[KLVTZ]

Somewhat related:

I always find myself clearing the drive in order to install the latest macOS. Perhaps psychological, but it always gives me a fresh starting point that is benefited by an implicit boost in performance. While it does require some time for setup, and much of what I do is manual, I never regret it --almost like spring cleaning.

[mulmen]

Maybe I am getting old but I find “starting fresh” to be extremely expensive. I recently had to do this with my work MacBook which cannot restore from Time Machine for... reasons.

I don’t know what settings I changed six months or a year or four years ago. I just know that my mouse should scroll that way, not this way. Time Machine makes sure these settings persist between disasters so I don’t generally try to track them. Historically upgrades maintained the settings where they make sense. Over time my environment adapted to my preference.

But with the recent more drastic changes in Big Sur (and my fresh start) I find myself constantly having to re-learn really basic things like how to manage notifications. What used to be one click is three, or gestures that used to do one thing (drag right to dismiss) now do something unexpected (dismiss all notifications for an app). I don’t know how much of this is a setting and how much is just new behavior.

It has been an infuriating experience. I don’t even know how to use my computer and I feel powerless. I also have very little motivation to learn the “new” way because I know it will just change again in a year. So the time I invest now will be wasted.

It’s extremely demoralizing. One of the hardest things I do during the day is try to navigate my desktop environment. I have an adversarial relationship with my MacBook. There’s very little cognitive energy left to do my actual job. I don’t feel like it is improving, my computer is just in my way.

[bayindirh]

> Maybe I am getting old but I find “starting fresh” to be extremely expensive.

I used to think like that, then I got a new mirrorless camera, which has a ton of settings with a menu which it feels like an open world. Then, I stopped worrying about setting things the way exactly I want. Instead, I started to change things I dislike.

This brings two advantages from my point of view. First, it doesn't feel overwhelming; two, it's really a smooth way of learning new things or relearning things in the new way.

I also run a micro server on a SBC. I fed up with the Ubuntu installation running on it and decided to migrate to Debian. I got two-three essential files (basically fstab, dnsmasq config files), and nuked the card. It was running in less than 15 minutes. I made a lot of small changes after that, but it was much smoother and nicer. Since I was not in a rush, I made the changes calmly and enthusiastically. Now, that thing works 10x better than Ubuntu.

No need to rush, just solve a single thing in one go, and you won't believe how far you can go in very short time.

Of course, this is my two cents and YMMV.

[D13Fd]

Honestly that is kind of weird.

I just re-imaged my Macbook Pro laptop this week, to completely remove some super invasive exam-taking software that I had to install for a licensing exam.

The whole thing was very painless. I keep all of my data in one folder. I copied that folder, and copied some preferences for apps that don't sync to a folder (e.g., VS Code) to an external SSD.

I booted into recovery mode, wiped the disk, and re-installed Mac OS. Then I copied my folder back and re-did my settings.

The whole thing took a couple of hours, although a lot of that was babysitting the installs etc. while doing other things. I definitely wouldn't put it into the "extremely expensive" bucket in terms of time spent.

[Pokepokalypse]

I used to do this on a weekly basis with my Windows desktops (95, 98, NT, XP, and 7 was the last one I bothered with). I used various tools to automate this process, (nLite was a good one), and wrote scripts to perform application setup (back in the bad old days before chocolatey).

This had huge benefits in terms of maintaining a very performant Windows desktop.

Then, I also baked-in my security configurations with another set of scripts. So it was always in a consistent configuration, (even if I had to "temporarily" disable something that was blocking me or broke something, I could always return to my "known-good-configuration").

I've also done the same with my linux systems.

Mac OS X has always been curiously resistant to full automation, however. I know some people have done it; but there's something about this ecosystem that makes it very difficult; and I kind of think that's by-design, (to thwart the hackintosh people).

I think it would be extremely valuable to be able to do this on Mac OS X; because customizing the OS is central to being able to get a good productive user-experience (especially for power-users), and I'm often stymied trying to accomplish this in a repeatable manner, on Mac OS X.

[jorl17]

I have churned through three macs since 2012 and have never once installed fresh. Time machine has helped me move between them. At one point I had to temporarily move back to an old one while the other one was being fixed, and I did the exact same thing (I experienced some hiccups with brew packages that were no longer compatible due to missing CPU optimizations on the old mac).

I periodically clean my mac, though. Remove stale configuration files, cleanup apps, etc. I also have a bunch of stuff written down, as well as scripts, to help with installing new macs (to help my friends reinstall theirs).

I'm very nitpicky about configurations and apps. I've got dozens of apps and micro-apps I use. which are very modified. These include the typical BetterTouchTool, Alfred, Amphetamine, but also smaller apps like Audio Balance. My terminal is heavily customized, both in terms of iTerm 2 settings, but also in terms of my zsh config, custom commands, etc.

I'm sure I'd be able re-create my environment within days, but these would be very rough days....and time machine just works! I don't need anything else.

[hesk]

I can relate. I went through a clean install recently because my last was about 5 years ago and I wanted to start fresh instead of installing from a Time Machine backup.

I had a checklist from last time in my notes and remembered that it only took a few hours and then the system was set.

This time it took much longer. Maybe because I went from Mojave to Big Sur in one go.

So now I've started a small project where I automate as much as possible, using defaults and/or Plistbuddy to edit macOS configuration settings, install dotfiles using GNU stow, profiles for network settings, and just copying files around.

[bartvk]

Whenever you change a setting, look up the corresponding “defaults write” command. Put them into a script. Then run that whenever you got a new machine.

[josephd79]

Dot files are your friend.

[mtmail]

I keep a file listing software I installed and my usual settings I need to set. Some 30 packages, including UI tools. The homebrew package installer supports a 'Brewfile' which will install everything in one step. https://thoughtbot.com/blog/brewfile-a-gemfile-but-for-homeb...