even better if it updated to mimic Windows 8's taskbar (popup previews of windows, mostly), but I'll take what I can get for now. Easily…

You might also be interested in Witch [0] which lets you switch between windows of different apps as opposed to only switching between single apps or between windows of a single app.

[0]http://manytricks.com/witch/

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#145

Post by tptacek »

LowDog wrote: post #137

This is interesting given that OS X is anything but a hacker's paradise. The platform is very locked down, discourages tinkering and customization, and given how expensive Apple hardware is, this is the least accessible and most exclusive out of the three main players. Even worse is when developers make it the leading platform for their software, like in the case of Atom, where the Windows support is awful given that…

I'm confused by the idea that a platform with a published kernel development kit could be considered "locked down, discouraging tinkering".

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#146

Post by habitue »

oftenwrong wrote: post #143
habitue wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UX is amazing if you ignore gnome/kde etc, which are just imitations of windows and mac. I'd say the true linux UX is in tiling window managers. Just like the terminal and vim/emacs, tiling WMs have a steep learning curve and an amazing payoff where the computer becomes an extension of your will, rather than something you fight. I really recommend you try them. That being said, they don't look pretty, but they ma…

I disagree that tiling WMs necessarily have a steep learning curve. From experience I claim: Anybody can learn to use a WM like xmonad in its stock configuration in about 30 minutes, and be proficient enough to have a significant boost in productivity in a day or two.

You're right that it's not necessarily steep if you're used to using keyboard commands. But if you're used to doing everything with a mouse it might take some adjusting

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#147

Post by jason_slack »

I've been a long time Mac user and I think that software setup and updates has always been a bit clunky. Apple tries to make it easy with Software Update. You can always Homebrew to get missing pieces.

For me, I use CentOS for servers and I really wish that OS X had 'yum' (https://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/yum/)

It feels very easy for me to install, update, remove, etc

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#148

Post by sanderjd »

lelandbatey wrote: post #141
sanderjd wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great analogy. In high school and college, I believe I was a Windows and then Linux "car guy". One of the things I liked when I (mostly) switched to OSX from Linux was that I no longer had to spend any time fiddling with stuff. I used to find it fun, now it just feels like there's way too many interesting things to be learning about and doing to spend any time tweaking crap on my computer!

I feel there's two levels of the constant fiddler, one where their fiddling is fruitful, one where the fiddling is not. The difference, I feel, basically comes down to how much you document, test, and automate what you do. If treated like science instead of voodoo, messing with your computer becomes one of those "interesting things to be learning."

That's how I used to feel, and then (documentation and automation or not) it totally lost its interest for me! Creating software is just so much more interesting than configuring somebody else's. YMMV.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#150

Post by tvon »

archagon wrote: post #64
616c wrote: post #42

I do not wants to flame, but is there a reason people dislike Macports so much. I tried Homebrew when it was 1-2 years old, but stuck with ports bc it was so stable, compiles from source, and I never heard a serious problem. I heard the opposite complaint on the net, but almost all Macports hate was from many years before. I am the only one who chose not to rely on Homebrew!?

My understanding is that Homebrew does not clobber any system defaults — works with the OS, not against it. I could be wrong, though.

No, MacPorts is actually more sane in this regard because it build it's own set of dependencies instead of relying on anything the system provides. This makes it a more soundly designed tool, IMO.

Homebrew also recommends using /usr/local as the root which I think is just plain bad advice, but it is simple enough to change it to something else.

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