7 ms·

I'm not a developer, but I knew developers were previously content with Macbooks usually running OSX or linux. Given so much unhappiness with OSX, and the inab

by dm319 9y ago

I'm not a developer, but I knew developers were previously content with Macbooks usually running OSX or linux. Given so much unhappiness with OSX, and the inability to run linux on the USB-C macbook pros, what are developers generally doing? The Apple hardware is nice, but it generally means you have to use OSX. Windows WSL is pretty convenient, but then you have to use Windows. Linux is, of course, great, but what hardware?

city41 9y ago
I switched to Linux running on ThinkPads (between work and my personal laptop I have a Carbon, T470s and a T450). I have generally found ThinkPad hardware is very compatible with Linux.
E765 9y ago
I recently bought a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. I'm pretty happy with it.
- voltagex_ 9y ago
  A useful filter when buying laptops is "does this laptop have the service manual accessible to mortals?" Handily filters down to 2 companies: Dell and Lenovo. I am unsure about Librem and PogoLinux.
  - opencl 9y ago
    HP has service manuals available too, including their consumer models. Oddly they come with the disclaimer "IMPORTANT! This document is intended for HP authorized service providers only." which makes you wonder why it's available to download from the support website.
folkhack 9y ago
Thinkpads. I moved from Windows 7 to Debian 8 a year or so ago and have never looked back (except for the Adobe Suite...) I use an OSX Macbook Pro for my 9-5 and have been avoiding High Sierra forever - it's just a slap in the face. At least I know my Debian 8 box will almost always operate as expected - even through a distribution release. I need stability from my system, and there's just no other option anymore.
notadoc 9y ago
Well this is purely anecdotal, but at least 70% of the developers, IT workers, and researchers that I know are using prior generation MacBook Pro hardware (the ones without the touch bar or terrible keyboard, and with ports) and are intentionally using the older OSX versions. I know several people who traded in 2016/2017 models for 2015 models because it's literally an upgrade; get an older machine and you suddenly have usable ports, a keyboard that works, and an escape key, what a luxury. I also know a fair amount of people getting Thinkpad and even Surfaces.
- vanilla_nut 9y ago
  An especially unfortunate truth is that many developers have grown so afraid of workflow-breaking bugs that they're willing to risk security flaws just so they can get work done. The things I would do (and pay) for 2010-Apple tier hardware built for CentOS in both laptop and phone form factors...
  - notadoc 9y ago
    > An especially unfortunate truth is that many developers have grown so afraid of workflow-breaking bugs that they're willing to risk security flaws just so they can get work done. Can't blame them. Ultimately, it's productivity that pays the bills.
  - linkmotif 9y ago
    > The things I would do (and pay) for 2010-Apple tier hardware built for CentOS Isn’t it remarkable this still doesn’t exist? Build quality still does not compare in the PC world. Yet, I’m on a MBA3,2 (late 2010) and it’s great. Still running Yosemite. It’s got 4gb ram but handles running 10 JVMs with modest heaps for development no problem. Stable and runs for months without issue. I’d love more RAM and more cores but none of these computers seem worth it. I considered buying a 2015 MPB the other month only to learn that Apple glues the battery to the top case. So to replace the battery you need to replace the whole top case. Insane.
    - 0xabe 9y ago
2trill2spill 9y ago
FreeBSD 12(current) on a 2017 XPS 13 has been great for me. Funny thing is I never imagined buying a dell laptop. I was going to purchase a new mac, but the touch bar killed that for me. So far so good with the XPS 13.
- EamonnMR 9y ago
  I can at least confirm for you that you made the right choice. Today I went to use the touchbar to adjust the volume on a conference call I was in and ended up hitting the contextual "home" button, taking me away from the page (and call) entirely. I guess I should have memorized which invisible part of the touchbar corresponded to what better. I miss hardware buttons.
  - r00fus 9y ago
    Did that end the call? Most conferencing tools I use are happy if you shift away. I have to say I hardly ever use the volume buttons on my Mac and I use it 10-14h a day.
- somethingsimple 9y ago
  How much of a hassle was it to set it up? Are all peripherals working?
  - 2trill2spill 9y ago
    To get a working install it was very easy. I just grabbed the latest FreeBSD 12 snapshot iso and put it on a usb drive and installed like normal. Everything but the wifi works. So I'm using a usb wifi dongle. You need the new (experimental) drm-next code and drivers for suspend and resume support. If your comfortable with a unix command line environment you can get a working dev environment in a couple hours. So besides the wifi everything is working and iirc someone has been working on a driver for the builtin wifi card and plans on merging it into 12 sometime this year. But so far I'm loving it, I have ZFS, Dtrace, Sublime3, Firefox57 and xterm, which is an ideal dev environment for me.
acdha 9y ago
> Given so much unhappiness with OSX Unhappy people post a LOT more and the internet loves a good pile-on. Apple has had plenty of embarrassing QA lapses but the average developer is fine, and it’s not like everything else is perfect. The Linux users I work with spend more time on sysadmin work than the Mac users by a hefty margin, although there’s a good argument that software compatibility is worth that overhead.
- crispinb 9y ago
  I have to say (and of course this just another anecdote) none of the developers I know (including myself!) are happy any more with OSX. In particular, no-one wants the new MB Pros. We put up with the gradual culling of ports for the sake of the things we liked (OSX's great 3rd party GUI software ecosystem, plus enough unixyness underneath, and the great hardware). But removing 1/6 of the keyboard for the sake of a feeble "innovation" has been a cut too far, and now we're gazing with envy at machines with real keyboards and an actual diversity of ports. The only developers I know who are replacing their pre-touchbar machines right now with new ones are those making much of their living from iOS / OS X. Many (like me) are kind of hanging on, because it's a pain to change OSs, lose much of the software we love etc. I'm still undecided, but I think my current (ageing) MB Pro is going to be my last. > The Linux users I work with spend more time on sysadmin work than the Mac users by a hefty margin Yep. I shifted from Linux to OS X years ago because I was sick of tech fiddling and wanted to have a machine that needed no hand-holding and let me get on with my work. There seem to be no good options.
- city41 9y ago
  > The Linux users I work with spend more time on sysadmin work than the Mac users by a hefty margin This is why I use LTS Ubuntu. I don't do any sysadmin work at all. Every couple of weeks or so a dialog opens up saying there are updates, and I click OK. Everything "just works".
jacobsenscott 9y ago
Apple hardware was nice. Not anymore. I had to have the keyboard replaced on my touchbar model. And the 8 Gig memory limit is silly. Thanks to an external keyboard and vagrant I get to spend most of my time on linux with a good keyboard, so it is tolerable for now. I would dump it for a linux laptop, but I work remote so every type of video chat/screen share tool needs to work. Most of them don't work on linux. My computer choice is dictated by chat tools, which is kind of sad.
- lygaret 9y ago
  I use Linux as a daily driver, and currently have zero issues using Hangouts and Hipchat's built in videochat, and only minor issues with Skype, for a data point...
- revicon 9y ago
  And no native Evernote client :(
  - rodelrod 9y ago
    That is indeed unfortunate but the windows version runs decently on Wine. It's a pain to figure out the exact versions of Evernote and Wine that will work + the fixes (currently I'm on Evernote 6.4 and Wine 2.1 using PlayOnLinux). In the end some annoying bugs linger, but for the most part I still prefer it to Evernote for Mac.
  - iamdave 9y ago
    Still?
- emilsedgh 9y ago
  Hangouts, Slack, Zoom.us, Appear.in (even Skype iirc) work fine with Debian.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  I had a company like that. I just ran Windows in a VM and connected it to the company domain controller. While at work, I used x11vnc on one display, tightvnc on the Windows VM on another monitor and would use that with WebEx if I needed to share my screen. At home, I ran the same setup but I used my gaming/windows laptop for my VNC client and WebEx. I could never get the Linux Cisco VPN client to work, so my work laptop just made an openvpn connection to my flat (fibre connections are nice).
tzakrajs 9y ago
I have made the switch to Ubuntu for Windows on my personal projects. If you aren't trying to run daemons, it is a perfect workstation environment.
wilun 9y ago
> Linux is, of course, great, but what hardware? We are in 2018, not in 1995. You can easily find good desktop and laptop that run fine under pretty much all major distros. Especially if you compare to MBP & the like, meaning you have no budget issues...
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  Apart from high DPI displays which is not great at the moment.
pfranz 9y ago
> inability to run linux on the USB-C macbook pros What have you tried? I have a MacBookPro14,1 (2017) and had a bit more of a problem than expected triple-booting Windows, Linux, and High Sierra, but I got it working. My main issue seemed to be that nvme wasn't supported for many of the Linux installers. I think it was a newer Fedora I finally got working. I may have had to manually mount the drive before running the installer (I cant remember). I haven't used it as my primary OS, but everything seemed to be working (hi-dpi, wifi, trackpad). I think like any other new hardware, it'll take a couple years before Linux works out of the box.
Yetanfou 9y ago
> Linux is, of course, great, but what hardware? Plenty of threads on this forum (and others) to choose from when it comes to choosing hardware for Linux. The answers are often similar: Thinkpad T4xx, Dell XPS 13/15, System76. I don't see HP mentioned that often but I have a bunch of (older) HP laptops running here and there which do just fine, just stay away from their consumer products and focus on (used) business hardware. Purism is cropping up here and there as well, mostly due to their active stance against Intel ME. In other words it is not that hard to find good hardware to run Linux on. Given the state of MacOS these days the experience is likely to be less trouble-prone than that of those staying on (or hopping on) the Apple platform.

by dm319 9y ago

city41 9y ago

I switched to Linux running on ThinkPads (between work and my personal laptop I have a Carbon, T470s and a T450). I have generally found ThinkPad hardware is very compatible with Linux.

E765 9y ago

I recently bought a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. I'm pretty happy with it.

voltagex_ 9y ago
A useful filter when buying laptops is "does this laptop have the service manual accessible to mortals?" Handily filters down to 2 companies: Dell and Lenovo. I am unsure about Librem and PogoLinux.
- opencl 9y ago
  HP has service manuals available too, including their consumer models. Oddly they come with the disclaimer "IMPORTANT! This document is intended for HP authorized service providers only." which makes you wonder why it's available to download from the support website.

folkhack 9y ago

Thinkpads. I moved from Windows 7 to Debian 8 a year or so ago and have never looked back (except for the Adobe Suite...) I use an OSX Macbook Pro for my 9-5 and have been avoiding High Sierra forever - it's just a slap in the face. At least I know my Debian 8 box will almost always operate as expected - even through a distribution release. I need stability from my system, and there's just no other option anymore.

notadoc 9y ago

Well this is purely anecdotal, but at least 70% of the developers, IT workers, and researchers that I know are using prior generation MacBook Pro hardware (the ones without the touch bar or terrible keyboard, and with ports) and are intentionally using the older OSX versions. I know several people who traded in 2016/2017 models for 2015 models because it's literally an upgrade; get an older machine and you suddenly have usable ports, a keyboard that works, and an escape key, what a luxury. I also know a fair amount of people getting Thinkpad and even Surfaces.

vanilla_nut 9y ago
An especially unfortunate truth is that many developers have grown so afraid of workflow-breaking bugs that they're willing to risk security flaws just so they can get work done. The things I would do (and pay) for 2010-Apple tier hardware built for CentOS in both laptop and phone form factors...
- notadoc 9y ago
  > An especially unfortunate truth is that many developers have grown so afraid of workflow-breaking bugs that they're willing to risk security flaws just so they can get work done. Can't blame them. Ultimately, it's productivity that pays the bills.
- linkmotif 9y ago
  > The things I would do (and pay) for 2010-Apple tier hardware built for CentOS Isn’t it remarkable this still doesn’t exist? Build quality still does not compare in the PC world. Yet, I’m on a MBA3,2 (late 2010) and it’s great. Still running Yosemite. It’s got 4gb ram but handles running 10 JVMs with modest heaps for development no problem. Stable and runs for months without issue. I’d love more RAM and more cores but none of these computers seem worth it. I considered buying a 2015 MPB the other month only to learn that Apple glues the battery to the top case. So to replace the battery you need to replace the whole top case. Insane.
  - 0xabe 9y ago

2trill2spill 9y ago

FreeBSD 12(current) on a 2017 XPS 13 has been great for me. Funny thing is I never imagined buying a dell laptop. I was going to purchase a new mac, but the touch bar killed that for me. So far so good with the XPS 13.

EamonnMR 9y ago
I can at least confirm for you that you made the right choice. Today I went to use the touchbar to adjust the volume on a conference call I was in and ended up hitting the contextual "home" button, taking me away from the page (and call) entirely. I guess I should have memorized which invisible part of the touchbar corresponded to what better. I miss hardware buttons.
- r00fus 9y ago
  Did that end the call? Most conferencing tools I use are happy if you shift away. I have to say I hardly ever use the volume buttons on my Mac and I use it 10-14h a day.
somethingsimple 9y ago
How much of a hassle was it to set it up? Are all peripherals working?
- 2trill2spill 9y ago
  To get a working install it was very easy. I just grabbed the latest FreeBSD 12 snapshot iso and put it on a usb drive and installed like normal. Everything but the wifi works. So I'm using a usb wifi dongle. You need the new (experimental) drm-next code and drivers for suspend and resume support. If your comfortable with a unix command line environment you can get a working dev environment in a couple hours. So besides the wifi everything is working and iirc someone has been working on a driver for the builtin wifi card and plans on merging it into 12 sometime this year. But so far I'm loving it, I have ZFS, Dtrace, Sublime3, Firefox57 and xterm, which is an ideal dev environment for me.

acdha 9y ago

> Given so much unhappiness with OSX Unhappy people post a LOT more and the internet loves a good pile-on. Apple has had plenty of embarrassing QA lapses but the average developer is fine, and it’s not like everything else is perfect. The Linux users I work with spend more time on sysadmin work than the Mac users by a hefty margin, although there’s a good argument that software compatibility is worth that overhead.

crispinb 9y ago
I have to say (and of course this just another anecdote) none of the developers I know (including myself!) are happy any more with OSX. In particular, no-one wants the new MB Pros. We put up with the gradual culling of ports for the sake of the things we liked (OSX's great 3rd party GUI software ecosystem, plus enough unixyness underneath, and the great hardware). But removing 1/6 of the keyboard for the sake of a feeble "innovation" has been a cut too far, and now we're gazing with envy at machines with real keyboards and an actual diversity of ports. The only developers I know who are replacing their pre-touchbar machines right now with new ones are those making much of their living from iOS / OS X. Many (like me) are kind of hanging on, because it's a pain to change OSs, lose much of the software we love etc. I'm still undecided, but I think my current (ageing) MB Pro is going to be my last. > The Linux users I work with spend more time on sysadmin work than the Mac users by a hefty margin Yep. I shifted from Linux to OS X years ago because I was sick of tech fiddling and wanted to have a machine that needed no hand-holding and let me get on with my work. There seem to be no good options.
city41 9y ago
> The Linux users I work with spend more time on sysadmin work than the Mac users by a hefty margin This is why I use LTS Ubuntu. I don't do any sysadmin work at all. Every couple of weeks or so a dialog opens up saying there are updates, and I click OK. Everything "just works".

jacobsenscott 9y ago

Apple hardware was nice. Not anymore. I had to have the keyboard replaced on my touchbar model. And the 8 Gig memory limit is silly. Thanks to an external keyboard and vagrant I get to spend most of my time on linux with a good keyboard, so it is tolerable for now. I would dump it for a linux laptop, but I work remote so every type of video chat/screen share tool needs to work. Most of them don't work on linux. My computer choice is dictated by chat tools, which is kind of sad.

lygaret 9y ago
I use Linux as a daily driver, and currently have zero issues using Hangouts and Hipchat's built in videochat, and only minor issues with Skype, for a data point...
revicon 9y ago
And no native Evernote client :(
- rodelrod 9y ago
  That is indeed unfortunate but the windows version runs decently on Wine. It's a pain to figure out the exact versions of Evernote and Wine that will work + the fixes (currently I'm on Evernote 6.4 and Wine 2.1 using PlayOnLinux). In the end some annoying bugs linger, but for the most part I still prefer it to Evernote for Mac.
- iamdave 9y ago
  Still?
emilsedgh 9y ago
Hangouts, Slack, Zoom.us, Appear.in (even Skype iirc) work fine with Debian.
djsumdog 9y ago
I had a company like that. I just ran Windows in a VM and connected it to the company domain controller. While at work, I used x11vnc on one display, tightvnc on the Windows VM on another monitor and would use that with WebEx if I needed to share my screen. At home, I ran the same setup but I used my gaming/windows laptop for my VNC client and WebEx. I could never get the Linux Cisco VPN client to work, so my work laptop just made an openvpn connection to my flat (fibre connections are nice).

tzakrajs 9y ago

I have made the switch to Ubuntu for Windows on my personal projects. If you aren't trying to run daemons, it is a perfect workstation environment.

wilun 9y ago

> Linux is, of course, great, but what hardware? We are in 2018, not in 1995. You can easily find good desktop and laptop that run fine under pretty much all major distros. Especially if you compare to MBP & the like, meaning you have no budget issues...

tonyedgecombe 9y ago
Apart from high DPI displays which is not great at the moment.

pfranz 9y ago

> inability to run linux on the USB-C macbook pros What have you tried? I have a MacBookPro14,1 (2017) and had a bit more of a problem than expected triple-booting Windows, Linux, and High Sierra, but I got it working. My main issue seemed to be that nvme wasn't supported for many of the Linux installers. I think it was a newer Fedora I finally got working. I may have had to manually mount the drive before running the installer (I cant remember). I haven't used it as my primary OS, but everything seemed to be working (hi-dpi, wifi, trackpad). I think like any other new hardware, it'll take a couple years before Linux works out of the box.

Yetanfou 9y ago

> Linux is, of course, great, but what hardware? Plenty of threads on this forum (and others) to choose from when it comes to choosing hardware for Linux. The answers are often similar: Thinkpad T4xx, Dell XPS 13/15, System76. I don't see HP mentioned that often but I have a bunch of (older) HP laptops running here and there which do just fine, just stay away from their consumer products and focus on (used) business hardware. Purism is cropping up here and there as well, mostly due to their active stance against Intel ME. In other words it is not that hard to find good hardware to run Linux on. Given the state of MacOS these days the experience is likely to be less trouble-prone than that of those staying on (or hopping on) the Apple platform.