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Comment by corybrown | Hacker News Reader

Pretty cool trick to make the OS X docker hacks feel transparent. I've been tempted into getting a Linux laptop just because using Docker on OS X feels so hacky.

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I did and never looked back. Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 3

Been using Linux on my work macbooks since 2009. There are some bumps involved, but it works really well on the awesome Apple hardware.

How's the battery life?

I use a Macbook Pro (2014) with Kubuntu Linux installed full-time. The battery life is about half of what it is when running OSX.

If you forget your charger, there is serious range anxiety. Luckily, I've been running PC laptops for years and have gotten completely used to bringing my charger any time I take my laptop.

I estimate that I get better than half of the battery life.

Years ago, when I started doing it, the battery life of Linux on Macbook was really terrible.

I only need a couple of hours of battery life for my mac at most, so that's fine for me at least.

I get ~3/4s of the battery life that i have on osx if i do not run anything on flash.

if flash starts, i get less than half. (using archlinux on a mid-2012 mbp)

I dual-booted Mint on my 2011 MBA the other week and it was a nasty experience. I feel like Linux users have low standards, or maybe I've been away too long. Here's four things I found immediately:

1. The fans don't automatically react to temperature without a background daemon (?!).

2. Multi-touch trackpad support is terrible. The default synaptic driver can't handle you resting your thumb on the bottom of the trackpad. The alternative driver doesn't support momentum scrolling (and is still a bit shit). At least palm detection has been solved; well done Linux, it only took you 10 years.

3. It cannot seem to handle using left Alt as a third-level activator (e.g. for # key on EU keyboards) at the same time as actually letting you /use/ your Alt key (e.g. for activating menus). I think I eventually solved this, but how hard should it be?!

4. As others have mentioned; battery life.

I was impressed that sleep, audio, wifi and display brightness all worked out of the box though. Progress, eh?

I always run Ubuntu.latest. 15.10 on a 2014 macbook pro at the moment.

1. I currently don't have a problem with that (the fans/temperature management). In my seven years of running Ubuntu on Macbooks, I've run into that in the past, but it's been a while. 2. I've never been a 'full' OSX user, but I understand that they are doing a lot of very nifty things with the touch pad, not surprisingly. My experience with the touchpad under Ubuntu is generally not as good as under OSX. 3. Can't comment on this one 4. As described elsewhere.

For most people, I would not recommend running any Linux flavor on a Macbook. I am a 'UNIX guy' for decades now. Hell, I even run a minimalistic windows manager (http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/)

For me, the upsides outweigh the downsides. I'm pretty sure that's not the case for most people though.

Would it not just be easier to dual boot Linux? If you've got a big enough hard drive it works very nicely.

If you're going to go through the trouble of having two computers anyway, why not make the second one a home Linux server? Point the docker client's socket at that machine, instead of at a VM.

One of the benefits of doing this, I find, is that all the power-hungry stuff happens on the server, so I can have a really lightweight development machine (e.g. one of the 2015 Macbooks.)

...or just get one in a colo for $40/month.

Depends on your internet speed. Pushing docker images over a LAN is about the same speed as writing them to disk. Pushing them to a remote server somewhere can introduce noticable latency in your workflow.

It's easy, you just do everything on the remote machine(s). I've taken this to such an extreme that I've given up on the Macbook and moved to a far less expensive and more secure Chromebook.

Not bad. Personally, I can't stand the hit to latency that doing work over SSH or screen sharing introduces, unless the ping time is very low... and your average cloud server has way less CPU power and RAM than a good laptop too, though I suppose you can avoid that by selecting a more expensive server to do work on. There are certainly huge advantages to the remote method for those that can pull it off.

Linux works quite well on Macbooks. No need to buy more hardware.

It works great indeed. My main pain point though is that if you want to dual-boot then every update of OS X will destroy your Linux workspace.

Just use Vagrant! Start a Vagrant VM on your Mac and do the Docker stuff inside it.

If I "just used Vagrant," I think I'd end up with a virtualbox VM, just like if I were to have used docker-machine.

Vagrant is more repeatable, though. It's straightforward to provision an environment. In my (limited) experience with direct Virtualbox, you wind up manually building a lot of stuff.

docker-machine automates setting up a VM running Docker. There's nothing manual about it (besides running "docker-machine create dev" or whatever)

Docker-machine drove me up a wall. Getting file sharing to work so I could use my nice Mac editors on my in-docker code was a huge waste of time and effort. Docker-machine was just another one of those crappy half-measures that keep Mac owners struggling to find a way to make Docker graceful.

I was also motivated by bringing on new team members who were on Windows rather than Macs. Vagrant works fine and transparently on both Mac and Windows, with the same commands. It's not necessary for everyone, but I was pleased that my best Mac solution also works just as well on Windows.

It's unfortunate you had such a bad experience with Docker. No doubt there's a steep learning curve to use more advanced features. If you're still willing to look in to it, I'd recommend taking at look at https://docs.docker.com/engine/userguide/dockervolumes/ under "Mount a host directory as a data volume."

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