9 ms·

It’s really something, isn’t it? I’ve never regretted my decision to switch from macOS to Linux over a decade ago. Having to restart a 64GB machine constantly b

It’s really something, isn’t it? I’ve never regretted my decision to switch from macOS to Linux over a decade ago. Having to restart a 64GB machine constantly because it runs out of memory? Meanwhile my 4GB Linux computer shows a 38-day uptime (only because I accidentally unplugged it last month) and my two Linux servers have uptimes of over a year.

strunz 5y ago
Funny, I moved from Linux to Mac because I got so sick of no good laptops with full support for Linux and it's never ending subsystems for audio, webcams, trackpads, etc. And not like Linux UIs are known for being efficient and memory friendly either.
hhaha88 5y ago
Hahaha the old “if your workload just looked like my workload” argument. I like how x86 is a power sucking hog for the performance and enthusiasts response is to go out and buy more power sucking hogs! Someone wasn’t around when Linux could figure out what to do with a USB device. Spectre? Meltdown? What are those? It’s almost as if engineering is hard and being a critic is easy. Kind of like numbers, language allows for a never ending, so big in a sense, corpus of little ideas.
crubier 5y ago
Just to be clear: This perfectly fine experience you describe is also exactly the experience of 99% of Apple users, including me. You only hear the ones that complain.
- leephillips 5y ago
  The ones that don’t complain have low standards. When I switched, although OSX was pretty solid, it was trading frequently spinning beachballs for the first consistently responsive computer I’d ever used. I had come to regard macOS sluggishness as normal, as do most Mac users, because they haven’t experienced anything better.
  - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
    Thanks for telling me that I have low standards. Amazing considering MacBooks on my desk.
  - pivo 5y ago
    > The ones that don’t complain have low standards. Wow, well, thanks a lot. I've been developing on both the Mac and Linux for years and I don't have this issue on any of the multiple MBPs I use, including my personal 2013 model. I'm not saying I have no problems on the Mac, but they're not worse than the issues I had with Linux, especially on laptops.
  - DandyDev 5y ago
    Is this sort of sweeping generalization really necessary? I can tell you that it's not true in any case. I'm one of those Mac users that doesn't complain about performance, because I rarely see the spinning beach ball.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    I haven't seen a spinning beachball on MacOS in years. I'm not even sure it still exists anymore. But also only rarely have a sluggish system, with or without a spinning beachball.
    - emkoemko 5y ago
      what are spinning beach balls? i don't understand? like BSOD ?
      - saagarjha 5y ago
        A cursor indicating the frontmost application is unresponsive.
    - joeman1000 5y ago
      Definitely still exists. I get it in emacs sometimes (god only knows why).
fouc 5y ago
I'm sure I've gotten 100-days uptimes on my MacBook. Close the lid at night, it goes to sleep, open it up in the morning, and continue working.
- innocentoldguy 5y ago
  This has been my experience as well. I've had an M1 MacBook Pro since they came out and I've never had to reboot my machine outside of software updates that required me to. It has always just run. I use my computer to write Elixir code, write music with Logic and Studio One, and edit photos/videos. Maybe none of those tasks trigger the problems other people are having.
- grosswait 5y ago
  I can’t get more than upper 30’s before it just starts doing too many odd things to work around
  - ddoeth 5y ago
    Yep, same for me. But the restart fixes it every time. That's why I set a timer that reminds me to restart after 20+ days.
- abrowne 5y ago
  Only if you skip updates that require a reboot?
- TomVDB 5y ago
  Same here. I get ridiculous uptimes on mine. (And, yes, I defer SW updates…)
- postalrat 5y ago
  Refreshing just HN probably doesn't take too many resources.
- eru 5y ago
  Don't OS upgrades come out more often than that?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
RayVR 5y ago
I don’t know what you’re doing on a 4GB machine but I promise most workloads that create significant memory pressure would start creating problems for you, just like on macOS. I use a dual xeon, 64GB Linux desktop which performs reasonably well. A colleague runs a Linux machine with 16GB of ram. Compiling the same project can cause OOM issues for him and the kernel starts whacking processes. Even if he closes all non-essential processes, his builds run 10x as long as mine due to memory constraints. My main point here - let’s not pretend your 4GB machine is being used to do any intense local work. The inverse of this is seen on my Intel MacBook Air and my colleague’s M1 MacBook Air. The compilation time for our code is 35 minutes or more on my machine and only 3 minutes on the M1.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  > My main point here - let’s not pretend your 4GB machine is being used to do any intense local work. That depends entirely on what you consider intense local work. Just because you are not compiling doesn’t mean running your 15 microservice stack locally is not intense.
  - monsieurbanana 5y ago
    Any memory intensive work. I thought his meaning was clear.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      Memory intensive work wasn't the topic of conversation. GGP's comment was about how often he had to reboot his laptop despite it's immense memory budget, not about how much faster it was at performing memory-intensive tasks.
    - nerdponx 5y ago
      4 GB is maybe small nowadays, but memory-intensive is relative. I'd argue that _most_ programmers or even data analysts don't need more than 8 GB to perform their actual work. But realistically they need 16+ anyway because of opening 200 browser tabs, memory-heavy IDEs, etc. 32 or 64 is nice for sure, but definitely not needed for actual "work" workloads for the most part.
jwmoz 5y ago
I never regretted moving from Linux to Mac also a decade ago. Mac has been fairly smooth for me, still on a 2013 mbp that just needed a battery replacement. Linux, however, was pain, quite often.
- emkoemko 5y ago
  its a lot different now, unless your running it on proprietary hardware without official driver support, like the random stuff laptops have these days, but now we have many companies making laptops for Linux so it has improved a lot. Why give money to a company to use their software when you can use open software and help fix and improve something everyone can use for free.
charcircuit 5y ago
Maybe not constantly but I have to restart my 64 GB Linux machine because it runs out of memory. Linux's OOM killer is terrible. I literally have to wait half an hour while my desktop is frozen for the OOM killer to kick in. And no, spamming the key combo for invoking the OOM killer once this happens doesn't help.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  Use earlyoom or another oom daemon for a 1000x better experience and consider figuring out what is leaking. Do you use gnome? It used to have a bad leak that was supposed to have been fixed.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    I think it's mostly firefox just holding things in memory since so much is free. Eventually it just all adds up and eventually I try to compile something and then it will run out of memory. Yes, I can go setup an oom daemon, but Linux should handle this for me out of the box (ideally with some sort of logic to avoid killing something like X taking down every single program I have open). Getting stuck for half an hour or longer is just not acceptable to let happen.
  - kabes 5y ago
    Thanks I'll try that. The behavior when memory is low is easily the worst part of desktop Linux
runjake 5y ago
I regret moving from macOS to Linux. While the tooling and system stability are better, the desktop and app experiences are far worse. It’s buggy, half-baked, and crash. I regularly hop distributions and do clean installs to see if that will fix it but they’re all the same — pop!_os might be slightly more stable in that regard. I’ve been using Linux since 1992. I’ve had several year periods in the 90s and early 2000s where Linux was all I used. I can ditch GNOME, KDE, and XFCE and go back to twm or i3 or fvwm or Window Maker, but I’ve moved beyond thoses experiences. I want a more functional desktop. But, I see now why I paid more to put up with Apple.
- arminiusreturns 5y ago
  Can you please explain what exactly you get from the Apple desktop you don't with any of those options? I'm currently forced onto a mac for work and I find it lacking in almost every way other than an ever so slight advantage in beauty. So besides dpi-scaling issues linux is known for, whats the draw? Some hotkey that does a thing? Some visual candy? Smoothness in transitions? Whatever it is, it's hard for me to imagine it being worth the tradeoff. I can't even name desktop workspaces on a Mac! I'm reviewing the "new features" section on Monterey: https://www.apple.com/macos/monterey/features/ https://www.apple.com/macos/monterey/features/ and I'm not seeing much other than a few known areas (multi-device support if you bought fully into the apple ecosystem, etc). With most "I tried linux desktop" people it's a problem of DE/WM, but you seem to be beyond that so I'm genuinely curious.
  - runjake 5y ago
    > Can you please explain what exactly you get from the Apple desktop you don't with any of those options? A more cohesive experience across the desktop and applications, eg.: - The look and feel is uniform. Admittedly somewhat less so, these days now that the Apple Human Interface Guidelines are largely ignored. - Mac apps and generally more stable. - Mac apps generally have more features. - The Mac apps I use generally tend to tie into the hardware (hw acceleration, drivers, etc) much better. The benefit of controlling the vertical, I suppose. - The keyboard shortcuts both exist and are the same across apps. - The design patterns. - The AppleScript/x-callback-url, etc). - Third party apps generally tend to fit well into the above. On Linux, almost everybody seems to have their own ideas on how an app should be arranged. With full desktop environments, like GNOME and KDE lessen this, but it's still really, really common. That said, my money is still on Linux and other open source OSes, because I don't want a single company telling me what I can and can't do.
cellis 5y ago
try viewing 2000 image files on Ubuntu desktop (20.04). It was so slow that I wrote a web interface to do the job instead.
dagw 5y ago
On the other hand my Linux computer struggles to go 10 days without a reboot due to the graphics driver bugging out, while my old MBA basically never needed rebooting.
pacomerh 5y ago
This sounds appealing until you remember that you can't get all the nice apps in Linux.

strunz 5y ago

Funny, I moved from Linux to Mac because I got so sick of no good laptops with full support for Linux and it's never ending subsystems for audio, webcams, trackpads, etc. And not like Linux UIs are known for being efficient and memory friendly either.

hhaha88 5y ago

Hahaha the old “if your workload just looked like my workload” argument. I like how x86 is a power sucking hog for the performance and enthusiasts response is to go out and buy more power sucking hogs! Someone wasn’t around when Linux could figure out what to do with a USB device. Spectre? Meltdown? What are those? It’s almost as if engineering is hard and being a critic is easy. Kind of like numbers, language allows for a never ending, so big in a sense, corpus of little ideas.

crubier 5y ago

Just to be clear: This perfectly fine experience you describe is also exactly the experience of 99% of Apple users, including me. You only hear the ones that complain.

leephillips 5y ago
The ones that don’t complain have low standards. When I switched, although OSX was pretty solid, it was trading frequently spinning beachballs for the first consistently responsive computer I’d ever used. I had come to regard macOS sluggishness as normal, as do most Mac users, because they haven’t experienced anything better.
- rad_gruchalski 5y ago
  Thanks for telling me that I have low standards. Amazing considering MacBooks on my desk.
- pivo 5y ago
  > The ones that don’t complain have low standards. Wow, well, thanks a lot. I've been developing on both the Mac and Linux for years and I don't have this issue on any of the multiple MBPs I use, including my personal 2013 model. I'm not saying I have no problems on the Mac, but they're not worse than the issues I had with Linux, especially on laptops.
- DandyDev 5y ago
  Is this sort of sweeping generalization really necessary? I can tell you that it's not true in any case. I'm one of those Mac users that doesn't complain about performance, because I rarely see the spinning beach ball.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  I haven't seen a spinning beachball on MacOS in years. I'm not even sure it still exists anymore. But also only rarely have a sluggish system, with or without a spinning beachball.
  - emkoemko 5y ago
    what are spinning beach balls? i don't understand? like BSOD ?
    - saagarjha 5y ago
      A cursor indicating the frontmost application is unresponsive.
  - joeman1000 5y ago
    Definitely still exists. I get it in emacs sometimes (god only knows why).

fouc 5y ago

I'm sure I've gotten 100-days uptimes on my MacBook. Close the lid at night, it goes to sleep, open it up in the morning, and continue working.

innocentoldguy 5y ago
This has been my experience as well. I've had an M1 MacBook Pro since they came out and I've never had to reboot my machine outside of software updates that required me to. It has always just run. I use my computer to write Elixir code, write music with Logic and Studio One, and edit photos/videos. Maybe none of those tasks trigger the problems other people are having.
grosswait 5y ago
I can’t get more than upper 30’s before it just starts doing too many odd things to work around
- ddoeth 5y ago
  Yep, same for me. But the restart fixes it every time. That's why I set a timer that reminds me to restart after 20+ days.
abrowne 5y ago
Only if you skip updates that require a reboot?
TomVDB 5y ago
Same here. I get ridiculous uptimes on mine. (And, yes, I defer SW updates…)
postalrat 5y ago
Refreshing just HN probably doesn't take too many resources.
eru 5y ago
Don't OS upgrades come out more often than that?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

RayVR 5y ago

I don’t know what you’re doing on a 4GB machine but I promise most workloads that create significant memory pressure would start creating problems for you, just like on macOS. I use a dual xeon, 64GB Linux desktop which performs reasonably well. A colleague runs a Linux machine with 16GB of ram. Compiling the same project can cause OOM issues for him and the kernel starts whacking processes. Even if he closes all non-essential processes, his builds run 10x as long as mine due to memory constraints. My main point here - let’s not pretend your 4GB machine is being used to do any intense local work. The inverse of this is seen on my Intel MacBook Air and my colleague’s M1 MacBook Air. The compilation time for our code is 35 minutes or more on my machine and only 3 minutes on the M1.

Aeolun 5y ago
> My main point here - let’s not pretend your 4GB machine is being used to do any intense local work. That depends entirely on what you consider intense local work. Just because you are not compiling doesn’t mean running your 15 microservice stack locally is not intense.
- monsieurbanana 5y ago
  Any memory intensive work. I thought his meaning was clear.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Memory intensive work wasn't the topic of conversation. GGP's comment was about how often he had to reboot his laptop despite it's immense memory budget, not about how much faster it was at performing memory-intensive tasks.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    4 GB is maybe small nowadays, but memory-intensive is relative. I'd argue that _most_ programmers or even data analysts don't need more than 8 GB to perform their actual work. But realistically they need 16+ anyway because of opening 200 browser tabs, memory-heavy IDEs, etc. 32 or 64 is nice for sure, but definitely not needed for actual "work" workloads for the most part.

jwmoz 5y ago

I never regretted moving from Linux to Mac also a decade ago. Mac has been fairly smooth for me, still on a 2013 mbp that just needed a battery replacement. Linux, however, was pain, quite often.

emkoemko 5y ago
its a lot different now, unless your running it on proprietary hardware without official driver support, like the random stuff laptops have these days, but now we have many companies making laptops for Linux so it has improved a lot. Why give money to a company to use their software when you can use open software and help fix and improve something everyone can use for free.

charcircuit 5y ago

Maybe not constantly but I have to restart my 64 GB Linux machine because it runs out of memory. Linux's OOM killer is terrible. I literally have to wait half an hour while my desktop is frozen for the OOM killer to kick in. And no, spamming the key combo for invoking the OOM killer once this happens doesn't help.

michaelmrose 5y ago
Use earlyoom or another oom daemon for a 1000x better experience and consider figuring out what is leaking. Do you use gnome? It used to have a bad leak that was supposed to have been fixed.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  I think it's mostly firefox just holding things in memory since so much is free. Eventually it just all adds up and eventually I try to compile something and then it will run out of memory. Yes, I can go setup an oom daemon, but Linux should handle this for me out of the box (ideally with some sort of logic to avoid killing something like X taking down every single program I have open). Getting stuck for half an hour or longer is just not acceptable to let happen.
- kabes 5y ago
  Thanks I'll try that. The behavior when memory is low is easily the worst part of desktop Linux

runjake 5y ago

I regret moving from macOS to Linux. While the tooling and system stability are better, the desktop and app experiences are far worse. It’s buggy, half-baked, and crash. I regularly hop distributions and do clean installs to see if that will fix it but they’re all the same — pop!_os might be slightly more stable in that regard. I’ve been using Linux since 1992. I’ve had several year periods in the 90s and early 2000s where Linux was all I used. I can ditch GNOME, KDE, and XFCE and go back to twm or i3 or fvwm or Window Maker, but I’ve moved beyond thoses experiences. I want a more functional desktop. But, I see now why I paid more to put up with Apple.

arminiusreturns 5y ago
Can you please explain what exactly you get from the Apple desktop you don't with any of those options? I'm currently forced onto a mac for work and I find it lacking in almost every way other than an ever so slight advantage in beauty. So besides dpi-scaling issues linux is known for, whats the draw? Some hotkey that does a thing? Some visual candy? Smoothness in transitions? Whatever it is, it's hard for me to imagine it being worth the tradeoff. I can't even name desktop workspaces on a Mac! I'm reviewing the "new features" section on Monterey: https://www.apple.com/macos/monterey/features/ https://www.apple.com/macos/monterey/features/ and I'm not seeing much other than a few known areas (multi-device support if you bought fully into the apple ecosystem, etc). With most "I tried linux desktop" people it's a problem of DE/WM, but you seem to be beyond that so I'm genuinely curious.
- runjake 5y ago
  > Can you please explain what exactly you get from the Apple desktop you don't with any of those options? A more cohesive experience across the desktop and applications, eg.: - The look and feel is uniform. Admittedly somewhat less so, these days now that the Apple Human Interface Guidelines are largely ignored. - Mac apps and generally more stable. - Mac apps generally have more features. - The Mac apps I use generally tend to tie into the hardware (hw acceleration, drivers, etc) much better. The benefit of controlling the vertical, I suppose. - The keyboard shortcuts both exist and are the same across apps. - The design patterns. - The AppleScript/x-callback-url, etc). - Third party apps generally tend to fit well into the above. On Linux, almost everybody seems to have their own ideas on how an app should be arranged. With full desktop environments, like GNOME and KDE lessen this, but it's still really, really common. That said, my money is still on Linux and other open source OSes, because I don't want a single company telling me what I can and can't do.

cellis 5y ago

try viewing 2000 image files on Ubuntu desktop (20.04). It was so slow that I wrote a web interface to do the job instead.

dagw 5y ago

On the other hand my Linux computer struggles to go 10 days without a reboot due to the graphics driver bugging out, while my old MBA basically never needed rebooting.

pacomerh 5y ago

This sounds appealing until you remember that you can't get all the nice apps in Linux.