9 ms·

Dude, operating system is one of the most fundamental things to consider when getting a dev machine. MacOS is literally useless for me, because I depend on the

Dude, operating system is one of the most fundamental things to consider when getting a dev machine. MacOS is literally useless for me, because I depend on the Linux kernel.

selfmodruntime 4y ago
You can still install Linux on a mac (which is what I did) and still get a powerful and beautiful machine, if you so desire.
- fabianhjr 4y ago
  There is almost no firmware support for the recent aarch64 Mac hardware.
- vinceguidry 4y ago
  Least-worst option if you're stuck running OSX is to run a Linux VM. VMWare makes probably the best solution.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  I use a Mac Book from time to time and the keyboard alone is special... I don't think Mac is a good universal machine for development to be honest. The devices overall are nice, out of the question, but a Linux machine is ultimately more powerful.
  - swozey 4y ago
    "Ultimately more powerful" As a previous BSD engineer please explain further, this entire thread is just horrendous and should be downvoted to oblivion. Nobody cares what laptop you decide to use, nor are you incapable of doing your own research. My grandmother calls me for laptop recommendations. My M1 Max 14" MBP has 64gb ram, mucho cores and is the fastest machine I've used. My gaming/dev desktop is a 12core ryzen with 64gb and I prefer to use the Macbook which can sit on my lap without even having a fan running. Did I used to hate Apple? Yes. Do I have a $2500 Dell XPS 13z sitting in a closet that I never use because it throttles so horribly it's useless? Yes.
    - wtetzner 4y ago
      I think you misunderstood "more powerful". I don't think they were referring to the hardware being more powerful, but the OS in terms of its flexibility.
    - formerkrogemp 4y ago
      I'll pay you 5$ and shipping for that XPS.
      - swozey 4y ago
        It's being sent to my mom this week, if you make that $1k I'll do it. It's barely 2 years old and has been awful since I got it. I think I just had higher expectations out of its form factor which can't keep itself cool at all.
        formerkrogemp 4y ago
        I'm always in support of donating laptops to relatives in need. Good on you.
    - raxxorraxor 4y ago
      Well, you might be able to make it work, but the OS simply leaves you less freedom compared to a Linux machine. And you would need to jump through hoops. I am an embedded dev and I have tried. Theoretically it is possible, but you would miss a lot of tooling on the way. I don't really care about performance that much. I have an MB Air with M1 and I like it because the battery and display is very good. But it isn't really used for productivity. I also work in industry and everything here is Windows and maybe Linux. MacOS doesn't exist here. Good luck attaching your Mac to a reflow soldering machine (I have tried too). It just doesn't play well with others and is rather exclusionary itself.
      - swozey 4y ago
        Unique devices is definitely a concern! I wasn't sure when I got my Garmin watch if I'd be able to update it from my mac. Thankfully I can.
  - lazyier 4y ago
    Apple keyboards are miserable. I don't know why people keep saying that it's so wonderful. I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing. As an Emacs user I find the whole concept of a "touch screen esc key" as deplorable and regressive. And this is on top of the poor reliability and high cost of repair.
    - Unbeliever69 4y ago
      The new macs are (for me) a return to the pre-2015 era but on steroids. My M1 Macbook Air is a blazing fast dev machine for what I do (dockerized full-stack web dev). I do sympathize with all the mac hate during the dreaded 2016-2020 era. I'm glad I held out and skipped that era entirely.
    - tmh88j 4y ago
      >Apple keyboards are miserable > I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing. You have an older version made sometime between 2016-2019. They got rid of the butterfly keyboard for the 2020 models.
      - masklinn 4y ago
        The keys on the new ones still have pretty short travel though. Much shorter than the pre-butterfly generation, which wasn’t very deep in the first place. I can well understand that people who like / want deep key travel would dislike them.
        tmh88j 4y ago
        I hate the butterfly keyboard too, but most importantly the worthless touchbar is gone and the physical escape key is back.
        4y ago
- omginternets 4y ago
  Right, but the parent poster is presumably going to spend most of his time under linux, at which point a native linux box seems like the reasonable choice.
- brimble 4y ago
  The OS and first-party software are at least 50% of the reason I buy Mac hardware, personally. Safari (+20% battery life), Notes (missing a couple features I'd like, but has also never crashed or glitched on me in a decade of use, so...), Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Digital Color Meter, Preview (I love Preview), the excellent and remarkably low-latency Terminal, Mail, et c. Take those away and I'd just go back to buying used Windows laptops on Ebay, putting Linux on them, and being sad.
  - moreira 4y ago
    > Take those away and I'd just go back to buying used Windows laptops on Ebay, putting Linux on them, and being sad. Same. It's also interesting to think of this in terms of the real $ value of the OS. If I had to choose between a $1000 Windows laptop or a $2000 macOS laptop, I'd still go for the macOS laptop, even if they had the same specs. The specs of a laptop matter far less to me than the OS and surrounding ecosystem. Same as how a $10K Mac Studio would still be useless for gaming. Could have the world's best GPU, and it would still have no value to anyone looking for a gaming computer.
    - brimble 4y ago
      I'm really, really not happy about there not being a single OS I consider comparable, when it comes to getting work done. It's like the rest are all competing with each other and macOS is just off doing its own (better) thing, while they don't even try to compete with it. I'm tentatively hopeful that Google's new OS will be good enough to compete—after a couple decades of using desktop Linux full-time, then off-and-on, I think its GUI model (and by extension those of the BSDs) is just fundamentally not capable of producing something really good. Too fragmented for mostly-bad reasons, whole stack's too big and creaky and Wayland doesn't seem to be helping with that very much, having it not just separable from but very separate from the base OS causes lots of support-related trouble if you try to target it as a platform, and so on. BeOS was nice. Windows could be nice but they decided to make it adware and spyware and completely ruin the settings screens for no good reason. Sigh.
  - boringg 4y ago
- mort96 4y ago
  So are you suggesting getting a 3+ year old Intel model then? Since the ARM models aren't really supported yet.
- ho_schi 4y ago
  This will come with a lot of problems and requires extra work. Apple Hardware is not intended by the manufacturer to be used as general purpose computer but to run MacOS.
  - lazyier 4y ago
    No kidding. I can walk into any office store, plop down 350 dollars, and get a laptop that will probably work very well with Linux. Any problems I end up hardware-wise is probably going to be the same sort of problems I would run into if I was running Windows. With plenty of companies providing great support for Linux I don't know why anybody would want to deal with Evil Corp Apple and then spend day struggling to get a mostly working system. Apple are the people who make a living on creating and pedaling spyware ffs.
    - ho_schi 4y ago
      Not my words but yes. Giving a corporation money encourages them to keep going that direction further. I would spend more money on Linux certified computers from (e.g. Lenovo, Dell, Purism, System76, Tuxedo...) which hopefully encourages this companies to keep going and improving. A single customer of course doesn't change much but 10.000 do.
- chociej 4y ago
  YMMV. Linux on the 2019 16" MBP has a lot of issues that make it irritating. It works, but not perfectly by any stretch. And yes the machine is nice, except for the keyboard, which is probably one of the most important parts!
uuyi 4y ago
Maybe, maybe not. I'm a Linux person. I run Debian in a UTM VM on my MacBook Pro and do all the work in that. Why? Because the host machine sucks less at all the desktop stuff that Linux is horrible at and the VM wins at all the server and dev stuff the Mac sucks at.
mekster 4y ago
Doesn't feel right. Any OS can virtualize Linux, so the host doesn't really matter. Besides, it's usually the software that matters and not the OS.
- chociej 4y ago
  Virtualization is a far cry, performance and experience wise, from running the OS natively.
  - mekster 4y ago
    What work are you even doing to push virtualization performance to its limit? I cab run a Ubuntu server VM at good performance on VMware.
  - indiv0 4y ago
    Not anymore. Not on the M1s. They're far and away faster than anything but the beefiest desktop. A lua parser benchmark I ran in a VM on my M1 beat my 5950X by a factor of two. The only remaining limitation are missing some ARM docker containers (which is slowly being solved) and the machines not being suitable for ML (in which case you need a desktop or to rent server time on the cloud).
- kaladin-jasnah 4y ago
  Is this satire?
  - mekster 4y ago
    As in? I'm serious.
    - kaladin-jasnah 4y ago
      It is definitely not easier to passthrough an NVIDIA GPU that I require for machine learning to a virtual machine on an M1 Mac versus just buying a laptop with an NVIDIA GPU. I don't even know if M1 supports eGPU, have not heard anything about it, and I doubt PCI passthrough or whatever you use for eGPUs works on macOS. Sometimes hardware does matter, and it glaringly matters (esp. w.r.t. CUDA). Also consider gaming. Considering that GPU virtualization is not really a thing still, I cannot imagine, for example, gaming being easier on macOS, and the VM requires additional setup too.
indiv0 4y ago
Just run Linux in a VM! It's my preferred workflow nowadays. See: https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubDMLoWz76U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubDMLoWz76U Only real limitations are lack of ML because no server/desktop-grade GPU and some missing ARM-based docker containers. But the latter is slowly being resolved and the former isn't gonna happen on a laptop anyways.
- gspr 4y ago
  > Just run Linux in a VM! It's my preferred workflow nowadays. Or just run it on real hardware! It's my preferred workflow. These two comments of ours are equally pointless.
  - indiv0 4y ago
    Alright, then allow me to explain. Before, there were a multitude of reasons not to develop in a VM: Poor support for accelerated instructions on laptops; Slow CPUs; limited RAM; slow file-sharing between the host and guest. The M1 architecture solves most of the issues. Modern laptops almost universally support accelerated instructions now. This means less overhead, so doing everything entirely in the VM is worth it now. So no more dealing with slow file-sharing. The speed of the M1 also means you're not limited compared to your desktop. Depending on the benchmark (especially any benchmark relying on CPU cache size), it may be faster on the M1 air than on a 5950X. Even in workloads where the laptop is slower, it is now fast enough. Running docker containers in a VM on a 16GB *non-M1* machine is untenable. The M1's RAM is not only higher bandwidth and lower latency, but the compression and caching has improved so much that you can fit much more in that same 16GB. In use-cases where you need more than 16GB, the M1's NVMe disk is so low latency that swap usage is indistinguishable in performance from RAM usage. So the laptop has no memory limit, for practical purposes (though the wear on the disk is increased in this case). In addition, ARM architectures were a pain to deal with before, so most people emulated x86_64 and assume that you'd still have to do that on the M1. Nowadays, there is no reason not to run an ARM Linux in the VM. Most programs run just fine, and the remaining holdouts are a few Docker containers that haven't been updated. But even those aren't a problem because recent improvements to Docker greatly simplify running x86_64 containers under QEMU. Combine all of this with the Mac app ecosystem (which has its problems, but is generally OK to use, especially if your other devices come from Apple), improved battery, the return of the good keyboard, and greatly lowered TDP, there really isn't a choice to make anymore. The remaining reasons not to use it are basically as follows: 1) Compatibility with external devices, or work on embedded controllers 2) Anything requiring significant GPU compute (ML, etc.). But this would likely be done on a desktop rather than a laptop, which wasn't the scope of the question. 3) Disk capacity requirements (though external NVMe over thunderbolt mostly solves this) 4) Extremely multi-threaded work (video editing, etc.) where a desktop CPU outperforms the M1's multi-thread score. Less pointless now?
neogodless 4y ago
Yes. I think the way this conversation played out was "given how I use my device, is there an optimal device to buy?" A lot of the answers are, in turn, "why don't you use your device differently? having ignored your use cases and preferences, this is the device I'd recommend." It might be a valid opinion to say "I don't use Linux and I enjoy using MacOS on Apple Silicon" but... it doesn't actually help the original poster, does it? So why post that at all? I guess I could point out to the poster that I use Windows 10, and I built a desktop PC. It doesn't really meet any of their criteria (except #3 computing power), but... it works for me. So maybe they should change and be more like me!

Dude, operating system is one of the most fundamental things to consider when getting a dev machine. MacOS is literally useless for me, because I depend on the Linux kernel.

selfmodruntime 4y ago

You can still install Linux on a mac (which is what I did) and still get a powerful and beautiful machine, if you so desire.

fabianhjr 4y ago
There is almost no firmware support for the recent aarch64 Mac hardware.
vinceguidry 4y ago
Least-worst option if you're stuck running OSX is to run a Linux VM. VMWare makes probably the best solution.
raxxorraxor 4y ago
I use a Mac Book from time to time and the keyboard alone is special... I don't think Mac is a good universal machine for development to be honest. The devices overall are nice, out of the question, but a Linux machine is ultimately more powerful.
- swozey 4y ago
  "Ultimately more powerful" As a previous BSD engineer please explain further, this entire thread is just horrendous and should be downvoted to oblivion. Nobody cares what laptop you decide to use, nor are you incapable of doing your own research. My grandmother calls me for laptop recommendations. My M1 Max 14" MBP has 64gb ram, mucho cores and is the fastest machine I've used. My gaming/dev desktop is a 12core ryzen with 64gb and I prefer to use the Macbook which can sit on my lap without even having a fan running. Did I used to hate Apple? Yes. Do I have a $2500 Dell XPS 13z sitting in a closet that I never use because it throttles so horribly it's useless? Yes.
  - wtetzner 4y ago
    I think you misunderstood "more powerful". I don't think they were referring to the hardware being more powerful, but the OS in terms of its flexibility.
  - formerkrogemp 4y ago
    I'll pay you 5$ and shipping for that XPS.
    - swozey 4y ago
      It's being sent to my mom this week, if you make that $1k I'll do it. It's barely 2 years old and has been awful since I got it. I think I just had higher expectations out of its form factor which can't keep itself cool at all.
      - formerkrogemp 4y ago
        I'm always in support of donating laptops to relatives in need. Good on you.
  - raxxorraxor 4y ago
    Well, you might be able to make it work, but the OS simply leaves you less freedom compared to a Linux machine. And you would need to jump through hoops. I am an embedded dev and I have tried. Theoretically it is possible, but you would miss a lot of tooling on the way. I don't really care about performance that much. I have an MB Air with M1 and I like it because the battery and display is very good. But it isn't really used for productivity. I also work in industry and everything here is Windows and maybe Linux. MacOS doesn't exist here. Good luck attaching your Mac to a reflow soldering machine (I have tried too). It just doesn't play well with others and is rather exclusionary itself.
    - swozey 4y ago
      Unique devices is definitely a concern! I wasn't sure when I got my Garmin watch if I'd be able to update it from my mac. Thankfully I can.
- lazyier 4y ago
  Apple keyboards are miserable. I don't know why people keep saying that it's so wonderful. I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing. As an Emacs user I find the whole concept of a "touch screen esc key" as deplorable and regressive. And this is on top of the poor reliability and high cost of repair.
  - Unbeliever69 4y ago
    The new macs are (for me) a return to the pre-2015 era but on steroids. My M1 Macbook Air is a blazing fast dev machine for what I do (dockerized full-stack web dev). I do sympathize with all the mac hate during the dreaded 2016-2020 era. I'm glad I held out and skipped that era entirely.
  - tmh88j 4y ago
    >Apple keyboards are miserable > I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing. You have an older version made sometime between 2016-2019. They got rid of the butterfly keyboard for the 2020 models.
    - masklinn 4y ago
      The keys on the new ones still have pretty short travel though. Much shorter than the pre-butterfly generation, which wasn’t very deep in the first place. I can well understand that people who like / want deep key travel would dislike them.
      - tmh88j 4y ago
        I hate the butterfly keyboard too, but most importantly the worthless touchbar is gone and the physical escape key is back.
        4y ago
omginternets 4y ago
Right, but the parent poster is presumably going to spend most of his time under linux, at which point a native linux box seems like the reasonable choice.
brimble 4y ago
The OS and first-party software are at least 50% of the reason I buy Mac hardware, personally. Safari (+20% battery life), Notes (missing a couple features I'd like, but has also never crashed or glitched on me in a decade of use, so...), Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Digital Color Meter, Preview (I love Preview), the excellent and remarkably low-latency Terminal, Mail, et c. Take those away and I'd just go back to buying used Windows laptops on Ebay, putting Linux on them, and being sad.
- moreira 4y ago
  > Take those away and I'd just go back to buying used Windows laptops on Ebay, putting Linux on them, and being sad. Same. It's also interesting to think of this in terms of the real $ value of the OS. If I had to choose between a $1000 Windows laptop or a $2000 macOS laptop, I'd still go for the macOS laptop, even if they had the same specs. The specs of a laptop matter far less to me than the OS and surrounding ecosystem. Same as how a $10K Mac Studio would still be useless for gaming. Could have the world's best GPU, and it would still have no value to anyone looking for a gaming computer.
  - brimble 4y ago
    I'm really, really not happy about there not being a single OS I consider comparable, when it comes to getting work done. It's like the rest are all competing with each other and macOS is just off doing its own (better) thing, while they don't even try to compete with it. I'm tentatively hopeful that Google's new OS will be good enough to compete—after a couple decades of using desktop Linux full-time, then off-and-on, I think its GUI model (and by extension those of the BSDs) is just fundamentally not capable of producing something really good. Too fragmented for mostly-bad reasons, whole stack's too big and creaky and Wayland doesn't seem to be helping with that very much, having it not just separable from but very separate from the base OS causes lots of support-related trouble if you try to target it as a platform, and so on. BeOS was nice. Windows could be nice but they decided to make it adware and spyware and completely ruin the settings screens for no good reason. Sigh.
- boringg 4y ago
mort96 4y ago
So are you suggesting getting a 3+ year old Intel model then? Since the ARM models aren't really supported yet.
ho_schi 4y ago
This will come with a lot of problems and requires extra work. Apple Hardware is not intended by the manufacturer to be used as general purpose computer but to run MacOS.
- lazyier 4y ago
  No kidding. I can walk into any office store, plop down 350 dollars, and get a laptop that will probably work very well with Linux. Any problems I end up hardware-wise is probably going to be the same sort of problems I would run into if I was running Windows. With plenty of companies providing great support for Linux I don't know why anybody would want to deal with Evil Corp Apple and then spend day struggling to get a mostly working system. Apple are the people who make a living on creating and pedaling spyware ffs.
  - ho_schi 4y ago
    Not my words but yes. Giving a corporation money encourages them to keep going that direction further. I would spend more money on Linux certified computers from (e.g. Lenovo, Dell, Purism, System76, Tuxedo...) which hopefully encourages this companies to keep going and improving. A single customer of course doesn't change much but 10.000 do.
chociej 4y ago
YMMV. Linux on the 2019 16" MBP has a lot of issues that make it irritating. It works, but not perfectly by any stretch. And yes the machine is nice, except for the keyboard, which is probably one of the most important parts!

uuyi 4y ago

Maybe, maybe not. I'm a Linux person. I run Debian in a UTM VM on my MacBook Pro and do all the work in that. Why? Because the host machine sucks less at all the desktop stuff that Linux is horrible at and the VM wins at all the server and dev stuff the Mac sucks at.

mekster 4y ago

Doesn't feel right. Any OS can virtualize Linux, so the host doesn't really matter. Besides, it's usually the software that matters and not the OS.

chociej 4y ago
Virtualization is a far cry, performance and experience wise, from running the OS natively.
- mekster 4y ago
  What work are you even doing to push virtualization performance to its limit? I cab run a Ubuntu server VM at good performance on VMware.
- indiv0 4y ago
  Not anymore. Not on the M1s. They're far and away faster than anything but the beefiest desktop. A lua parser benchmark I ran in a VM on my M1 beat my 5950X by a factor of two. The only remaining limitation are missing some ARM docker containers (which is slowly being solved) and the machines not being suitable for ML (in which case you need a desktop or to rent server time on the cloud).
kaladin-jasnah 4y ago
Is this satire?
- mekster 4y ago
  As in? I'm serious.
  - kaladin-jasnah 4y ago
    It is definitely not easier to passthrough an NVIDIA GPU that I require for machine learning to a virtual machine on an M1 Mac versus just buying a laptop with an NVIDIA GPU. I don't even know if M1 supports eGPU, have not heard anything about it, and I doubt PCI passthrough or whatever you use for eGPUs works on macOS. Sometimes hardware does matter, and it glaringly matters (esp. w.r.t. CUDA). Also consider gaming. Considering that GPU virtualization is not really a thing still, I cannot imagine, for example, gaming being easier on macOS, and the VM requires additional setup too.

indiv0 4y ago

Just run Linux in a VM! It's my preferred workflow nowadays. See: https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubDMLoWz76U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubDMLoWz76U Only real limitations are lack of ML because no server/desktop-grade GPU and some missing ARM-based docker containers. But the latter is slowly being resolved and the former isn't gonna happen on a laptop anyways.

gspr 4y ago
> Just run Linux in a VM! It's my preferred workflow nowadays. Or just run it on real hardware! It's my preferred workflow. These two comments of ours are equally pointless.
- indiv0 4y ago
  Alright, then allow me to explain. Before, there were a multitude of reasons not to develop in a VM: Poor support for accelerated instructions on laptops; Slow CPUs; limited RAM; slow file-sharing between the host and guest. The M1 architecture solves most of the issues. Modern laptops almost universally support accelerated instructions now. This means less overhead, so doing everything entirely in the VM is worth it now. So no more dealing with slow file-sharing. The speed of the M1 also means you're not limited compared to your desktop. Depending on the benchmark (especially any benchmark relying on CPU cache size), it may be faster on the M1 air than on a 5950X. Even in workloads where the laptop is slower, it is now fast enough. Running docker containers in a VM on a 16GB *non-M1* machine is untenable. The M1's RAM is not only higher bandwidth and lower latency, but the compression and caching has improved so much that you can fit much more in that same 16GB. In use-cases where you need more than 16GB, the M1's NVMe disk is so low latency that swap usage is indistinguishable in performance from RAM usage. So the laptop has no memory limit, for practical purposes (though the wear on the disk is increased in this case). In addition, ARM architectures were a pain to deal with before, so most people emulated x86_64 and assume that you'd still have to do that on the M1. Nowadays, there is no reason not to run an ARM Linux in the VM. Most programs run just fine, and the remaining holdouts are a few Docker containers that haven't been updated. But even those aren't a problem because recent improvements to Docker greatly simplify running x86_64 containers under QEMU. Combine all of this with the Mac app ecosystem (which has its problems, but is generally OK to use, especially if your other devices come from Apple), improved battery, the return of the good keyboard, and greatly lowered TDP, there really isn't a choice to make anymore. The remaining reasons not to use it are basically as follows: 1) Compatibility with external devices, or work on embedded controllers 2) Anything requiring significant GPU compute (ML, etc.). But this would likely be done on a desktop rather than a laptop, which wasn't the scope of the question. 3) Disk capacity requirements (though external NVMe over thunderbolt mostly solves this) 4) Extremely multi-threaded work (video editing, etc.) where a desktop CPU outperforms the M1's multi-thread score. Less pointless now?

neogodless 4y ago

Yes. I think the way this conversation played out was "given how I use my device, is there an optimal device to buy?" A lot of the answers are, in turn, "why don't you use your device differently? having ignored your use cases and preferences, this is the device I'd recommend." It might be a valid opinion to say "I don't use Linux and I enjoy using MacOS on Apple Silicon" but... it doesn't actually help the original poster, does it? So why post that at all? I guess I could point out to the poster that I use Windows 10, and I built a desktop PC. It doesn't really meet any of their criteria (except #3 computing power), but... it works for me. So maybe they should change and be more like me!