4 ms·

> how the hacker 'tide' is supposedly turning back against Apple [...] To keep things short, whilst WSL puts Windows miles ahead of where it once was, I find th

by tomxor 5y ago

> how the hacker 'tide' is supposedly turning back against Apple [...] To keep things short, whilst WSL puts Windows miles ahead of where it once was, I find that the same old rough-edges still remain. This feels like a bit of a false dichotomy, WSL isn't the only alternative. We are so very far from limited to windows vs mac for desktop today, it's easier than ever to use Linux or even a BSD as a daily driver on a PC laptop. Even the article in 2005 noted hackers switching to intel boxes (not mac intel boxes) for FreeBSD and Linux at the time.

swiley 5y ago
When Lion came out I switched to Debian after it corrupted the rootfs twice. Installation my MBP was pretty easy.
- tomxor 5y ago
  Same here, 10.6 was my last MacOS, it felt like it lost direction and focus after that. For a 2009 MBP it was a nice experience trying out FreeBSD and various linux distros before settling on Debian. The only stumbling block on that machine was the macEFI, which there were eventually plenty of solutions for - I hear the later machines are a bit of a nightmare to run anything other than MacOS though.
jhbadger 5y ago
Well, if you are self-employed maybe. Or for your own personal home machines, sure. But most employers with IT departments wouldn't be too happy if you had a "nonstandard" OS on your work machine because they wouldn't know how to secure it. Heck, many of them don't even allow Macs.
- tomxor 5y ago
  I know what you mean, and that is probably still true for the majority, for the US at least, and in large corporations, but I think the world is changing. Linux is the standard OS at my work. We use it on servers, so it makes sense to use it on the desktop too for maximum dev familiarity and compatibility, since it now works well there... it's even started to be used by some of the non-devs to reduce windows/mac update fatigue and general performance issues even though they only need office apps... I'm at a small company but I know of other large companies with big IT depts applying the "locked down OS image" approach to Linux for desktop too. I find the concept of "windows" as the only safe OS image IT depts are willing to use, as fairly antiquated. Much like IE used to be the only browser you were allowed to use in many big old corps and gov agencies for "security" reasons. Although this is an aside, the original context of the article was only "hackers" machines, and whatever your interpretation of that is, it probably doesn't involve fortune 500s.
  - danieldk 5y ago
    We use it on servers, so it makes sense to use it on the desktop too for maximum dev familiarity and compatibility, since it now works well there... I am always surprised by these things. I mean, even trying to use something widely-used (nowadays) as Zoom, basically gives me two options (on a HiDPI screen): - Use X11, but when I share a window and use drawing tools, whatever I draw is displaced by a seemingly constant offset. It's caused by scaling for HiDPI, because if I disable scaling, things work. - Use Wayland, but I can only share the whole screen. Drawing works, but the overlay is incredibly flaky and often incorrectly registers clicks. Besides that on both Wayland and X11, doing video call makes the fans blow at full speed and quickly drains the battery when a laptop is not hooked up (probably no hardware acceleration of video encoding/decoding). Oh, and I probably want to use a wired headphone, because using a BlueTooth headsets regularly dropout. Zoom is just a single example, but there are just so many paper cuts if you want to work outside a solo developer context. (Windows has a lot of issues as well, but at least basic workflows generally work.)
    - tomxor 5y ago
      Zoom does seem to be a piece of crap, but it lets you use the browser which seems to be less bad on linux. At my work we all use google meets and only zoom for some external customers, the experience seems to be much worse with zoom in general regardless of the OS - that said it seems to work ok on Linux in the browser - once you actually get into the meeting, that's the hardest and worst UX experience ever (getting into the meeting). I haven't used HiDPI monitors on linux yet, being able to use linux easily is more important to me for dev, it's a known area of weakness, and I just don't need the extra pixels for dev so it's easier to just avoid it. If you are doing graphics linux is probably not the best OS for the job tbh, and that's a shame but just the way it is currently. > Zoom is just a single example, but there are just so many paper cuts if you want to work outside a solo developer context. I suppose it depends upon how much crap software the workplace forces upon their workers, I understand that it's often mandatory to use a bunch of proprietary software for various types of communication and management stuff.. i.e stuff that's not central to actual dev work. If you can get away with a browser, then it's not bad at all... and when there is an option for a native version, use the browser, because usually it's some horrific electron thing that's even worse.

by tomxor 5y ago

swiley 5y ago

When Lion came out I switched to Debian after it corrupted the rootfs twice. Installation my MBP was pretty easy.

tomxor 5y ago
Same here, 10.6 was my last MacOS, it felt like it lost direction and focus after that. For a 2009 MBP it was a nice experience trying out FreeBSD and various linux distros before settling on Debian. The only stumbling block on that machine was the macEFI, which there were eventually plenty of solutions for - I hear the later machines are a bit of a nightmare to run anything other than MacOS though.

jhbadger 5y ago

Well, if you are self-employed maybe. Or for your own personal home machines, sure. But most employers with IT departments wouldn't be too happy if you had a "nonstandard" OS on your work machine because they wouldn't know how to secure it. Heck, many of them don't even allow Macs.

tomxor 5y ago
I know what you mean, and that is probably still true for the majority, for the US at least, and in large corporations, but I think the world is changing. Linux is the standard OS at my work. We use it on servers, so it makes sense to use it on the desktop too for maximum dev familiarity and compatibility, since it now works well there... it's even started to be used by some of the non-devs to reduce windows/mac update fatigue and general performance issues even though they only need office apps... I'm at a small company but I know of other large companies with big IT depts applying the "locked down OS image" approach to Linux for desktop too. I find the concept of "windows" as the only safe OS image IT depts are willing to use, as fairly antiquated. Much like IE used to be the only browser you were allowed to use in many big old corps and gov agencies for "security" reasons. Although this is an aside, the original context of the article was only "hackers" machines, and whatever your interpretation of that is, it probably doesn't involve fortune 500s.
- danieldk 5y ago
  We use it on servers, so it makes sense to use it on the desktop too for maximum dev familiarity and compatibility, since it now works well there... I am always surprised by these things. I mean, even trying to use something widely-used (nowadays) as Zoom, basically gives me two options (on a HiDPI screen): - Use X11, but when I share a window and use drawing tools, whatever I draw is displaced by a seemingly constant offset. It's caused by scaling for HiDPI, because if I disable scaling, things work. - Use Wayland, but I can only share the whole screen. Drawing works, but the overlay is incredibly flaky and often incorrectly registers clicks. Besides that on both Wayland and X11, doing video call makes the fans blow at full speed and quickly drains the battery when a laptop is not hooked up (probably no hardware acceleration of video encoding/decoding). Oh, and I probably want to use a wired headphone, because using a BlueTooth headsets regularly dropout. Zoom is just a single example, but there are just so many paper cuts if you want to work outside a solo developer context. (Windows has a lot of issues as well, but at least basic workflows generally work.)
  - tomxor 5y ago
    Zoom does seem to be a piece of crap, but it lets you use the browser which seems to be less bad on linux. At my work we all use google meets and only zoom for some external customers, the experience seems to be much worse with zoom in general regardless of the OS - that said it seems to work ok on Linux in the browser - once you actually get into the meeting, that's the hardest and worst UX experience ever (getting into the meeting). I haven't used HiDPI monitors on linux yet, being able to use linux easily is more important to me for dev, it's a known area of weakness, and I just don't need the extra pixels for dev so it's easier to just avoid it. If you are doing graphics linux is probably not the best OS for the job tbh, and that's a shame but just the way it is currently. > Zoom is just a single example, but there are just so many paper cuts if you want to work outside a solo developer context. I suppose it depends upon how much crap software the workplace forces upon their workers, I understand that it's often mandatory to use a bunch of proprietary software for various types of communication and management stuff.. i.e stuff that's not central to actual dev work. If you can get away with a browser, then it's not bad at all... and when there is an option for a native version, use the browser, because usually it's some horrific electron thing that's even worse.