4 ms·

A lot of dev companies force their employees to use bacbooks in part as a result of their locked down practices and the only way to actually compile and test fo

A lot of dev companies force their employees to use bacbooks in part as a result of their locked down practices and the only way to actually compile and test for "everything", because of how much easier it is to cross compile to other platforms and markets. For that reason, I've personally had to use a M2 for a week now, and I find the experience unpleasant. The OS feels old and cumbersome. I had flashback to a time long ago when I needed to install custom apps in Windows for some basic functionality that's been built in gnome. Things like "alt + tab" actually bringing an app to the foreground, instead of prioritizing the minimized state. Why this deliberate action would have seemingly no effect is correct, I'm sure will be defended. Global shortcut to start up a terminal? Install a third party utility is probably the easiest. Want to place windows on the screen? Install a third party utility. Better screenshot functionality? Install a third party app. Change the default shell to a custom one? First you got to figure out how to access the root system through finder to actually find the executable. It goes on and on. And the performance is much worse than what I've become used to. The only thing it actually has going for it, which I believe is great, is battery life. But, that's it. I'm just glad I was able to disable the app validation check, because it had literally prevented me from installing a lot of third party software, and the suggested workarounds had no effect. Just the fact of phoning home every time run an executable makes me nauseous. I wonder how often the homebrew team get offers to add malware, because the checks there seem woefully insufficient.

rekoil 3y ago
> A lot of dev companies force their employees to use bacbooks in part as a result of their locked down practices and the only way to actually compile and test for "everything", because of how much easier it is to cross compile to other platforms and markets. A lot of devs are also choosing them because they are insanely good machines. Simply because ARM64 is a good architecture and there is pretty much no competition available, it's more or less a choice between Apple or not ARM64...
- okamiueru 3y ago
  My personal experience: - MacOS user experience: Terrible. It feels like Linux did 10 years ago. Bugs and inconsistencies everywhere. But hey, they are competing with W11 so, no need to improve it either. Forced updates and restarts. And, did I mention bugs and inconsistencies everywhere? - M2 Computational performance: It feels like my laptop 10 years ago. - M2 Batterly life performance: It is absolutely brilliant, but, I also work 80% of the time at a fixed desk, so, it's mostly only relevant when traveling. I'm sure a lot of devs use them because they like them. But, your argument that ARM64 is "good architecture" whatever vagueness that entails, is pretty much bollocks. Compile time performance is ok at best compared to other laptop CPUs (the fastest laptop Mx hardware is about half of the laptop competition, and that's just comparing CPU). The package management coherence is non existent, so everything is slow to start because everything ships a complete stack of libraries that need to be read from disk and copied in memory. I honestly believe that people who are blown away by the Mx hardware have simply lived too long in the walled garden to know what is out there. In summary: MacBooks are decent hardware, with exceptional battery life. Priced at 50% would make sense. And the OS experience is somewhere between mediocre to garbage. Ran an identical GPU workload on AMD hardware with dedicated GPU. - 3 year old desktop AMD hardware: 50 seconds (1x) - 1.5 year old laptop AMD hardware: 66 seconds. (1.32x) - Latest M2 Pro 12 core: 142 seconds. (2.84x) For CPU-only tasks. 1x, 1.9x 1.7x. So, the M2 Pro 12 core is about 2x slower than a one year older AMD laptop for GPU tasks, and about the same for CPU only tasks. And the latest AMD Laptop CPU is twice as fast as the one I used.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    I honestly can’t take you seriously when you write shit like “Linux did 10 years ago”..
    - okamiueru 3y ago
      Let's see: - Alt+Tab is bugged. You need a third party app to bring consistent behaviour. - Closing a window with window decorator very often minimizes it instead, no consistency. - Recording or capturing screenshot is tedious without a third party app - Homebrew is underwhelming as a package manager. It feels like Linux package managers did around 20 year ago. - No global shortcut key to trigger arbitrary commands (you need a third party app). Like, starting a terminal. - Bad support for external keyboard. Dead keys everywhere that have otherwise consistent meaning (delete, home, end, etc). The kinda stuff that could happen on Linux 10 years ago. - No sensible support for external mouse, such as scrolling behaviour is stuck to what would make sense for the trackpad, and feels bad on a mouse. You need to install a third party app to handle this. - No copy/cut paste in file manager. You need to drag and drop like a primate. - Oh, and finder, in general, is bad at almost all the things a file manager should be good at. But, someone somewhere at apple decided that labels trumps hierarchical file structures, to navigate a hierarchical file system. - Built in advertisements for apple products pop up from time to time. - "I guess I won't start working right now because MacOS is installing a mandatory update" has already happened. - Bypassing security check to launch app, as in the "open anyway" is bugged since 2016, but it's still there. And you can click on it without it doing anything. You have to google the command to disable the whole app audit thing and run it in a terminal. (You know, the kind of stuff you had to do on Linux 10 years ago). - Moving windows around is tedious without a third party app. - Accessing the root file system through Finder requires googling how and running a command on the terminal (you know, the kind of stuff you had to do on Linux 10 years ago). This list is just the annoyances noticed this week, and I'm sure I've forgotten quite a few. It feels like crap, and it's not because "apple bad, buu huu". I don't care about your team/my team. I just want things to work and not be annoying. Windows 10 and 11 is crap for many of the same reasons as MacOS. Just a different collection of bad designs. The "it just works" has been Linux for at least the last 5 years.

rekoil 3y ago

> A lot of dev companies force their employees to use bacbooks in part as a result of their locked down practices and the only way to actually compile and test for "everything", because of how much easier it is to cross compile to other platforms and markets. A lot of devs are also choosing them because they are insanely good machines. Simply because ARM64 is a good architecture and there is pretty much no competition available, it's more or less a choice between Apple or not ARM64...

okamiueru 3y ago
My personal experience: - MacOS user experience: Terrible. It feels like Linux did 10 years ago. Bugs and inconsistencies everywhere. But hey, they are competing with W11 so, no need to improve it either. Forced updates and restarts. And, did I mention bugs and inconsistencies everywhere? - M2 Computational performance: It feels like my laptop 10 years ago. - M2 Batterly life performance: It is absolutely brilliant, but, I also work 80% of the time at a fixed desk, so, it's mostly only relevant when traveling. I'm sure a lot of devs use them because they like them. But, your argument that ARM64 is "good architecture" whatever vagueness that entails, is pretty much bollocks. Compile time performance is ok at best compared to other laptop CPUs (the fastest laptop Mx hardware is about half of the laptop competition, and that's just comparing CPU). The package management coherence is non existent, so everything is slow to start because everything ships a complete stack of libraries that need to be read from disk and copied in memory. I honestly believe that people who are blown away by the Mx hardware have simply lived too long in the walled garden to know what is out there. In summary: MacBooks are decent hardware, with exceptional battery life. Priced at 50% would make sense. And the OS experience is somewhere between mediocre to garbage. Ran an identical GPU workload on AMD hardware with dedicated GPU. - 3 year old desktop AMD hardware: 50 seconds (1x) - 1.5 year old laptop AMD hardware: 66 seconds. (1.32x) - Latest M2 Pro 12 core: 142 seconds. (2.84x) For CPU-only tasks. 1x, 1.9x 1.7x. So, the M2 Pro 12 core is about 2x slower than a one year older AMD laptop for GPU tasks, and about the same for CPU only tasks. And the latest AMD Laptop CPU is twice as fast as the one I used.
- kaba0 3y ago
  I honestly can’t take you seriously when you write shit like “Linux did 10 years ago”..
  - okamiueru 3y ago
    Let's see: - Alt+Tab is bugged. You need a third party app to bring consistent behaviour. - Closing a window with window decorator very often minimizes it instead, no consistency. - Recording or capturing screenshot is tedious without a third party app - Homebrew is underwhelming as a package manager. It feels like Linux package managers did around 20 year ago. - No global shortcut key to trigger arbitrary commands (you need a third party app). Like, starting a terminal. - Bad support for external keyboard. Dead keys everywhere that have otherwise consistent meaning (delete, home, end, etc). The kinda stuff that could happen on Linux 10 years ago. - No sensible support for external mouse, such as scrolling behaviour is stuck to what would make sense for the trackpad, and feels bad on a mouse. You need to install a third party app to handle this. - No copy/cut paste in file manager. You need to drag and drop like a primate. - Oh, and finder, in general, is bad at almost all the things a file manager should be good at. But, someone somewhere at apple decided that labels trumps hierarchical file structures, to navigate a hierarchical file system. - Built in advertisements for apple products pop up from time to time. - "I guess I won't start working right now because MacOS is installing a mandatory update" has already happened. - Bypassing security check to launch app, as in the "open anyway" is bugged since 2016, but it's still there. And you can click on it without it doing anything. You have to google the command to disable the whole app audit thing and run it in a terminal. (You know, the kind of stuff you had to do on Linux 10 years ago). - Moving windows around is tedious without a third party app. - Accessing the root file system through Finder requires googling how and running a command on the terminal (you know, the kind of stuff you had to do on Linux 10 years ago). This list is just the annoyances noticed this week, and I'm sure I've forgotten quite a few. It feels like crap, and it's not because "apple bad, buu huu". I don't care about your team/my team. I just want things to work and not be annoying. Windows 10 and 11 is crap for many of the same reasons as MacOS. Just a different collection of bad designs. The "it just works" has been Linux for at least the last 5 years.