MacOS for the Linux Sysadmin?

[cah8429]

To preface, I am relatively experienced with MacOS. I already have an 11" MBA (previously had a 13" before selling it for an XPS) that I kick around with brew, iTerm2, and have attempted minimal work tasks on my MBA. I haven't spent anymore than an hour trying this stuff though because the HW is pretty weak and I don't like the screen for work.

With that out of the way, does anyone here use MacOS on the daily for administering *NIX systems professionally? Have you liked it? Things you've liked/disliked, have you been productive with your work? I'm revisiting a MacBook after seeing the 2020 MBA and already having been exposed to the creature comforts of using MacOS paired with my iPhone and iPad. My heaviest work would be virtualizing some Linux/BSD systems and some light compiling of Elixir projects, everything is SSH and editing stuff in Emacs as well as some photo editing when I can. Right now I am using Linux on a Thinkpad T480 and I haven't been too impressed compared to my previous laptops and I think I have to stop with the Linux laptop for work. I distro hop too often. I also have a "need" for MacOS because it works better with some of my media stuff and printing/scanning, and there are a couple environments where having a Mac has been helpful with my work and helping some folks.

Hope I posted in the right spot. Looking at the quad core, 512GB SSD, not sure if I should get the 16GB or not. I'm a pretty low memory user. I'll probably regret not getting 16GB one day though

 

[2984839]

Sounds like all you need is SSH and Emacs, so of course you can do all that on macOS. If you're going to be using VMs, get the 16 GB of RAM; otherwise it's completely unnecessary and a waste of money. Regarding software, I have used VMWare on macOS and it was good. I had no problems running OpenBSD and FreeBSD through it.

 

[cah8429]

Sounds like all you need is SSH and Emacs, so of course you can do all that on macOS. If you're going to be using VMs, get the 16 GB of RAM; otherwise it's completely unnecessary and a waste of money. Regarding software, I have used VMWare on macOS and it was good. I had no problems running OpenBSD and FreeBSD through it.

Thank you for that input. I'll likely stick with vbox like I have been. It has been very good at virtualizing the BSDs for me, and Illumos distros like OmniOS. I'll definitely reconsider and look at the 16GB. My needs are quite minimal for tooling. Most of the time anyways, if I can, I will often VPN into my home where I have a box that I have some VMs that I frequently run ansible playbooks and use ZFS to do my rollbacks.

 

[Mikael H]

With that out of the way, does anyone here use MacOS on the daily for administering *NIX systems professionally?

Yep, I've been doing it for nearly a decade in a mixed Windows and Linux environment, and haven't looked back. MacOS has enough of the productivity software and AD integration features so I don't become a complete recluse in my company, but also (sometimes with the aid of a ports or package manager) all the Unixy stuff I need to be efficient in my work. I could manage with a Ubuntu or Fedora laptop in combination with a Citrix client, but I really prefer to run productivity software natively and on my own computer.

As for the specifications, I wouldn't go below 4 cores, I might manage with 256 GB of disk, but I wouldn't want to, and I see no point in getting anything with less than 16 GB of RAM if there's any chance at all that you'll be running VMs locally.