MacBook

My boss recently replaced his old, dying Windows laptop. I'd observed his usage patterns a bit previously, and noted that he keeps a lot of stuff open for very long periods; he'd hibernate multiple times daily, not rebooting for several months on end. He'd regularly have his Windows task-bar 3-rows deep, completely full of running applications, which he avoided closing at all costs.

On my recommendation, he bought a MacBook. I figured it would get him the stability of a *nix (backed by Darwin, after all), and the UI would provide him a generally more efficient way to manage his work.

That worked so well for him that he decided the company would standardize on MacBooks. As a regular Linux user, I wasn't quite sure what to expect for my own workflow, but I was optimistic.

So far I've reinstalled the OS 3 times, in 2 days, due to various mistakes I've made in setting up the system to my liking. Learning a new system, for engineers (i.e. tinkerers) like me anyway, is bound to include a few mis-steps and whatever work required to recover from them. Fortunately the core OS X installation is reasonably comprehensive, far more complete than Windows could even hope to be.

After today's most recent re-installation, I decided it'd be nice to have these things documented for newcomers to the OS X environment. So here's what I've learned...

• If/when you reinstall, OS X must be installed on a case-INsensitive filesystem, since some applications will use different cases for the same paths (e.g. /Users/ vs /USERS/).
• Once you enable FileVault encryption, you should not change your user's "short name", since it prevents you from logging in again. Change your short name first, if necessary.

Customizations to make the transition from Ubuntu (etc) less shocking:

• In Finder, enable "Show Path Bar" under the View menu
• In Terminal, create a customized color profile with a transparent background, and set it as default.
• Install MacVim, The Unarchiver, Cyberduck, and Git

Other points of interest...

• Enabling Spaces (virtual desktops) is done in the System Preferences, and then switching between then with keyboard is a matter of Control + Left (right, up, down, 1, 2, etc)
• Copy and paste works in the terminal due to the Edit functions being accessed via the Command key, rather than Control
• There are no programs to let you view the contents of an archive - every utility I've found, including the built-in ones, require that you extract it entirely first, as far as I can tell... (except `tar` on command-line)
• Filesystem support on the Mac is limited - it's pretty strictly Mac-format (HFS+) volumes and FAT32 or exFAT. Open-source filesystems like ext3/4 are not supported, from what I see, which is quite disappointing... and requires that I set up a Linux virtual machine in VirtualBox, in order to work on the external HDDs I usually use.

So far the learning curve has been notable, but not disastrous, and I think I like the Mac experience, in spite of its shortcomings. We'll see how this pans out...