Switching to Ubuntu from Mac

Cristhian Ferrufino — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 10:50:56 +0000

As frontends, It’s time for us to move on into something better… bye-bye, macOS!

Why on earth would you do this?

Well, let’s start with I used to have a MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2017) at work, not the greatest piece of hardware ever produced by Apple, but at some point, I was “ok” for me to work with it only when I purchase a Magic Keyboard and Mouse.

Then during the lock-down period here in Berlin, meanwhile I was on “Home Office”. During zoom meeting all of a sudden, my webcam turn off and a burned pixel line appeared on the display, dividing it into two parts; which of course was really annoying to look. A couple of hours later on that day, the screen just stopped to work and only had a black screen.

And just like that, I was another victim of the “Flexgate”, but with a micro-crack alongside on the display (which I found out some days later, during a careful inspection at an “Apple Autorisierter Händler” here in Berlin) took all hope of getting this mac repair free of charge. Instead, I got an estimation of the repair cost of more than 1.500€.

Long story short, I got a brand new Dell XPS13 i7–10510u with Ubuntu 18.04. So at first, this reminds me of my good old days at the university, when we used to use Fedora; not completely unfamiliar with a Linux distribution but still. Some research was needed.

As a result of all that, I gather around some info which I’ve tried to summarize it, into these 3 simple steps:

Step 1 —Get down to the basics

"Upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS", then after that.

Open your command line, if you want to improve your command line skills I can recommend you this article “15 Essential Linux Command Line Tips and Tricks”

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

For the ones that are not familiar. Snap as is defined on their documentation is a software deployment and package management system. The canonical way for Mac’s app store.

Besides all the controversy that Snap is generating, I still believe is a great way to manage packages, especially for its self-contained structure, which gives a convenient way to install and manage complex packages dependencies.

Here is how we can install it:

sudo apt install snap

From my short experience on the subject I can suggest installing the following:

sudo apt install curl build-essential git postgresql postgresql-contrib

Step 2 — Here comes NVM

The tricky and funny part related with Snap is something I found while using it at work with my current projects when you install node with Snap, it generates found out that by using it on a container I will generate some problems related with

npm WARN lifecycle The node binary used for scripts is /snap/bin/node but npm is using /snap/node/2494/bin/node itself. Use the --scripts-prepend-node-path option to include the path for the node binary npm was executed with

I found that the best solution to have a stable node installation is to first use NVM

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.35.3/install.sh | bash

After installation, just close the terminal and open a new one and try to verify again the installation.

To install node you can check on NVM:

nvm list-remote

and install the version of your choice, on my case the current version (14.5.0)

nvm install v14.5.0

Step 3 — Just snap of a finger

After you install all your favourite global dependencies, We can go back to be friends with Snap and proceed by installing your most beloved apps.

On my case:

sudo snap install gitkraken go multipass kotlin postman vscode intellij-idea-ultimate --classic

also to be considered some personal favorites:

sudo snap install altair termius-app beekeeper-studio nordpass gifex standard-notes vlc

Conclusion

That’s it! some weeks of full immersion in the Ubuntu world.

I believe there’s no going back for me, especially because I got this feeling of full control of my Developer Environment; not that I didn’t have it with macOS, but lately especially after I upgraded to Mojave, I was having many issues with my configurations on Proxy, filesystem and so on... But enough of my shenanigans.

Hope you like my first ever article here; soon more to come! please if you have any suggestions, critics or questions just leave your comments below. I’m pretty sure this content can be useful for many; so your feedback will be much appreciated.