OS X isn't a huge cultural shock. It's mostly getting your head wrapped around the dock and some hotkeys, and it mostly Just Works. I made the switch a couple years back after over a decade of hardcore Linux or BSD on the desktop.

Once you get a terminal to your liking, it should make things less obtuse and let you get a feel for the operating system.

Ditto. In fact, I switched because I grew envious of how much easier everything was to do on the MBAs used by my daughter and wife than on my Ubuntu laptop. I'd sit at one of their machines, use the trackpad for a moment, just a moment, and miss the gestures on my DV7.

One day, in a moment of frustration, when Libre or Open or Braindead Office got too much in my way, I slammed the lid down, yelled "I'll be back in an hour", had my own MBA set up and working to my liking 90 minutes later, and haven't looked back.

I did the same and actually felt kind of bad that we live in a place where we are able to go kill two grand just like that.

However, I felt bad for only about two minutes, and then forgot about that until I read your comment.

sigh

Although I don't use OS X more than a few hours per month, this person has it right. The key thing to keep in mind is that OS X is UNIX. Sure, the command-line tools it comes with don't always support GNU extensions -- fine.

And the package mangement is iffy, at least as far as GUI applications go. For the command-line, a lot of people swear by package managers like Homebrew, probably because they also help resolve the "no GNU extensions" problem. While I don't use OS X enough to have any experience with this, I think this would be the key area for me to investigate to before I'd be comfortable using OS X as an everyday system. The rest is just getting comfortable with the keybindings/modifier key layout.

To elaborate on the modifier keys, from the inside out: Command key for GUI shortcuts (⌘C, ⌘V); Option (same as Alt); and Control. Both Option and Control are rarely used by themselves (though the Option key can be used for special characters and the Control key can be used for Emacs-style editing shortcuts) and can pass through in Terminal -- this is where the separate Command key really shines.

Oh, and the window manager. Coming from Linux, one of the strangest things about OS X is probably the application-oriented focus model (rather than window-oriented). As the parent mentions, this manifests itself in both the dock (clicking on an icon in the dock raises the whole application) and the hotkeys (Command-Tab to switch applications, Command-Backquote to switch windows within an application). This takes some getting used to, but like with the keyboard shortcuts, it should only take a day or two. On the other hand, the OS X implementation of workspaces is very good, especially if you decide to run a VM.

So to summarize, OS X is still a real UNIX system with a real command-line (and development tools are literally one click away -- type gcc or make or git into Terminal, and then click Install). It just has a slightly odd desktop environment on top, but that shouldn't be too hard to get used to.

Why are you being forced to use OSX? Why not just install your distro of choice on it?

Other than that, use iTerm2[0], Homebrew[1] and Cask[2], this'll kickstart your CLI env in the right direction.

  [0] http://iterm2.com/  
  [1] http://brew.sh/  
  [2] http://caskroom.io/

I never understand the instant dismissal of the stock Terminal.app

Yes it's not the most featureful terminal emulator in existence but it's well put together and works just fine.

For me, the main reason I moved to iTerm2 was because terminal only had support for 16 colors (I think ... it was 4-5 years ago). So I just use iTerm now out of habit. I didn't have any other issues with Terminal.app.

And I suspect most others have similar reasons.

I hate on Terminal.app because it's less configurable, has some really questionable key defaults (such as subsuming all of the home/end/insert keys for the window, not the apps in the terminal), lacks the ability to do tmux-esque split panes, and it lacks the ability to change mouse bindings.

It's an OK default, but for real work it drives me batty to keep hitting the limitations it imposes. Sure, I could rebind everything and move to tmux in the terminal itself, but why, when iTerm2 is free and still frequently updated?

The tmux integration offered by iTerm2 is also pretty handy if you spend any amount of time on remote servers.

I use the TotalTerminal addon for the stock terminal for a slide-out-from-the-side terminal that I can leave up and not have get in the way. It's really handy.

I switched to Iterm2 a couple of years back, my main reason back then was that Terminal.app was missing a lot of features which I had gotten used to when using Linux (Terminator it was, I believe).

Terminal displays [x] for some characters in my shell prompt for some reason. It also misses iTerms Fn left and Fn right start/end of line shortcuts.

+1 on brew and cask. Also, xcode, Tunnelblick, git, etc.

Be sure to change your default path to put /usr/local/bin first, so that all of the brewy and other goodness you install is actually picked up - and, if you install a more up to date bash, be sure to change your shell: System Preferences, Users and Groups, "two-finger" or "right click" on your name in the list on the left, advanced options....

I'm happy with the default terminal, works well enough.

EDIT: Not sure whether you will also need to change the default shell used by Terminal: start Terminal, Terminal, Preferences....

"Forced" might be a strong word, and I'm new to non-startups so I don't know what kind of admin lock down is on the box. So I'm trying to do as I'm told until I have a reason I can't...

In my (albeit somewhat limited) experience with different dev. companies, it's no (big) issue to use the distro that you're most comfortable with. For me this is OSX, but I've also ran Linux (Ubuntu/Mint) in a primarily Windows oriented company. The only "issue" was that I was my own tech-support in the case where something might not work.

Try and keep an open mind.

I used to be a die-hard Arch user who would never consider even buying a mac. Was given a macbook at an internship and haven't looked back... Well, I have. I love it though. Give it a month to start getting productive though.

As Revell said, Homebrew is a must-have. (Also fish[1], but that applies to Linux too).

[1] http://fishshell.com/

I've been looking at alternative shells a while back and Fish looked interesting indeed. What made you choose this one over regular Bash and ZSH? Also, how do you deal with incompatibility issues (if any) and different environments (f.e. when SSH-ing to a server)?

I only use Fish interactively. It has really nice autocompletion (which I'm pretty sure reads my mind), and cycling tab completion which I like. Also oh-my-fish[1] is awesome.

Last I checked it was maintained by one guy, meaning support isn't always great.

I still use bash for scripting (can't get away from it) and when compatibility is an issue.

[1] https://github.com/bpinto/oh-my-fish

Hi There, I work at a startup and we all get Mac Latops, I installed VirtualBox and allocated 100Gigs and 4G of Ram to a Linux Mint virtual machine on my Mac OSX instance and it works great. I get so use all the features of the mac and I can do all my work on my linux machine. You shouldn't have a problem if you use a virtual machine.

Good luck in your new job.

Some general tips for OS X (subjective of course)

- Spaces are akin to Workspaces (Three finger left/right swipe) and are great for running VM's fullscreen.

- Use gestures (Two finger/Three finger Left/Right/Up/Down swipe or grab/spread)

- Spotlight (Command-Space) is handy

- Give Safari a fair try but you mightn't like it (I switched from Chrome last year and am loving it)

- I never use Launchpad (Grab gesture)

Alfred is even better than Spotlight alone, I have it mapped to option-A and I never launch apps any other way.

Thanks dysfunction, good tip. I haven't looked at Alfred in a long time. Out of interest, for you, what differentiates Alfred from Spotlight in Yosemite? Having a quick look, Alfred having 1Password is excellent. Spotlight though is great for an instant Calculator and Currency conversion. Does Alfred support these OOTB? It looks pretty flexible, could I write something to integrate these?

Do you have the powerpack? Is it useful?

I've been running into the same issue since last week. (Linux user being forced to switch to OSX)

All the terminal thoughts mentioned above are good although there are still some weird BSD idiosyncrasies that you'll have to cope with (cp missing the link switch, find requiring an explicit target, etc) Ive also been using tmux and it makes the default terminal a bit more bearable.

Here are my biggest gripes thus far switching from Debian Jessie with KDE:

- The window management is laughably bad in OSX. I installed two extensions (divvy and cinch) to add window docking functionality which helps slightly but they are free only in that they pop up requests to pay every once in a while. Apparently there are some better extensions but they cost money and its my opinion that my workflow is my employers problem, not my monetary responsibility.

- Using virtual desktops on OSX after becoming accustomed to the Linux implementation sucks. Its is far less featured than KDE (at least out of the box) and a lot of the extensions to make it better seem to cost money. The desktop switching order is linear and it randomly changes the ordering on you while you are using it. There is also no concept of docking a window across desktops or opening a window on multiple. In fact, when you maximize a window it switches desktops on you.

- The firmware for the thunderbolt display is terrible. The USB ports keep shutting off randomly requiring you to unplug and replug the thunderbolt. Doing this totally screws up all your window sizes and placements. I generally have a full screen terminal on a virtual desktop and it causes it to underscan the window until I close and reopen it. Extremely irritating.

- I don't really like the focus management in OSX but this is more a minor UX irritation. My issue involves clicking on a text field inside a different application and instead of having the text field gain focus, the application gains focus but not the internal text field. Many a time have I entered text into the wrong entry field in the browser.

All this being said, Apple hardware is really excellent. Some of the peripherals are a little bit too 'designed' and not as functional but they are not unmanageable. The software needs some help and I still may switch to Linux in a VM at some point. For now I figure that I might as well give OSX a chance before I completely bail on it. The Apple fanboys would never let me hear the end of it.

Regarding window management: I use an excellent little free app called ShiftIt (https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt) that makes window management way better. Uses maybe 20MB of RAM and plays nice with multiple displays.

Interesting, thanks. Im going to give it a try.

Spectacle (www.spectacleapp.com) is a free, open-source window layout manager. You can customise any of its keyboard shortcuts and even install an Alfred 2 workflow for it.

My biggest problem moving to OSX (from mostly windows) was the idiotic apple UK keyboard layout (US keyboards might not be such a big deal, so this stuff might not apply) so I found myself having to download a regular UK keyboard layout (http://liyang.hu/osx-british.xhtml), and Karabiner (https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/) to make OSX behave properly with my normal keyboard with the pageup/down and home/end keys

Once I sorted that out it was a relatively pleasant experience.

You might also want to install SmoothMouse (http://smoothmouse.com/) which tames OSX's ferocious mouse acceleration curve, and reduces the delay between moving the mouse and the screen updating to be imperceptible

+1 for running dev environments in virtual machines.

I tend to run them headless (Shift-Click in VirtualBox) mapping my dev folder using samba (Command-K in Finder maps to a samba drive) and ssh into the VM's CLI using iTerm.

It's a great way to retain environments at the end of projects.

Would love to hear your thoughts after a month? The good and bad obviously...

Keep in mind that OS X is POSIX-compliant, but it's a customized BSD, not Linux. A lot of stuff works the same (and it'll compile most of your code without issue), and it's certainly a lot closer to what you're used to than a Win system (how that's POSIX compliant boggles me), but a lot of Linux-specific stuff isn't where you think it is.

You'll need to find alternatives to /sys and /proc. Services are managed with launchctl, which is kind of a pain. X Window support is there but clunky. And so on.

While you're living in a console, working on your own code, though, things are close enough to forget about most of the time.

Best of luck!

> Keep in mind that OS X is POSIX-compliant, but it's a customized BSD, not Linux.

And that if you're used to BSD ... it's weird as BSDs go. (Just little things, but I found it slightly jarring in practice.)

echoing others I suppose, but I'll also recommend running a Linux VM as your dev environment.

at my dayjob I'm using an iMac and managing my virtual machines using Vagrant which loads an image of an Ubuntu Linux machine (same distro as used on our production servers). its a convenient setup in several ways. This keeps my dev environment a close match to the prod environment, and it lets me install packages quickly and easily for development using the usual Linux tools. I also get to continue using the superb desktop interface that OSX provides.

A MBP running OSX is almost as good as a Linux laptop but with a better GUI. Just be happy they didn't give you a windows laptop. In the corporate world you would have to be a unicorn or rockstar to get a MBP. If you were a Linux sysadmin you might get away with running a Linux laptop but very doubtful. I love my Linux and my iMac 27inch no problem running brew to install things on OSX. Your MBP will be able to run vagrant and virtual-box which is Linux anyway.

I use Linux as my desktop but have an Air for traveling. Switching between them is not so bad. :-)

Lots of great advice here, but I still remember being surprised that on OS X (and BSDs I think?) a trailing slash in a directory name is significant, e.g. here:

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2005111210000737...

Keep that in mind when running `cp` etc.

Its a unix OS... it works the same. Some commands vary a bit but its largely the same. If you hate it, ssh into a linux box.

Is dual-boot not an option? Or... if you're not allowed to do that, you could always use a live-cd or live-usb version of your favorite linux distro. Might run a bit a slower, but maybe a live-usb running off of a SSD drive with a thunderbolt connection would be fast enough.

You'll probably transition fairly easily. Mac OS X is a customized BSD, so although it has differences with respect to Linux, it's also not that foreign either.

* Remap Command and Control if your fingers can't adjust to the change in shortcuts. System Preferences > Keyboard > Modifier Keys

* If you want TAB to work with all widgets (which is what makes sense to me): System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Full Keyboard Access: All Controls

* Not sure where a menu command lives? Search for it in the Help menu's Search field.

* Spotlight is a pretty good launcher, calculator, and more. Command+Space is your friend.

* If you need additional keyboard remapping support: [Karabiner](https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/) and [Seil](https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/seil.html.en)

* Time Machine is your friend.

* Grab [iTerm2](http://iterm2.com). Apple's terminal is nice, but iTerm2 has so much more. If you use tmux, iTerm2 has support for that, too.

* Install [Homebrew](http://brew.sh) for package management.

* [TotalSpaces 2](http://totalspaces.binaryage.com) gives you even more control over how your spaces are arranged, animations between them, and keystrokes for accessing them. Can't live without it anymore.

* Window management sucks. I use [Moom](http://manytricks.com/moom/)

* I've given up on Apple's Mail.app. I use Gmail, and [AirMail 2](http://airmailapp.com) does the trick for me.

* Use virtual machines where appropriate (VirtualBox, VMWare, Parallels, ...)

* Install your preferred shell if Bash isn't your cup of tea. I use [Fish](http://fishshell.com)

* [F.lux](https://justgetflux.com) is your eye's best friend.

* [Bartender](http://www.macbartender.com) keeps all those pesky menu items under control

* If you want to really customize your gestures and the like, [BetterTouchTool](http://www.bettertouchtool.net) can be useful. For awhile I had my "Windows+E" muscle memory tied to launching a new Finder window until I got over it.

Good luck! Give it about a week or so (if that), and you should be comfortable in your new environment.

Just run linux in a VM.

Install VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox, give it most of your RAM and hard disk space. Now run Linux on that. That's your best bet for sticking to Linux for most of your work.

You can use browser on the Mac if you want to be able to use the latest and greatest firefox/Chrome but for coding and software nothing beats Linux. All the OS X brew/ports etc are just not good enough compared to apt-get.

You can run the VM using VirtualBox in background mode too and then just ssh to it using the Terminal.app or iTerm.app on OS X.

Copy-paste works really well on iTerm so you can copy-paste links from your OS X browser like Firefox/Chrome to the ssh terminal and use it in case you download software using wget/curl sometimes.

For email, Thunderbird/Mail.app both work really well on OS X and that should be good enough unless you want mutt, which you can then use from your Linux VM.

Most likely your production environment is Linux, esp. if you're in a company that is giving you Macs so most likely web development. Even better if you mimic your production environment in your VM and develop on that instead of developing on a non-standard environment like OS X and then hoping stuff works in production. (Tons of devs do this and it makes no sense.)

Personally, I'd suggest using something like Vagrant instead - more lightweight in my opinion, in terms of being able to instantly destroy & create a new one with 2 commands.

Although, saying this, there's no reason the OP can't just install Linux over (or alongside) OS X.

I'm curious as to what makes Vagrant more light weight as it still needs some type of VM software.

Its more the discipline that Vagrant creates in letting you repeatedly generate the same environment.