Hello everyone, so at my new job I'll get a MacBook snd until #AsahiLinux supports the security processor I will be a good girl and use #macOS. For someone coming from a setup mixing #ArchLinux, #Fedora#Silverblue / #CoreOS, even some #NixOS and does weird stuff with #podman sometimes: Are there some general recommendations from other #Linux exiles (I use vanilla #GNOME nowadays mostly, so maybe not too much lol?)
I currently plan to use the mac as mostly a shiny looking physical terminal + some vscode/vi, that should be mostly trivial. As such I'm mostly worried about things like a proper keyboard layout (I use us altgr-intl, caps mapped to ctrl, tab to esc).
Otherwise I'm thinking of grabbing #Firefox and activating Lockdown Mode. I've seen nix-home and will try setting that up for day-to-day tasks/tools.
Coming from Evolution, is Apple Mail decent? Any other "classic" GNOME tool I'd miss? Currently looking for trustworthy replacements for Nick's YT downloader, Warp (Wormhole GUI), Frog (OCR tool), Obfuscate (picture obfuscator/censoring tool), Characters (searching through Unicode symbols/emoji). Anything else I may take for granted but is different? ¹
¹ I already know the cli differences w.r.t. bsd based tools, but my personal scripts are mostly posix/ksh8x compliant anyway :D
@ljrk probably on your list already but install homebrew as a package manager https://brew.sh also hammerspoon https://www.hammerspoon.org which lets you lua script the desktop and create gnomelike key bindings for example.
@Ric Ohhh, thanks, I didn't know hammerspoon! That does look neat!
I've learned to stay away from homebrew, it's one of the most terrible package managers (well, maybe after npm) in my experience and broke on my various hackintosh VM setups too often :-p
I try to replicate something similar but more sane with nix-home, but I've got no prior experience with that :D
@fiee@ljrk@Ric Wasn't picking a fight, just wanted to know. I'm new to Homebrew and would like to avoid any issues or at least understand potential pitfalls. I am not familiar with MacPorts at all.
@fiee@Ric I've got a lot of Mail archived so hopefully that works good enough (?) for me :D
I'll look into the YT-tool and Ukelele, my layout is heavily English based since it's a lot easier for C programming (IMHO), with just some altgr-combinations for the Umlauts. I still want to do a tex-based compose-layout (so you can do compose+\sum to get a capital math sigma) but I'm not sure whether something like compose even exists on macOS :/
@fiee Dead keys is something I usually disable ASAP as quite some tools use the accent characters and similar as part of their syntax and I can't be bothered hitting the same key twice :D
But that's simply a different focus. The compose stuff I want because I don't want to remember a lot of keybinds but just type my LaTeX commands everywhere and get proper Unicode symbols
@ljrk You've already got nix in your toolkit. Ignore the homebrew/macports noise entirely and just rig up what you need with nix - copying over your preferred environment. Worth noting that home manager on macOS also does user services.
Honestly Mail.app was a nicer experience ten years ago vs. today, but it's a measure of good enough still. Coming from Evolution it should be decently familiar. Otherwise there's still Thunderbird which can be de-cluttered just as well here as in its Linux dist.
@ljrk Keyboard mods are quite doable - there's a good number of third party solutions to make it easier, but don't underestimate the built-in options. In some ways the shortcut remapping beats what Plasma gives you - specifically by making per-app overrides a breeze. The built-in substitutions are very nice as well.
Give the accessibility options a browse as well - there's a good amount of potentially useful stuff in there.
@AngryAnt Thank you so much for your recommendations! Right now my Nix stuff is quite bare-bones but I'll probably use this occasion to expand that as the alternatives like brew are much worse than on Arch/Fedora :'D
I've switched away from TB due to it's cluttered interfaces, yup :D But also because Evolution at the time had much better built-in Exchange support, unfortunately required by my employer.
I'll definitely browse through the keyboard settings/shortcuts and accessibility options, the latter are often impressively useful. E.g., I use GNOME's "Large Text" option as a poor people's 150% fractional scaling without the issues this often entails (blurry things) -- and anyway, text is the only thing that I really need to scale up. Icons may stay small.
@Atemu Great, that sounds exactly like my use case! I'll definitely check out your recommendation w.r.t. spaces.
I'm in the habit of enabling lockdown even on our iPad, the whole bs of zero click exploits left me wary. And while I'm probably not the biggest target, I do work in infosec :-p Also, I really didn't find it to be annoying at all, indeed, in Safari it disabled loading certain 3rd party scripts, something which I'd have done anyway.
I'll look into using the GNOME stuff on mac & how well it integrates, I'm not that picky if there's a more mac-like app I'm fine using it.
BSD cli suites me fine, in that respect I'm a really old fart when it comes to that stuff and my personal shell utils are pretty POSIX compliant anyway, I rarely use the GNU extensions.
No decent free clipboard manager available (there are some, but not good enough for me)
Keyboard ignores input while the desktop-switching animation is happening. You will lose keystrokes when you think too fast 🙄
A strange option to rearrange desktops when clicking a notification was on by default for me, I took 1.5 year until someone around here told me it could be disabled in the settings.
@ljrk oh yes there's that! It's a weird thing indeed. You could install a helper app to add some shortcuts; I have rectangle installed and that gives a convenient maximise shortcut.
I've never looked into the spoon thing mentioned in another answer. I used to not have any rights on my machine but now I can install stuff so I'll have a look at that too, it might solve more limitations.
@PierricD@ljrk In accessibility settings you can opt to "reduce motion" which among other things kills the desktop switching animation. Generally there's a lot of good stuff in accessibility.
@AngryAnt@ljrk I'll try that, thank you. I don't mind a bit of eye candy tbh. The gnome desktop transitions, iirc, are quite similar to macos's and I like that; but in gnome the keyboard doesn't get "disconnected" while the eye candy is running so one can keep the flow going.
@AngryAnt@ljrk Actually "reduce motion" replaces the sliding by a fade-in transition which lasts more or less for the same time and also inhibits the keyboard while happening. 🤷♂️
@ljrk Also coming from Linux+XFCE, I've never gotten used to MacOS' desktop environment. Some things are decent and others, like Finder, is a permanent PITA.
Fortunately, whatever is missing or not to your liking you can get it thru the Homebrew package manager. That's been a lifesaver for me.
@ljrk I use both Evolution and Apple Mail. I've been using Evolution as my primary mail client on Linux since 2006 and Apple Mail for the past three years. I have no complaints.
@peteorrall That's good news! I really love Evolutions' integration and Apple's PIM stuff is supposed to be better so it'd be disheartening if I couldn't take advantage of that for Mail. Glad it'll most likely will work out :3
@peteorrall Hehe, my first encounter with Macs were the colorful CRT ones, but I've never been much of a Mac user at any time.
Yeah, Evolution works fine enough for me and has a decent UX. But what you describe, no matter how dated, matches the experiences of others here, so I'm hopeful in that regard! :)
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