Linux

To make the desktop experience bearable: AltTab, Forklift, Rectangle, Ukelele, DisplayControl, 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.

Absolutely get the Brew and Port package managers. You are gonna feel much better and at home with them. Check company policies for third party software.

Watch the intro video when you first turn on the mac book. REALLY.

If you miss it, or whatever, find the current vid to watch. Before I did that, it felt like the touchpad was insane, and just doing random shit.

And get iTerm2. Its better than stock.

From there, its just a UNIX with a funny window manager.

xscreensaver of course! Note that this is not an option on Windows---jwz hates Microsoft, and any xscreensaver port to Windows is against his wishes.

I use yabai and sketchybar for a tiling WM feel. It's nowhere as nice as my preferred i3, but it's ok. Unfortunately it often breaks with major OS updates, so I'm sure to hold back updating my system until yabai is working.

IIRC sshfs will work on macOS but it's more work to install. Worth it if allowed by your IT policies and your work can benefit from it.

Vim, tmux, and the usual *NIX stuff you might want.

The coreutils are not the GNU coreutils you typically find on a Linux system, so you may find a few differences. I believe sed is slightly different, and the flags for ls must be before the filename arguments, but I've found it's mostly silly stuff like that (I used zsh before using macOS, so no problem there).

Also check out Nix. It's a pretty weird package manager but has a lot of packages. Also allows you to configure your entire macOS install declaratively with a text-based config file, if you're into that.

Use brew to update the core Unix utils such as bash, tar, sed, etc to the latest GNU releases. The mac has really outdated BSD-based versions.

keka
https://github.com/aonez/Keka

I guess you'll not be able to install whatever you want because company policy. I suggest you to learn what you may and must not do with the workstation first. For the most of the software you'll need an admin access to allow a special permission.

rectangle app

Home-manager.

Someone has made an MIT licensed open source file manager for MacOS, not that I've used it myself:
https://github.com/abdullahguch/folderium

I think that a good way to approach the OS switch is to focus on "what tools does this OS have and how do they work?" and figure out a new workflow from that instead of trying to bring your old workflow over.

1. VM, 2) docker (macos runs docker inside a VM, u run KDE inside of it as a fat container), 3) MacOS specific tooling - this will depend on what they let you install. homebrew is a start, nix env also exists.

https://asahilinux.org/