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M* has caused nothing but trouble for most mac user engineers I know (read: most engineers I know) who upgraded. Now not only are they building software for a d

M* has caused nothing but trouble for most mac user engineers I know (read: most engineers I know) who upgraded. Now not only are they building software for a different OS, they're building for a different architecture! They do all of their important compute in Docker, wasting CPU cycles and memory on the VM. All for what: a nice case? nice UI (that pesters you to try Safari)? It looks like Apple's silicon and software is really good for those doing audio/video. Why people like it for dev is mostly a mystery to me. Though I know a few people who don't really like it but are just intimidated by Linux or just can't handle the small UX differences.

khaki54 2y ago
It's basically required for iOS development. Working around it is extremely convoluted any annoying
- resonious 2y ago
  I forgot to mention that as an obvious exception. Of course developing for Apple is best on Apple hardware.
AtomicOrbital 2y ago
I strongly suggest putting in the time to learn how to install and maintain a linux laptop ... Ubuntu 24.04 is a great engineer platform
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- daviddever23box 2y ago
  It is, provided that the hardware vendor has reasonably decent support for power management, and you're willing to haul around an AC adapter if not. In general, I really like AMD hardware with built-in graphics for this, or alternately, Intel Tiger Lake-U based hardware. Asahi Linux is shockingly great on Apple Silicon hardware, though.
spullara 2y ago
1) macs are by far the best hardware and also performance running intel code is faster than running intel code on the previous intel macs: https://discourse.slicer.org/t/hardware-is-apple-m1-much-faster-as-intel-cpu-s/21992 https://discourse.slicer.org/t/hardware-is-apple-m1-much-fas... 2) they should use safari to keep power usage low and browser diversity high
niij 2y ago
In my experience as a backend services Go developer (and a bit of Scala) the switch to arm has been mostly seamless. There was a little config at the beginning to pull dual-image docker images (x64 and arm) but that was a one time configuration. Otherwise I'm still targeting Linux/x64 with Go builds and Scala runs on the JVM so it's supported everywhere anyway; they both worked out of the box. My builds are faster, laptop stays cooler, and battery lasts longer. I love it. If I was building desktop apps I assume it would be a less pleasant experience like you mention.
- phlakaton 2y ago
  The pain for me has been in the VM scene, as VirtualBox disappeared from the ecosystem with the switch to ARM.
herval 2y ago
I don’t know a single engineer who had issues with M chips, and most engineers I know (me included) benefited considerably from the performance gains, so perhaps your niche isn’t that universal?
- resonious 2y ago
  My niche is Ruby on Rails web dev, which is definitely not universal, but not all that narrow either!
  - fiddlerwoaroof 2y ago
    You must have an unusual setup because, between Rosetta and rosetta in Virtualization.framework VMs (configurable in Docker Desktop or Rancher Desktop), I’ve never had issues running intel binaries on my Mac
  - Lio 2y ago
    I’m doing Ruby on Rails dev too. I don’t notice a hige difference between macOS and Linux for how I work. There’s quirks to either OS. Eg when on Gnome it drives me mad that it won’t focus a recently launched apps. On macOS it annoys me that I have install a 3rd party util to move windows around. Meh, you just adapt after a while.
  - herval 2y ago
    what's wrong w/ Rails on M chips? I don't recall having had much trouble with it (except w/ nokogiri bindings right when the M1 was first available, but that's a given for any new release of OSX)
jetpks 2y ago
I'm an engineer that has both an apple silicon laptop (mbp, m2) and a linux laptop (arch, thinkpad x1 yoga.) I choose the mac every day of the week and it's not even close. I'm sure it's not great for specific engineering disciplines, but for me (web, rails, sre) it really can't be beat. The UX differences are absolutely massive. Even after daily-driving that thinkpad for months, Gnome always felt kinda not quite finished. Maybe KDE is better, but it didn't have Wayland support when I was setting that machine up, which made it a non-starter. The real killer though is battery life. I can work literally all day unplugged on the mbp and finish up with 40-50% remaining. When i'm traveling these days, i don't even bring a power cable with me during the day. The thinkpad, despite my best efforts with powertop, the most aggressive frequency scaling i could get, and a bunch of other little tricks, lasts 2 hours. There are niceties about Linux too. Package management is better and the docker experience is _way_ better. Overall though, i'd take the apple silicon macbook 10 times out of 10.
- pompino 2y ago
  >The UX differences are absolutely massive. Examples?
- resonious 2y ago
  Interesting. I do similar (lots of Rails) but have pretty much the opposite experience (other than battery life - Mac definitely wins there). Though I use i3/Sway more than Gnome. The performance of running our huge monolith locally is much better for Linux users than Mac users where I work. I used a Mac for awhile back in 2015 but it never really stood out to me UX-wise, even compared to Gnome. All I really need to do is open a few windows and then switch between them. In i3 or Sway, opening and switching between windows is very fast and I never have to drag stuff around.
- xarope 2y ago
  I'd like to offer a counterpoint, I have an old'ish T480s which runs linuxmint, several lxd containers for traefik, golang, python, postgres and sqlserver (so not even dockerized, but full VMs running these services), and I can go the whole morning (~4-5 hours). I think the culprit is more likely the power hungry intel CPU in your yoga? Going on a slight tangent; I've tried but do not like the mac keyboards, they feel very shallow to me, hence why I'm still using my old T480s. The newer thinkpad laptop keyboards all seem to be going that way though (going thinner), much to my dismay. Perhaps a P14s is my next purchase, despite it's bulk. Anybody with a framework 13 want to comment on their keyboard?
freedomben 2y ago
Interestingly enough, the trend I am seeing is all the MacBook engineers moving back to native development environments. Basically, no longer using docker. And just as expected, developers are getting bad with docker and are finding it harder to use. They are getting more and more reliant on devops help or to lean on the team member who is on Linux to handle all of that stuff. We were on a really great path for a while there in development where we were getting closer to the ideal of having development more closely resemble production, and to have developers understand the operations tools. Now we're cruising firmly in the opposite direction because of this Apple switch to arm. Mainly it wouldn't bother me so much if people would recognize that they are rationalizing because they like the computers, but they don't. They just try to defend logically a decision they made emotionally. I do it too, every human does, but a little recognition would be nice.
- int_19h 2y ago
  It's not even a problem with MacBooks as such. They are still excellent consumer devices (non-casual gaming aside). It's this weird positioning of them as the ultimate dev laptop that causes so many problems, IMO.
  - wiseowise 2y ago
    Why would excellent machine be blamed for shitty software?
    - int_19h 2y ago
      Because machines are tools meant to perform tasks, and part of that is being interoperable with other tools and de facto standards in the relevant field. For dev work, today, MacBook is not good at it.
- daviddever23box 2y ago
  Remember, though, that the binaries deployed in production environments are not being built locally on individual developer machines, but rather in the cloud, as reproducible builds securely deployed from the cloud to the cloud. Modern language tooling (Go, Rust et al) allows one to build and test on any architecture, and the native macOS virtualization (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization) provides remarkably better performance compared to Docker (which is a better explanation for its fading from daily use). Your "trend" may, in fact, not actually reflect the reality of how cloud development works at scale. And I don't know a single macOS developer that "lean(s) on the team member who is on Linux" to leverage tools that are already present on their local machine. My own development environments are IDENTICAL across all three major platforms.
eloisant 2y ago
We have to cross-compile anyway because now we're deploying to arm64 Linux (AWS Graviton) in addition to x86 Linux. So even if all developers of your team are using Linux, unless you want to waste money by ignoring arm64 instances on cloud computing, you'll have to setup cross compilation.

khaki54 2y ago

It's basically required for iOS development. Working around it is extremely convoluted any annoying

resonious 2y ago
I forgot to mention that as an obvious exception. Of course developing for Apple is best on Apple hardware.

AtomicOrbital 2y ago

I strongly suggest putting in the time to learn how to install and maintain a linux laptop ... Ubuntu 24.04 is a great engineer platform

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
daviddever23box 2y ago
It is, provided that the hardware vendor has reasonably decent support for power management, and you're willing to haul around an AC adapter if not. In general, I really like AMD hardware with built-in graphics for this, or alternately, Intel Tiger Lake-U based hardware. Asahi Linux is shockingly great on Apple Silicon hardware, though.

spullara 2y ago

1) macs are by far the best hardware and also performance running intel code is faster than running intel code on the previous intel macs: https://discourse.slicer.org/t/hardware-is-apple-m1-much-faster-as-intel-cpu-s/21992 https://discourse.slicer.org/t/hardware-is-apple-m1-much-fas... 2) they should use safari to keep power usage low and browser diversity high

niij 2y ago

In my experience as a backend services Go developer (and a bit of Scala) the switch to arm has been mostly seamless. There was a little config at the beginning to pull dual-image docker images (x64 and arm) but that was a one time configuration. Otherwise I'm still targeting Linux/x64 with Go builds and Scala runs on the JVM so it's supported everywhere anyway; they both worked out of the box. My builds are faster, laptop stays cooler, and battery lasts longer. I love it. If I was building desktop apps I assume it would be a less pleasant experience like you mention.

phlakaton 2y ago
The pain for me has been in the VM scene, as VirtualBox disappeared from the ecosystem with the switch to ARM.

herval 2y ago

I don’t know a single engineer who had issues with M chips, and most engineers I know (me included) benefited considerably from the performance gains, so perhaps your niche isn’t that universal?

resonious 2y ago
My niche is Ruby on Rails web dev, which is definitely not universal, but not all that narrow either!
- fiddlerwoaroof 2y ago
  You must have an unusual setup because, between Rosetta and rosetta in Virtualization.framework VMs (configurable in Docker Desktop or Rancher Desktop), I’ve never had issues running intel binaries on my Mac
- Lio 2y ago
  I’m doing Ruby on Rails dev too. I don’t notice a hige difference between macOS and Linux for how I work. There’s quirks to either OS. Eg when on Gnome it drives me mad that it won’t focus a recently launched apps. On macOS it annoys me that I have install a 3rd party util to move windows around. Meh, you just adapt after a while.
- herval 2y ago
  what's wrong w/ Rails on M chips? I don't recall having had much trouble with it (except w/ nokogiri bindings right when the M1 was first available, but that's a given for any new release of OSX)

jetpks 2y ago

I'm an engineer that has both an apple silicon laptop (mbp, m2) and a linux laptop (arch, thinkpad x1 yoga.) I choose the mac every day of the week and it's not even close. I'm sure it's not great for specific engineering disciplines, but for me (web, rails, sre) it really can't be beat. The UX differences are absolutely massive. Even after daily-driving that thinkpad for months, Gnome always felt kinda not quite finished. Maybe KDE is better, but it didn't have Wayland support when I was setting that machine up, which made it a non-starter. The real killer though is battery life. I can work literally all day unplugged on the mbp and finish up with 40-50% remaining. When i'm traveling these days, i don't even bring a power cable with me during the day. The thinkpad, despite my best efforts with powertop, the most aggressive frequency scaling i could get, and a bunch of other little tricks, lasts 2 hours. There are niceties about Linux too. Package management is better and the docker experience is _way_ better. Overall though, i'd take the apple silicon macbook 10 times out of 10.

pompino 2y ago
>The UX differences are absolutely massive. Examples?
resonious 2y ago
Interesting. I do similar (lots of Rails) but have pretty much the opposite experience (other than battery life - Mac definitely wins there). Though I use i3/Sway more than Gnome. The performance of running our huge monolith locally is much better for Linux users than Mac users where I work. I used a Mac for awhile back in 2015 but it never really stood out to me UX-wise, even compared to Gnome. All I really need to do is open a few windows and then switch between them. In i3 or Sway, opening and switching between windows is very fast and I never have to drag stuff around.
xarope 2y ago
I'd like to offer a counterpoint, I have an old'ish T480s which runs linuxmint, several lxd containers for traefik, golang, python, postgres and sqlserver (so not even dockerized, but full VMs running these services), and I can go the whole morning (~4-5 hours). I think the culprit is more likely the power hungry intel CPU in your yoga? Going on a slight tangent; I've tried but do not like the mac keyboards, they feel very shallow to me, hence why I'm still using my old T480s. The newer thinkpad laptop keyboards all seem to be going that way though (going thinner), much to my dismay. Perhaps a P14s is my next purchase, despite it's bulk. Anybody with a framework 13 want to comment on their keyboard?

freedomben 2y ago

Interestingly enough, the trend I am seeing is all the MacBook engineers moving back to native development environments. Basically, no longer using docker. And just as expected, developers are getting bad with docker and are finding it harder to use. They are getting more and more reliant on devops help or to lean on the team member who is on Linux to handle all of that stuff. We were on a really great path for a while there in development where we were getting closer to the ideal of having development more closely resemble production, and to have developers understand the operations tools. Now we're cruising firmly in the opposite direction because of this Apple switch to arm. Mainly it wouldn't bother me so much if people would recognize that they are rationalizing because they like the computers, but they don't. They just try to defend logically a decision they made emotionally. I do it too, every human does, but a little recognition would be nice.

int_19h 2y ago
It's not even a problem with MacBooks as such. They are still excellent consumer devices (non-casual gaming aside). It's this weird positioning of them as the ultimate dev laptop that causes so many problems, IMO.
- wiseowise 2y ago
  Why would excellent machine be blamed for shitty software?
  - int_19h 2y ago
    Because machines are tools meant to perform tasks, and part of that is being interoperable with other tools and de facto standards in the relevant field. For dev work, today, MacBook is not good at it.
daviddever23box 2y ago
Remember, though, that the binaries deployed in production environments are not being built locally on individual developer machines, but rather in the cloud, as reproducible builds securely deployed from the cloud to the cloud. Modern language tooling (Go, Rust et al) allows one to build and test on any architecture, and the native macOS virtualization (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization) provides remarkably better performance compared to Docker (which is a better explanation for its fading from daily use). Your "trend" may, in fact, not actually reflect the reality of how cloud development works at scale. And I don't know a single macOS developer that "lean(s) on the team member who is on Linux" to leverage tools that are already present on their local machine. My own development environments are IDENTICAL across all three major platforms.

eloisant 2y ago

We have to cross-compile anyway because now we're deploying to arm64 Linux (AWS Graviton) in addition to x86 Linux. So even if all developers of your team are using Linux, unless you want to waste money by ignoring arm64 instances on cloud computing, you'll have to setup cross compilation.