MacOS on Notes from the Rabbit Hole

Fedora 41 Workstation notes

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Background & Motivation

My history with Linux and with Fedora (and CentOS) is pretty dense and somewhat intense going back to the first announcement of “Fedora Core” by Red Hat. And it extends to a short period of my professional career when I worked for Red Hat (and a much longer part of my career where I had a pivotal role as an individual contributor in IBM’s Linux Technology Center).

oh-my-zsh alternatives

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 21:44:43 -0400

Background

I’ve been a zsh user for a long time, both on Linux (where it’s not the default) and ~~OS X~~ macOS (where it now is the default).

The first thing I used to do on new machines is port all of my .oh-my-zsh stuff over.

Oh My Zsh is not bad! This is not mean to slam the project at all.

But I’ve recently (Jan 2025) upgraded to a new Mac Mini M4 and I thought maybe I should see what else is out there. If there’s something that’s good enough without being quite as large in size.

My MacBook Setup

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 18:01:29 -0500

2020 MacBook Air M1

I’ve got this old MacBook Air M1 that’s getting on in years, but I’m not quite yet feeling the need to upgrade it. Partly because I’ve got so many other Apple products to stay on top of, I really like to space my Mac purchases apart more.

But the M1 was such a huge leap in performance. I was coming from a MacBook Pro 16" Core i7 and I’m not kidding when I say this lowly Air that came out not much later is a better computer, and certainly more convenient to travel with. In fact, I’m literally writing this now from inside of Terminal 2 at RDU airport, and I’m looking forward to getting some writing done during my long flight.

Setting Up Podman on MacOS: A Docker Alternative for Local Container Development

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 09:56:50 -0500

Why Run Containers Locally?

Running containers on your development machine has become an essential practice for modern software development. Local containers provide:

Consistent development environments across team members
Quick testing of containerized applications without remote dependencies
Easy experimentation with different software stacks
Simplified microservices development and testing
Efficient resource usage compared to traditional virtual machines

Why Podman Instead of Docker Desktop?

While Docker Desktop has been the de facto standard for local container development, Podman offers several compelling advantages: