After two wonderful years of Linux, mostly with Ubuntu (with a small visit to Fedora), I had the opportunity to switch to a Mac at work. It’s an old 2009 MBP inherited by Vuduchild who left us lately.

At my previous workplace, I had an iMac for about four years, and I’m ashamed to admit that about two and a half years out of those four, I was mainly on the dark windows side of the iMacs bootcamp (NEVER AGAIN). As for the last year and a half out of those four, I started to use Mac OS exclusivly, fell for git and vim, but still developed mainly DONT.NIET apps.

When I started to work at my current workplace, I switched to Linux, and more importantly, I started working with Python and learning a whole lot of *nix os, bash, zsh, you name it.

I got used to tweaking every last detail to my specific needs. Installing Ubuntu only from the bare minimal text mode, and only installing Gnome 3 and the parts I liked.

I started to “live” almost only in two worlds, the terminal (Helloooo tmux) and the browser.

Everything was in instant reach either with an apt-get, ppa or worst(!) case scenario, I’d download and compile it.

And things worked. Even worked smoothly.

Multiple screens worked just as I wanted in Gnome 3 (the secondary screen sticks apps to stay when you switch workspace).

Sure I had some problems, but nothing I wasn’t able to fix.

So why switch back to a Mac?

Curiosity and the fact that it’s shiny.

It’s that simple, I’m a tech geek that could not possibly say no to a new (old) toy.

The facts

When I left the Apple world, I had just installed “Snow Leopard” (After using “Leopard” mostly). I remember there was a new shiny thing called (home)brew I wanted to check out but never got to.

Now we’re up to “Mountain Lion”. Good thing I didn’t join back on {Grumpy,Nyan} cat. There’s an App Store (!).

The good

It’s smooth. Almost to smooth.

Brew and Brew cask Makes life a bliss. Hello apt-get. Never download dmg => Drag to applications again.

Might sound silly, but I’ve missed Google Chrome Canary.

Finally my Magic Trackpad works flawlessly, with VERY smooth gestures.

The Adium Icon. I know, it’s simply awesome.

The MEH

I miss the good old workspaces, having four explicit ones. That’s the way I configured Gnome 3.

Apple, it’s been two years, Y U NO PROPER WINDOW POSITION AND SIZE HANDLING?? (brew cask install slate fixes some of that though).

Montain Lions fullscreen feature isn’t really that helpful.

The WTF

I had to set LC_LANG? REALLYZ? Why did it take me two days to understand that this is what ruins my vim powerline in tmux?!?!?!

Multiple screen handling. Nuff said.

The basics that just doesn’t work. readline -f should work, Y U NO GNU?

The worst

Hey, I want to develop something -> sure no problem.

Download a 1.7 gb download of Xcode, after it’s done, open it, find the downloads tab and click command line tools, which takes some time to download as well.

Then you can install homebrew, and your life is shiny again.

It still annoys me that I need to walk around with a VGA adaptor, HDMI adaptor etc.

Da Summaryz

I came back to the Mac world a different user thanks to Linux.

It was still worth it moving back.

PS, The handcuffs are rather symbolic for moving back to a close{d,r} system..