Greetings. I’m not sure if should ask this here or on a MacOS specific community, mods feel free to remove this post if necessary.

Basically I’m getting a new SRE job. At my current (future ex) SRE job, i had all the freedom to have a Archlinux KDE workstation, that is incredibly comfortable to use as i’m also dailying it on my personal workstation.

However this new company gave me the workstation choice between either a Windows machine without WSL (yes i know), either a Macbook m4. (Edit for clarity : i cannot change the OS because of central management software)

I chose the macbook for the battery life and being able to keep it at least Unix (with zsh always on hand), but i have no prior experience on using mac os.

What are the various software that you would recommend to a KDE user to have on its mac ? I know only about brew.sh the new apple container thingy, and some various fan control app. Is there a way to have Dophin as file manager, or something similar ? (IE a file manager with an integrated folder-following terminal ? General tips and tricks you may want to share?

Thank you for your attention and have a great day

  • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
    4·
    2 hours ago

    To make the desktop experience bearable: AltTab, Forklift, Rectangle, Ukelele, MonitorControl, Amphetamine, Firefox, Thunderbird, qView and duti to set the latter three up as the defaults.

    As a package manager I’m pretty happy with nix-darwin, now I get all the CLI tools there, and what isn’t packaged, like wireshark for example, I get through my nix-controlled homebrew.

    Coming from a Linux userland you might want to replace some coreutil packages with their GNU variants. I ran into one case where the GNU grep was much faster than the BSD version preinstalled in macOS for example.

    What I haven’t found a good solution to yet is Filesystem support. Both NTFS and ext4 are missing. I currently have a Linux VM just for that. I think Paragon sells a driver, have been meaning to look into it more, but haven’t.

    Edit: To be fair to macOS the App called Preview is a pretty good PDF reader in my view.

    PS: If you ever need to use dd on macOS, be aware that there are /dev/rdisk handles instead of /dev/disk for the un-buffered access. Its significantly faster for dd shoveling.

    PPS: You will probably have to turn off what they call “natural” scroll. macOS inverts the default for some reason.