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> WSL is only for those that use Windows to target GNU/Linux, the demography that used to buy macOS to do the same. Do you know many people that used to do thi

> WSL is only for those that use Windows to target GNU/Linux, the demography that used to buy macOS to do the same. Do you know many people that used to do this with macOS and are now using Windows ? Like, oh boy, I tried, but after 4 months I ended up back with macOS.

sfifs 6y ago
In my experience, one of the the problems is that Macs are hilariously underpowered for many modern dev and analytics use cases. So the workaround is to work off remote machines/clusters over web interfaces/SSH but for many development use cases that's just slow and clunky - the have merit more in productionising. The series of hardware clusterfucks on Mac haven't helped ether. So I've seen Mac users who work in these areas get sick of the issues and limitations and switch to Win 10 + sometimes WSL. The people remaining with Macs are executive suite (who go for iPad pros) and account execs who do sales where it looks cool to go pull out a Mac. However even there people are increasingly looking dumb when they want to present something and go on 5 min dongle troubleshooting hunt because Mac killed HDMI and VGA ports and start their presentation appearing incompetent. Sometimes over web screen shares, only the desktop shows and not the applications. By refusing to focus on hardware/software quality and power users, Apple has lost the game on high end.
- fluffything 6y ago
  > In my experience, one of the the problems is that Macs are hilariously underpowered for many modern dev and analytics use cases. This is what I do and works perfectly. My dev machines are 82 cores xeon platinums with Terabytes of RAM or nodes with 8 V100 GPUs attached, etc. I don't know of any workstation, much less laptop, that could be a replacement for any of that. For the stuff I do on the laptop itself (Word/Powerpoint/Outlook, web browsing, using an editor to edit files remotely, etc.), more power wouldn't hurt, but my macbook is a macbook air 2013... so I can't imagine that a 2020 macbook would be underpowered.
  - sfifs 6y ago
    Bulk of business analytics and modeling in the world happens in the zone between "regular business laptop" and "82 Core Xeon machines". Laptops with Xeons and reasonably powerful NVIDIA GPUs thrive in that environment.
    - fluffything 6y ago
      The CPU and GPU is rarely the problem. The problem is the amount of data to analyze. In a laptop with a 1TB SSD, if I need to analyze 200Gbs of data here and there, I just don't have enough hard-disk space, so I need to SSH somewhere anyways. Once you have to do that, then you might just analyze it there. Bringing it to your laptop makes no sense.
blinkingled 6y ago
Few years ago I did this transition - I had a MBP that I used for all Unix based things - after realizing how great Ubuntu runs under Hyper-V I just began to use that. It wasn't as seamless but no big deal opening up SecureCrt to connect. Then WSL came along and I used that but found the file system access to be too slow so back to Hyper-V VM. Now that WSL2 is actually a more seamless Hyper-V VM I am planning to just use that. I truly haven't needed a Mac for anything at least 4 years. I do a bunch of Enterprise Java development along with learning Rust etc. - VSCode with Remote Extension Pack makes it all even better.
- fluffything 6y ago
  So you switched from a MBP to a Windows laptop ? (its unclear from all that you wrote) What was the advantage ?

sfifs 6y ago

In my experience, one of the the problems is that Macs are hilariously underpowered for many modern dev and analytics use cases. So the workaround is to work off remote machines/clusters over web interfaces/SSH but for many development use cases that's just slow and clunky - the have merit more in productionising. The series of hardware clusterfucks on Mac haven't helped ether. So I've seen Mac users who work in these areas get sick of the issues and limitations and switch to Win 10 + sometimes WSL. The people remaining with Macs are executive suite (who go for iPad pros) and account execs who do sales where it looks cool to go pull out a Mac. However even there people are increasingly looking dumb when they want to present something and go on 5 min dongle troubleshooting hunt because Mac killed HDMI and VGA ports and start their presentation appearing incompetent. Sometimes over web screen shares, only the desktop shows and not the applications. By refusing to focus on hardware/software quality and power users, Apple has lost the game on high end.

fluffything 6y ago
> In my experience, one of the the problems is that Macs are hilariously underpowered for many modern dev and analytics use cases. This is what I do and works perfectly. My dev machines are 82 cores xeon platinums with Terabytes of RAM or nodes with 8 V100 GPUs attached, etc. I don't know of any workstation, much less laptop, that could be a replacement for any of that. For the stuff I do on the laptop itself (Word/Powerpoint/Outlook, web browsing, using an editor to edit files remotely, etc.), more power wouldn't hurt, but my macbook is a macbook air 2013... so I can't imagine that a 2020 macbook would be underpowered.
- sfifs 6y ago
  Bulk of business analytics and modeling in the world happens in the zone between "regular business laptop" and "82 Core Xeon machines". Laptops with Xeons and reasonably powerful NVIDIA GPUs thrive in that environment.
  - fluffything 6y ago
    The CPU and GPU is rarely the problem. The problem is the amount of data to analyze. In a laptop with a 1TB SSD, if I need to analyze 200Gbs of data here and there, I just don't have enough hard-disk space, so I need to SSH somewhere anyways. Once you have to do that, then you might just analyze it there. Bringing it to your laptop makes no sense.

blinkingled 6y ago

Few years ago I did this transition - I had a MBP that I used for all Unix based things - after realizing how great Ubuntu runs under Hyper-V I just began to use that. It wasn't as seamless but no big deal opening up SecureCrt to connect. Then WSL came along and I used that but found the file system access to be too slow so back to Hyper-V VM. Now that WSL2 is actually a more seamless Hyper-V VM I am planning to just use that. I truly haven't needed a Mac for anything at least 4 years. I do a bunch of Enterprise Java development along with learning Rust etc. - VSCode with Remote Extension Pack makes it all even better.

fluffything 6y ago
So you switched from a MBP to a Windows laptop ? (its unclear from all that you wrote) What was the advantage ?