4 ms·

Better late than never but I feel sorry to people using Windows for web dev when the tooling experience has been way worse than Mac for a decade now. And some

by h1d 7y ago

Better late than never but I feel sorry to people using Windows for web dev when the tooling experience has been way worse than Mac for a decade now. And some people can't even try to switch out of Windows.

blinkingled 7y ago
I kind of feel the same way about using macOS. At this point in time if your hardware works with Linux you're missing out on a lot of things by using macOS. Windows/WSL2 removes the hardware compatibility part leaving macOS to catch up.
- h1d 7y ago
  What is there to miss on Linux exclusive tooling or even Windows exclusive tooling?
  - blinkingled 7y ago
    There are lot of small things that to me personally add up to a much bigger annoyance when using macOS. Lack of official hypervisor means I have to use 3rd party stuff - few times I used it I had kernel panics on wakeup. Old versions of all command line utilities - need brew to install that which has broken on me at least once. Updates are slow - both in terms of availability and installation times. If I need new stuff, I am forced to upgrade to entirely new major release. Compare that to a rolling release distro like Arch or fast moving one like Fedora or slower moving Ubuntu LTS that gets HWE stack upgrades life is really easy. You get a built in hypervisor (KVM) that can be used by the Android emulator, your libvirt VMs and docker. Want to run dtrace/bpftool - no need to compromise security. Need latest GCC - easy enough to get - it goes on and on. Not to mention the package managers are pretty good on all Linux distros now a days. With Windows the downside was that WSL 1 was slow and macOS was faster than that although slower than Linux for FS operations etc. But now with WSL2 pretty much matching native Linux performance and allowing you to use docker natively - it suddenly becomes a much better option - can buy cheaper hardware that does what you want to without relying on Apple to give you the right keyboard, # of ports etc.
    - meddlepal 7y ago
      Yea I'm really not looking forward to switching to macOS from Linux at a new job I'm starting. It's all these minor little things that add up to a decent-sized headache. I am optimistic for WSL2 because while Linux was an option I was given it was very much a "Do so at your own peril we have a lot of homegrown tools that are not tested outside Windows and macOS". In a year or so maybe I'll switch to Windows w/ WSL2 or just back to Linux but there was no good reason to rock that boat at this time.

by h1d 7y ago

blinkingled 7y ago

I kind of feel the same way about using macOS. At this point in time if your hardware works with Linux you're missing out on a lot of things by using macOS. Windows/WSL2 removes the hardware compatibility part leaving macOS to catch up.

h1d 7y ago
What is there to miss on Linux exclusive tooling or even Windows exclusive tooling?
- blinkingled 7y ago
  There are lot of small things that to me personally add up to a much bigger annoyance when using macOS. Lack of official hypervisor means I have to use 3rd party stuff - few times I used it I had kernel panics on wakeup. Old versions of all command line utilities - need brew to install that which has broken on me at least once. Updates are slow - both in terms of availability and installation times. If I need new stuff, I am forced to upgrade to entirely new major release. Compare that to a rolling release distro like Arch or fast moving one like Fedora or slower moving Ubuntu LTS that gets HWE stack upgrades life is really easy. You get a built in hypervisor (KVM) that can be used by the Android emulator, your libvirt VMs and docker. Want to run dtrace/bpftool - no need to compromise security. Need latest GCC - easy enough to get - it goes on and on. Not to mention the package managers are pretty good on all Linux distros now a days. With Windows the downside was that WSL 1 was slow and macOS was faster than that although slower than Linux for FS operations etc. But now with WSL2 pretty much matching native Linux performance and allowing you to use docker natively - it suddenly becomes a much better option - can buy cheaper hardware that does what you want to without relying on Apple to give you the right keyboard, # of ports etc.
  - meddlepal 7y ago
    Yea I'm really not looking forward to switching to macOS from Linux at a new job I'm starting. It's all these minor little things that add up to a decent-sized headache. I am optimistic for WSL2 because while Linux was an option I was given it was very much a "Do so at your own peril we have a lot of homegrown tools that are not tested outside Windows and macOS". In a year or so maybe I'll switch to Windows w/ WSL2 or just back to Linux but there was no good reason to rock that boat at this time.