4 ms·
I love dhh and I applaud his manic obsession with Linux over the 18 months or so that I've seen on my twitter feed. I still don't exactly understand what the pu
by brettgriffin 1y ago
I love dhh and I applaud his manic obsession with Linux over the 18 months or so that I've seen on my twitter feed. I still don't exactly understand what the purpose of all of this is.
I'm sure it is very configurable, but every visual I've seen of this thing looks awful and not something I'd want to look at while working. But I understand we all have different tastes.
But even in the blog post I'm struggling with 'why?' here. Am I to understand the primary benefits here are improved battery life and increased developer productivity by tests running faster? Is that it?
I travel an inordinate amount and have never found a Macbook's battery life to be insufficient. I struggle to even remember the last time I've used my computer long enough to drain the batter and not be near a power outlet. I work from ski lodges, planes, my car. This has never been a problem for me. Not once. This just feels like a really bad metric to optimize for given a typical developers' schedule and work arrangement.
> On the flip side, we'll get a massive boost in productivity from being able to run our Ruby on Rails test suites locally much faster.
Is this not just a Ruby issue? I don't know what's basecamp or HEYs codebase looks like on the inside, but they don't feel like projects whose tests suites should require a completely different OS or hardware arrangement. I haven't used Ruby in a decade but I do recall it being frustratingly slow. This seemed to be an understood and accepted reality amongst teams that adopt it.
Anyway, I feel like a better 'why you should do this' in order, especially if it is being mandated amongst developers in a company.
- dismalaf 1y ago> Is this not just a Ruby issue? Pretty sure it's a Docker on Mac issue.
- vitorbaptistaa 1y agoFrom what I understood, the initial motivation wasn't technical, but related to Apple's practices around a closed app store and the 30% tax on every purchase. He explained it both on Lex Fridman's podcast at [1] and a bit on [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzDi8u3WMj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzDi8u3WMj0 [2] https://world.hey.com/dhh/living-with-linux-and-android-after-two-decades-of-apple-4f730084 https://world.hey.com/dhh/living-with-linux-and-android-afte...
- lbrito 1y ago>I haven't used Ruby in a decade but I do recall it being frustratingly slow. I've been using for more than a decade and have never found it to be "frustratingly slow", whatever that means in practice. Except when running on Docker on a co-worker's Apple product, which I do not use.
- wtfleming 1y agoI haven’t used Ruby much, but anecdotally I once rewrote a Ruby service in Java and was able to reduce the number of servers needed from ~100 to 10. That was a case where it was “frustratingly slow” in practice.
- dismalaf 1y agoWhat is that service doing? Even 10 Java servers seems like a lot for a single service, unless 1 server = 1 single VM thread or something...
- lbrito 1y agoWasn't JRuby an option? Anyway, obviously Ruby (or any other dynamic language for that matter) isn't the solution to every problem. I was once tasked to refurbish an old Delphi desktop application that did some thermal simulations; I wrote the interface as a Rails webapp and the simulation itself as a compiled C routine, which I called from Rails via FFI.
- hshdhdhj4444 1y agoWhat is the “this” when you say “why you should do this”?
- sbinnee 1y agoLinux is fundamentally appealing to those who want to tinker with OS. Even with this kind of full-featured ricing or package, users will have hard time to figures some features out, if they do not have enough knowledge how to navigate Linux system. I personally use all three major OS, Mac at work, Windows for gaming, Linux for everything else. For me different OS serves different purposes and gives me task-oriented productivity boost.
- brettgriffin 1y ago> Linux is fundamentally appealing to those who want to tinker with OS I respect that and truly admire what dhh has done and tweeted about over the last year or so. But for a business to mandate an operating system for their developers (which I fully agree they have the right to do) with those reasons is underwhelming. What is a productivity boost for you in one OS might be a burden to someone else. And vice versa. That's the benefit of letting developers choose their OS.
- cadamsdotcom 1y agoNo one’s forcing anyone to work at this company. Thanks to the publicity there’s plenty of warning about what it’ll involve so you can expect folks to come in well informed - or self-select out.
- brettgriffin 1y agoStrawman. Nobody ever said anyone was being forced to work there and nobody would claim that was the case.
- mkozlows 1y agoDHH is a weirdo, obviously, but I'll say that if you're doing Unixy dev work, there's less pain doing it on Linux than on MacOS, in the same way that MacOS is better than WSL.