6 ms·

>Wouldn't a Linux device, or Linux running on a Mac suit you better? Maybe they want a unixy desktop with working sound ? Half joking, but that's my use case

>Wouldn't a Linux device, or Linux running on a Mac suit you better? Maybe they want a unixy desktop with working sound ? Half joking, but that's my use case - homebrew is pretty great, most developers use a Mac in my domains of interest so it's always supported. Linux is just too much work (and I'm using Fedora on my desktop). SIP is just false positives and annoyance. I'm on the fence about M/ARM switch since I still see a lot of friction with containers so I might be looking at framework for my next device. Or just go all in on client/server development model.

devsda 3y ago
> Maybe they want a unixy desktop with working sound ? In my experience, this has not been an issue for the past 10-15 years atleast. Before that there were some problems with few (external) soundcards or random cpu spikes with the mixers. However, the UX can still improve. Switching audio outputs with multiple outputs like external displays etc is not very smooth or intuitive. Some bluetooth headsets have issues but I've had those with a mac as well.
- unsupp0rted 3y ago
  There's only a 1% chance these days on Linux that your sound won't work or your computer won't sleep when you close the lid or your wifi won't work, or your ethernet, or your cooling, or a peripheral, or CPU/memory spikes. And a 90% chance it'll be at least one such thing.
  - zitsarethecure 3y ago
    All of those things work fine on every computer in my household that runs Linux. This spans thinkpad, dell and ASUS laptops, Dell desktops, home-built gamer type desktops, a few raspberry pi's, and a SFF PC we use to run Kodi on the main TV. I do find it amusing in a thread about how you have to turn off a core security feature to be able to use containers properly on a Mac that the discussion immediately turns to how bad Linux sound drivers supposedly are. Honestly, I went in the other direction (Mac to Linux) and I've found the waters to be just fine. I don't know if I just have the magic touch or something, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
    - rafaelmn 3y ago
      Haha now that you mention it touch (trackpad) absolutely sucks on Linux when I last tried it - I couldn't even get palm rejection to work. But this isn't bashing on linux desktop (I would use it if Mac wasn't an option) as much as giving a reason why people would use MacOS despite being annoyed by SIP.
    - songshu 3y ago
      Tell us what distro you recommend?
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  > In my experience, this has not been an issue for the past 10-15 years atleast. Before that there were some problems with few (external) soundcards or random cpu spikes with the mixers. May be some confusion. To run linux on a newer Mac with "Apple Silicon" (ARM based), you need to go through a lot of hoops and much work needs to be done still for a stable environment. Check out https://asahilinux.org/about/ https://asahilinux.org/about/ Or maybe you thought they meant running linux in general on a PC (Intel x86 32/64 bit)? In that case I agree - driver issues like that have been mostly ironed out by now.
- AHTERIX5000 3y ago
  I'm getting early PulseAudio vibes with PipeWire though. BT audio devices stuttering and sometimes losing audio completely regardless of output devices unless I restart the daemon. I guess it stabilizes again during next few years.
- urxvtcd 3y ago
  Anecdotal evidence, but here it goes. I moved from Linux to M1 MacBook recently. I know my greps and vims, but I was tired of audio glitches during high CPU usage, system not waking up from sleep, total OS freezes, super loud fans, and so on. Now I get none of that. I don't think I've ever heard the fans. Audio just works, everything is super snappy. It always wakes up. I'm no longer afraid of bluetooth. And on top of that, setting my $DAYJOB VPN took three minutes and it just works, where on Linux I had constant problems with DNS breaking, and setting it up was always an hour of work, praying I got the config files right this time. It really seems to be "unixy desktop with working sound", the best of both worlds.
  - stonewhite 3y ago
    Exactly my experience. After 15 years, I became an apple fanboy in 15 days. I still do hate losing my muscle memory on some bash shortcuts, but I'd say it was very much worth it.
    - dtech 3y ago
      You can just install a recent bash with homebrew and use that as your terminal.
    - tipsytoad 3y ago
      Karabiner and applescripts can get you pretty far
    - entrepy123 3y ago
      Homebrew has GNU utils to smooth over the differences in package options. [0] https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/coreutils [1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/69223/how-to-replace-mac-os-x-utilities-with-gnu-core-utilities
- rafaelmn 3y ago
  The sound is an internal meme where the linux devops would regularly have to drop off calls to talk (restart to unmute :)). On my desktop I couldn't even boot installer without running with safe mode, otherwise I'd just get stuck on a blank screen (ancient 1050 TI GPU and standard desktop components otherwise, so not exotic/new stuff). I've used linux desktop for >decade and Gnome shell feels like home but these days I feel like I don't have the time for linux adventures. Maybe I'll mix it up with my next device, but I'm not reading great things about AMD power modes and Linux.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    > The sound is an internal meme where the linux devops would regularly have to drop off calls to talk (restart to unmute :)). Hmmm once every full moon MS Teams running on ungoogled chrome do not seem to realize my Bose BT Headset is paired and available (and in that case I just use the internal soundcard) but I have seen people having sound issues on MS teams and needing to reboot regardless of the OS they were using. Windows, Linux, even some MacOS users so I wouldn't use that as a generalization.
- rebolek 3y ago
  I'm running Linux everyday and I really wouldn't recommend it for any serious audio stuff. There is great audio software coming to Linux (Bitwig, Reaper, etc) which is great but the underlying infrastructure is a mess. There are like 3-4 audio subsystems running, I never know which one is it, setting latency is wizardry and sometimes it doesn't run at all. It's usually fine when I run stuff like Spotify, VLC, or Youtube in Firefox, so for user-level audio, Linux is fine IMO. But when I run something where I care about latency and multichannel output, it's hit or miss. It runs fine one day and then I get no sound on another or distorted sound or sound playing at wrong speed and wrong pitch (yay, 44,1 vs 48). Maybe it's the distros I'm using, maybe there are some that work better, but the UX isn't as great as with macOS. On Manjaro, update sometimes get audio notification removed from tray and I can't change volume using mouse or dedicated keys. Then I have to look for few hours for a solution only to have the same thing happen again three months later (same with brightness keys on laptop). On Ubuntu Studio with an external soundcard, I get randomly distorted sound or no sound at all. So it's easier to use some shitty onboard sound, great. I like Linux, I use Linux daily, but sound on Linux is terrible. It's much better than it was, yes, but still terrible. For anything more than "play a song here", macOS is much better.
  - worthless-trash 3y ago
    It sounds like your specifically fighting your distros problem, or something that its not your understanding. I would not consider Linux sound Terrible, but to be fair, I only use it every day for regular development tasks for the last 10 years. Maybe I've become accustomed to whatever problem you see that I don't.
  - anthk 3y ago
    Fedora Silverblue with Pipewire will just use a single subsystem and that's it. Inmutable OS and the rest of software it's Flatpak. The issues are gone. Oh, you need a proper devel environment with dnf/rpm? Just use "toolbox enter" and install all the complex envs under that container.
hamandcheese 3y ago
> homebrew is pretty great I hear this said a lot in passing, and I'm really curious what people mean when they say this.
- kowlo 3y ago
  Perhaps they are talking about Homebrew the package manager [1]. [1] https://brew.sh https://brew.sh
  - hamandcheese 3y ago
    I wonder what people mean when they say "Homebrew is pretty great", I do not wonder what they mean when they say "Homebrew".
    - orf 3y ago
      They mean that they have an overall positive opinion of Homebrew, more than “not bad” but less than “amazing”.
      - dividedbyzero 3y ago
        As someone who would readily say that Homebrew is pretty great, this is exactly how I feel about Homebrew.
    - hizanberg 3y ago
      It does what it says on the tin and installs the plethora of software available on homebrew with a simple command, which is pretty great
    - anonymoushn 3y ago
      For example people do not use homebrew to install python3 on a fresh install of mac os and get a python that spews a bunch of messages to stderr about the version of libc6.so and cannot speak TLS.
zuppy 3y ago
depending of what you mean by friction with containers, there may be different solutins. for example, as a temporary solution on Docker when you don't want/have time to support both arm and x86, you can do something like this: FROM --platform=linux/x86_64 ubuntu:23.04 i haven't found any issues with it that i could not get over in the past 2+ years of m1. most of the containers are available on both architectures anyway. the performance improvement was totally worth it, i won't even talk about the heating issue with intel.
- huijzer 3y ago
  > i haven't found any issues with it that i could not get over in the past 2+ years of m1. I'm currently running a Journal of Open Source Software x86 container on aarch64 and it's terribly slow. Takes 12GB of RAM and 3 minutes to build a LaTeX document, see https://github.com/openjournals/inara/issues/30 https://github.com/openjournals/inara/issues/30. Any tips?
  - ptspts 3y ago
    Building a single-page LaTeX document as a PDF can be done in less than 0.3s when the environment is set up correctly. I don't know anything about this particular container.
  - zshrc 3y ago
    > I'm currently running a Journal of Open Source Software x86 container on aarch64 and it's terribly slow There's your issue. Use an aarch64 image.
thathndude 3y ago
This is a fair point. For folks who want a “just works” Unix system, disabling SIP probably makes sense. But most it’s still very niche. Is there a way to make a separate partition of MacOS and have one copy with SIP and one without?
- slonopotamus 3y ago
  > But most it’s still very niche. I'd say that the whole containerization topic is niche > Is there a way to make a separate partition of MacOS and have one copy with SIP and one without? I think you can install macOS VM on your macOS host and disable SIP _inside VM_.
avidphantasm 3y ago
I use AMD64 containers on my M1 Pro under Docker Desktop with zero problems. It’s about 10-20% slower than my AMD64 Linux machine on average, which is usually fast enough.
- zshrc 3y ago
  You ever give OrbStack a go? I used Docker Desktop before it but find OrbStack to be a lot faster and native feeling.
  - avidphantasm 3y ago
    No, I’ll give it a look, thanks for the tip.

devsda 3y ago

> Maybe they want a unixy desktop with working sound ? In my experience, this has not been an issue for the past 10-15 years atleast. Before that there were some problems with few (external) soundcards or random cpu spikes with the mixers. However, the UX can still improve. Switching audio outputs with multiple outputs like external displays etc is not very smooth or intuitive. Some bluetooth headsets have issues but I've had those with a mac as well.

unsupp0rted 3y ago
There's only a 1% chance these days on Linux that your sound won't work or your computer won't sleep when you close the lid or your wifi won't work, or your ethernet, or your cooling, or a peripheral, or CPU/memory spikes. And a 90% chance it'll be at least one such thing.
- zitsarethecure 3y ago
  All of those things work fine on every computer in my household that runs Linux. This spans thinkpad, dell and ASUS laptops, Dell desktops, home-built gamer type desktops, a few raspberry pi's, and a SFF PC we use to run Kodi on the main TV. I do find it amusing in a thread about how you have to turn off a core security feature to be able to use containers properly on a Mac that the discussion immediately turns to how bad Linux sound drivers supposedly are. Honestly, I went in the other direction (Mac to Linux) and I've found the waters to be just fine. I don't know if I just have the magic touch or something, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
  - rafaelmn 3y ago
    Haha now that you mention it touch (trackpad) absolutely sucks on Linux when I last tried it - I couldn't even get palm rejection to work. But this isn't bashing on linux desktop (I would use it if Mac wasn't an option) as much as giving a reason why people would use MacOS despite being annoyed by SIP.
  - songshu 3y ago
    Tell us what distro you recommend?
ShamelessC 3y ago
> In my experience, this has not been an issue for the past 10-15 years atleast. Before that there were some problems with few (external) soundcards or random cpu spikes with the mixers. May be some confusion. To run linux on a newer Mac with "Apple Silicon" (ARM based), you need to go through a lot of hoops and much work needs to be done still for a stable environment. Check out https://asahilinux.org/about/ https://asahilinux.org/about/ Or maybe you thought they meant running linux in general on a PC (Intel x86 32/64 bit)? In that case I agree - driver issues like that have been mostly ironed out by now.
AHTERIX5000 3y ago
I'm getting early PulseAudio vibes with PipeWire though. BT audio devices stuttering and sometimes losing audio completely regardless of output devices unless I restart the daemon. I guess it stabilizes again during next few years.
urxvtcd 3y ago
Anecdotal evidence, but here it goes. I moved from Linux to M1 MacBook recently. I know my greps and vims, but I was tired of audio glitches during high CPU usage, system not waking up from sleep, total OS freezes, super loud fans, and so on. Now I get none of that. I don't think I've ever heard the fans. Audio just works, everything is super snappy. It always wakes up. I'm no longer afraid of bluetooth. And on top of that, setting my $DAYJOB VPN took three minutes and it just works, where on Linux I had constant problems with DNS breaking, and setting it up was always an hour of work, praying I got the config files right this time. It really seems to be "unixy desktop with working sound", the best of both worlds.
- stonewhite 3y ago
  Exactly my experience. After 15 years, I became an apple fanboy in 15 days. I still do hate losing my muscle memory on some bash shortcuts, but I'd say it was very much worth it.
  - dtech 3y ago
    You can just install a recent bash with homebrew and use that as your terminal.
  - tipsytoad 3y ago
    Karabiner and applescripts can get you pretty far
  - entrepy123 3y ago
    Homebrew has GNU utils to smooth over the differences in package options. [0] https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/coreutils [1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/69223/how-to-replace-mac-os-x-utilities-with-gnu-core-utilities
rafaelmn 3y ago
The sound is an internal meme where the linux devops would regularly have to drop off calls to talk (restart to unmute :)). On my desktop I couldn't even boot installer without running with safe mode, otherwise I'd just get stuck on a blank screen (ancient 1050 TI GPU and standard desktop components otherwise, so not exotic/new stuff). I've used linux desktop for >decade and Gnome shell feels like home but these days I feel like I don't have the time for linux adventures. Maybe I'll mix it up with my next device, but I'm not reading great things about AMD power modes and Linux.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  > The sound is an internal meme where the linux devops would regularly have to drop off calls to talk (restart to unmute :)). Hmmm once every full moon MS Teams running on ungoogled chrome do not seem to realize my Bose BT Headset is paired and available (and in that case I just use the internal soundcard) but I have seen people having sound issues on MS teams and needing to reboot regardless of the OS they were using. Windows, Linux, even some MacOS users so I wouldn't use that as a generalization.
rebolek 3y ago
I'm running Linux everyday and I really wouldn't recommend it for any serious audio stuff. There is great audio software coming to Linux (Bitwig, Reaper, etc) which is great but the underlying infrastructure is a mess. There are like 3-4 audio subsystems running, I never know which one is it, setting latency is wizardry and sometimes it doesn't run at all. It's usually fine when I run stuff like Spotify, VLC, or Youtube in Firefox, so for user-level audio, Linux is fine IMO. But when I run something where I care about latency and multichannel output, it's hit or miss. It runs fine one day and then I get no sound on another or distorted sound or sound playing at wrong speed and wrong pitch (yay, 44,1 vs 48). Maybe it's the distros I'm using, maybe there are some that work better, but the UX isn't as great as with macOS. On Manjaro, update sometimes get audio notification removed from tray and I can't change volume using mouse or dedicated keys. Then I have to look for few hours for a solution only to have the same thing happen again three months later (same with brightness keys on laptop). On Ubuntu Studio with an external soundcard, I get randomly distorted sound or no sound at all. So it's easier to use some shitty onboard sound, great. I like Linux, I use Linux daily, but sound on Linux is terrible. It's much better than it was, yes, but still terrible. For anything more than "play a song here", macOS is much better.
- worthless-trash 3y ago
  It sounds like your specifically fighting your distros problem, or something that its not your understanding. I would not consider Linux sound Terrible, but to be fair, I only use it every day for regular development tasks for the last 10 years. Maybe I've become accustomed to whatever problem you see that I don't.
- anthk 3y ago
  Fedora Silverblue with Pipewire will just use a single subsystem and that's it. Inmutable OS and the rest of software it's Flatpak. The issues are gone. Oh, you need a proper devel environment with dnf/rpm? Just use "toolbox enter" and install all the complex envs under that container.

hamandcheese 3y ago

> homebrew is pretty great I hear this said a lot in passing, and I'm really curious what people mean when they say this.

kowlo 3y ago
Perhaps they are talking about Homebrew the package manager [1]. [1] https://brew.sh https://brew.sh
- hamandcheese 3y ago
  I wonder what people mean when they say "Homebrew is pretty great", I do not wonder what they mean when they say "Homebrew".
  - orf 3y ago
    They mean that they have an overall positive opinion of Homebrew, more than “not bad” but less than “amazing”.
    - dividedbyzero 3y ago
      As someone who would readily say that Homebrew is pretty great, this is exactly how I feel about Homebrew.
  - hizanberg 3y ago
    It does what it says on the tin and installs the plethora of software available on homebrew with a simple command, which is pretty great
  - anonymoushn 3y ago
    For example people do not use homebrew to install python3 on a fresh install of mac os and get a python that spews a bunch of messages to stderr about the version of libc6.so and cannot speak TLS.

zuppy 3y ago

depending of what you mean by friction with containers, there may be different solutins. for example, as a temporary solution on Docker when you don't want/have time to support both arm and x86, you can do something like this: FROM --platform=linux/x86_64 ubuntu:23.04 i haven't found any issues with it that i could not get over in the past 2+ years of m1. most of the containers are available on both architectures anyway. the performance improvement was totally worth it, i won't even talk about the heating issue with intel.

huijzer 3y ago
> i haven't found any issues with it that i could not get over in the past 2+ years of m1. I'm currently running a Journal of Open Source Software x86 container on aarch64 and it's terribly slow. Takes 12GB of RAM and 3 minutes to build a LaTeX document, see https://github.com/openjournals/inara/issues/30 https://github.com/openjournals/inara/issues/30. Any tips?
- ptspts 3y ago
  Building a single-page LaTeX document as a PDF can be done in less than 0.3s when the environment is set up correctly. I don't know anything about this particular container.
- zshrc 3y ago
  > I'm currently running a Journal of Open Source Software x86 container on aarch64 and it's terribly slow There's your issue. Use an aarch64 image.

thathndude 3y ago

This is a fair point. For folks who want a “just works” Unix system, disabling SIP probably makes sense. But most it’s still very niche. Is there a way to make a separate partition of MacOS and have one copy with SIP and one without?

slonopotamus 3y ago
> But most it’s still very niche. I'd say that the whole containerization topic is niche > Is there a way to make a separate partition of MacOS and have one copy with SIP and one without? I think you can install macOS VM on your macOS host and disable SIP _inside VM_.

avidphantasm 3y ago

I use AMD64 containers on my M1 Pro under Docker Desktop with zero problems. It’s about 10-20% slower than my AMD64 Linux machine on average, which is usually fast enough.

zshrc 3y ago
You ever give OrbStack a go? I used Docker Desktop before it but find OrbStack to be a lot faster and native feeling.
- avidphantasm 3y ago
  No, I’ll give it a look, thanks for the tip.