Transitioning from Win to Mac 1-Downloading software

In this series of articles I want to document my experience of switching from windows to a mac machine in a work environment and highlight the differences between them to hopefully help other people who are also making this transition.
These articles are applicable for the mac's that have an ARM processor, so from the M1 mac mini and upwards.

Rosetta 2

Here i'm not talking about the rosseta stone, so don't worry you wont have to carry a stone with you to work, no this is a translation layer.
These new mac's processors are based on the ARM architecture, the old macs were based on the x86 (sometimes called x64 for 64bit hardware) architecture because of this software written for the x86 won't run on ARM without a translation layer.
Also this kind of emulation can have a 20-30% performance (older benchmark link below) impact and it is not guaranteed that all software will run.
If you try to open a x86 app the OS will prompt you to install Rosetta but you can manually install it with the following command: softwareupdate --install-rosetta

For getting software the safest and easiest way is to get it from the Appstore but for lots of apps you need the brew package manager.
You can install it with the folowing command: /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
In brew there are two types of software you can download, a cask or a formula, formula is usually a refers to a non gui app.
Most apps can be found on the official brew site but some can be installed from a github repo using the "Tap" feature which adds that github repo as a new "repository" for packages.
When you found your package you just run brew install package_name and that is it.

Sometimes a software can't be found in the Launchpad and can't be started from the terminal either.
Don't worry, get a well brewed beer and we gonna fix that, here are the steps to fix a terminal app not working:
1. Run brew info package_name to find out where the program is saved
2. Try to find the executable in the folder and try to run in from there
3. If it works, add the folder to PATH variable on startup so the program can be launched from anywhere by editing your terminal profile using a terminal file editor like nano:
  - After installing nano from brew like: brew install nano, edit the terminal profile: nano ~/.zshrc
  - Here you can add the folder where your program resides to the PATH by adding this line to the end of the file: export PATH=$PATH:executable_location
Now if a gui app not in the Launchpad you just drag the executable's icon to the Launchpad's icon on your dock, that will add it.

Happy coding!