Posts » Goodbye Mac
I’ve been a Mac user since 2003, at the beginning a devoted, lately a more pragmatic one, but one nonetheless. As you may know I love simple things and Mac always filled that role rather well. However over the years (spanning way before 2003) I’ve always been a *nix user too, setting up servers, doing computation work on my University cluster, or working on Mac OS X. So the direction I took early this year was pretty straightforward: let’s switch to Linux.
So I did, and inspired by functional programming and declarative approach to system management, I installed NixOS on my Mac. After some initial hurdles I had it up and running and it felt like home - same bash terminal, finally a native Docker runtime, git for tracking all I do, Sublime for code editing, and Firefox for the Web. I picked i3 as a window manager, scripted it a bit, and everything looks good so far. That’s all I need as a web developer.
The whole setup ran fine on a MacBook, but I very rarely need portability of a laptop these days. That’s where I got an idea of buying a desktop computer or actually building one from scratch. I ordered parts over the last two months and early this week assembled a nice, modern system based on the latest AM4 platform from AMD. After syncing all my data I was up and running in my dear *nix world.
Here’s to the new beginnings.
p.s. My NixOS setup is open source on GitHub.