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Mark Shuttleworth sees increased demand for enterprise Ubuntu Linux desktop
- burtonator 8y agoTold you. I've been telling you guys for the last ten years that this year is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop. When are you going to believe me!
- jamestanderson 8y agoCan anyone shed some light into why specifically AI developers prefer using Linux over MacOS? I realize the tradeoffs and preferences between Mac and Linux, but this article calls out AI devs specifically, and I wasn't sure the reason for that.
- larrik 8y agoNot sure, but maybe the ability to use whatever graphics card you want?
- jamestanderson 8y agoThat makes a lot of sense. Thank you!
- zihotki 8y agoHardware drivers is one of major reasons, AFAIK.
- freehunter 8y agoIt may have been just thrown out as a buzzword, but modern AI requires specialized and expensive hardware (GPUs) that other servers don’t need, and Macs aren’t known for their broad GPU selection or support. Many high-end Nvidia GPUs don’t have drivers for MacOS. In the context it was written it sounds like “this other shadow IT usage can be under the table because it’s deemed unimportant to the business but now that our business is all-in on AI we can use that momentum to get better servers”.
- crowbahr 8y agoNvidia's cuda is, as far as I know, still heads and shoulders above anything offered by AMD, and yet Mac pros only come with AMD gpus which are soldered to the boards.
- lousken 8y agoMacs aren't really designed for constant heavy load, they tent to thermal throttle.
- toby 8y agoCan you explain this further? I've noticed that compiling a large project on a Mac is significantly slower than on a similarly-spec'ed Linux machine.
- frabert 8y agoThis video by Linus Tech Tips explains it a bit further: https://youtu.be/947op8yKJRY https://youtu.be/947op8yKJRY
- mrweasel 8y agoSpecifically newer MacBook Pros are having issues driving multiple (or in my case even a single external display). When running two or three external displays, both me an my colleagues are experiences our laptops running they fans rater frequently or in some case not actually spinning up the fans and then crash at random intervals. In our case I convinced that it's a design flaw in the MacBook Pro.
- bryanlarsen 8y agoAlso for the same reason that Linux is common in webdev: there are advantages using the same OS for both dev and production.
- xur17 8y agoIf you develop anything on docker or kubernetes, linux is quite a bit better since you can run things natively instead of via Docker for mac's vm.
- linguae 8y agoCUDA. I do research in machine learning, and I have a work-issued MacBook Pro, but I also have access to a server running Linux with multiple NVIDIA GPUs for development purposes. There are many activities that I use my MacBook Pro for, but when it comes to machine learning tasks, I use the server for that.
- spamizbad 8y agoI've been a developer on all three major platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux). Just my opinion, but I feel these days Linux has the best "developer ergonomics" for backend and systems development. Granted, I think if you're building native mobile apps and web front-ends, your life is easier on a Mac just by virtue of having access to the same tooling as your design team. But for everything else, it just feels easier to get stuff done on Linux. Complicating matters is the declining quality of Apple Macbook Pros and their propensity to thermally throttle. They are quite beautiful though! Still, as a 2018 15" MBP user at work, I often regret not getting a T or P-series Lenovo which carry with them their own flaws.
- sampo 8y ago> I often regret not getting a T or P-series Lenovo There is also the X1 Extreme.
- xur17 8y agoI currently have the regular X1, but am seriously considering the X1 Extreme as my next laptop. 32gb of ram in a dev machine would be amazing.
- noir_lord 8y agoMy T470P from 2017 has 32GB of RAM (Came with 1x16 and I put the other 16 in myself) and it's great. Can in a pinch do everything on the laptop I can do on my dev desktops.
- Ologn 8y agoMy focus is building native mobile apps, primarily Android, but I have built iOS apps as well. With iOS, Apple has it so that you more or less need a MacOS running XCode. While the Mac I use has Android Studio on it, I find myself switching back to Ubuntu Linux to program Android. It is just an easier workflow for me.
- sremani 8y agoLinux enjoys first-class citizen treatment w.r.t AI\ML tools as well as the ability to add an NVIDIA GPU to your hardware is way more straight forward than an apple device.
- opportune 8y agoI guess probably some AI developers are training using a GPU physically in their machine. TBH I don't know if that's the right way to do it though. If you're developing locally in some kind of notebook environment and then deploying to the cloud/some local servers/etc. (which I think you should do) then I don't think it would matter much.
- robbrit 8y agoThere's an in-between: develop locally in a non-notebook environment, and deploy that software in a container. Notebooks are great for fiddling around with new ideas, but when building production AI systems they tend to fall over. What we'll often do is use a small dataset locally on our desktop to confirm that something works, and then ship it to a multi-GPU setup in our cluster to train things for real-world uses. It's much easier to do this when you're developing on the same OS that is running in the cluster, hence Ubuntu desktop.
- opportune 8y agoThat also works, I guess I just mean that I don't think people people should be relying on training on local GPUs. Since yeah, a lot of use cases require multi-GPU training running on the order of days, seems very amateurish to really need a beefy local GPU to get your work done. I guess I rarely run into ubuntu vs macos compatibility issues while I do notice the lack of QOL features on ubuntu. I would rather stay on macos
- dharma1 8y agoAll the tooling is linux, some of it has mac ports but not nearly always and things don't always work. Another major factor is CUDA - all the frameworks use CUDA and Nvidia cards, which MacOS doesn't support. OpenCL is way slower and undersupported. AMD has been working on ROCm but it doesn't feel like it's going anywhere fast enough. Everyone uses CUDA.
- ryanmarsh 8y agoThis site pegged my i9 and spun the fan up. I tried profiling the site, there's tons of garbage and errors in the console and looks like most of the CPU is spent in Teads' code which is some kind of marketing platform.
- calibas 8y agoI see trackers for Google, comScore, Soasta, VigLink, Adobe, AK, Neilsen, and Taboola. Who knows how many more would be loaded if I didn't have ad blocking enabled...
- jlgaddis 8y agoWelcome to the modern web! I highly recommend uBlock Origin [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin
- coldpie 8y agoAlso NoScript.
- CameronNemo 8y agouMatrix anyone?
- geodel 8y agoIt seems to work okay on i11 processor once I shutdown all other instances of fine electron based software.
- Tehchops 8y agoZDNet has to monetize their low-effort content somehow.
- gonyea 8y agoIt's amazing that Apple seems to be holding on to their grudge against Nvidia... to their own detriment. You haven't been able to buy a Mac/Macbook Pro with an Nvidia chip for many years now, and using one in an external enclosure is iffy. So data scientists are increasingly using Linux to do their work.
- CoolGuySteve 8y agoAre the embedded NVidia chips really that great for DL? I have a GeForce 150 in my laptop that I keep permanently disabled in Linux to save a couple watts of power. Aside from the GPU generally being weak, my battery would only last for a couple hours if I cranked my CPU/GPU near 100% usage vs 10 hours just editing files via wifi. Almost all my work requiring a GPU is done by either ssh'ing into my desktop with a GTX 1080 or on AWS. And in that scenario, Linux has less friction (I can migrate setups between home and AWS) and is significantly cheaper than a MacPro.
- mark_l_watson 8y agoI have a System76 Linux laptop with a 1070 and it works fine for deep learning. I used to SSH into cloud services but decided having a GPU always available locally was worth a little money.
- badsectoracula 8y agoTBH there isn't much of a point on having an Nvidia chip if Nvidia isn't also allowed to provide proper drivers for macOS and has to rely on Apple's shoddy implementation of pretty much everything.
- dogma1138 8y agoNVIDIA provided drivers themselves including a CUDA runtime they still do for High Sierra and older OSes, with Mojave tho Apple locked them out.
- craftyguy 8y agoWhat does this comment have to do with the article? There are no mentions of Apple or Nvidia..
- twa927 8y ago> "Previously, those were kind of off the books, under the table. You know, 'Don't ask don't tell deployments.' "But now suddenly, it's the AI team and they've got to be supported." Are AI devs (Data Scientists?) really regarded that much higher by the management compared to the regular devs? Do you think this is special or is it just the current fad that is large enough to reach the management?
- gonyea 8y agoIn my experience, Developers who deviate from the norms are able to support themselves. Data Scientists are generally more dependent on support and infra from the rest of the org.
- bluGill 8y agoRegular devs tend to have to target users. You can love X as much as you like, but if your users are on Y you will find it easier to be on Y as well. Devs that have a business case to not be on Y have been using X for years. The only thing different about AI devs is they are enough to get a critical mass in some areas as opposed to the weird guy.
- geodel 8y agoYes I think so. At our place all data scientist/big data types are given high end MBPs and >2 good quality 4K monitors. All other typical IT devs are given a low-end 15W HP laptop and 2 HD monitors again from HP. Low quality Windows machines have been mandated right from top IT leadership. So I think data scientists are important enough if they can override or get exception to standard issue hardware/software.
- twa927 8y agoThat's interesting, I'm wondering if this happens also to e.g. "Cloud Specialists" or happened to "Object Orientation Specialists" 20 years ago...
- geodel 8y agoMaybe. But I think it is mainly due to expensive ass consultants selling management the idea of deriving deep insights out of terabytes of application logs. And since it is about big data so big hardware seems natural to management. Regarding OO Specialists I remember in J2EE heydays stodgy Weblogic/Websphere tools would take 2GB RAM when 256MB was more of standard. So management would approve this configuration for important enterprise projects done in J2EE.
- teekert 8y agoI'm a bioinformatician/data scientist and I'd really love to run Ubuntu on my laptop but I have to use Windows, company policy. Tbh I'd miss Teams and Outlook (though both are well supported in the browser), I avoid Excel like the plaque anyway because it messes with gene names (sept1 anyone?) and Word/PowerPoint is also ok in the cloud (though the latter gets tedious with animations and complex slides I find).
- AdmiralAsshat 8y ago>While some users still miss the now-deprecated Unity interface, the GNOME 3 desktop interface has won fans. Indeed, Shuttleworth said, "GNOME kind of saved my bacon, to be honest. Unity was causing a lot of distractions and it was controversial, even though it was good. So, when we decided to retire it, we needed a desktop, and that was GNOME" This is pleasantly surprising to read. Many were happy to see Canonical drop their homegrown Unity for GNOME, and GNOME has received quite a few performance improvements from Ubuntu devs as a result.