Why are developers switching from Mac OS X to Linux?
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Maybe what HN needs is a periodic "Apple Sucks, post your rants here" posting, just like the periodic "who's hiring" posts, because it's clear that "Apple Sucks" is the only reason for all these posts that completely lack any interesting content.
When we replace my wife's 2012 MacBook Air I think we'll probably get a Windows machine, the latest MacBook refresh was pretty disappointing.
The discontinuation of the 17 inch MacBook Pro
The soldered in ram.
And the final one was with the last refresh where they held the top of the line model at 16GB of ram.
As a note these where probably all sound business decisions they just chip away at my ideal machine. Which is a large screen machine, with a lot of horse power so that I can simulate an entire network environment locally to eliminate variables as well as use in a disconnected environment.
Why would Apple want to drive developers away?
Soldered in ram was a decision to reduce the overall size of the MBP to make it thinner. Again this probably appeals to the large consumer market.
I don't know the reasoning for not moving the line up to at least 32GB of ram but I would assume their cost to produce to market segment came to a higher profit calculation by not doing it, maybe it offset the cost of the touch bar but that is speculation but I assume they had their reasons.
I don't think it is an intentional effort to drive developers away, rather calculated attempt to chase the largest market segment.
Yeah, this stuff is really tiresome. What a bandwagon people have going now.
I use a MBP for work, and while the build quality is great, I find the machine itself to be...meh. My older one had more ports, some that I used often and still miss. I would never have a new Mac for that very reason. The OS is decent, usable certainly, but I really would rather be using Linux. I don't have any very strong opinions though. I'd be fine with any machine with a unixy OS on it.
I think very strong, hardline opinions on this kind of stuff can sometimes betray immaturity. The world is rarely "black and white".
I've not seen a single PC with the Apple build quality. Combine that with Apple Stores providing excellent, best in industry support for a good price: I'd love to go Linux, but someone needs to build a good Linux notebook with Apple grade support for that to happen. I have no time for tinkering or downtime.
FWIW, I've (snarkily, unfairly, wrongly) thought that for many years now. I'm not defending that, because — as noted — it's snarky, unfair and incorrect. But I really have wondered why people who are liberated enough to not use Windows use macOS instead of going all the way to Linux. If you're willing to break the social norm, why not go all the way and be free?
> Either you're on Windows wishing you were using Linux, or you're on macOS wishing you were on Windows wishing you were using Linux.
Some of us just use Linux, and are happy.
Like you said, those are the ones who have "broken free". Everyone else (the "hackers") either use Windows and wish they used Linux or use macOS and wish they used Linux. But they don't actually use Linux, because [reasons].
To be fair to them, I don't use desktop Linux because [reasons].
I used Linux for years. I built a MythTV box and bought a digital TV tuner card for it and, later, a device to get the video from the cable box, along with an IR blaster to change the channels on the cable box. I have owned five laptops on which I used Linux exclusively (1 Dell Latitude, 1 HP EliteBook, and 3 Thinkpads). I built my desktop system for Linux. I have used Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, Arch, Gentoo, and SUSE as my daily drivers, and have tried other systems like Mandriva and Fedora. I have compiled kernels and filed bugreports.
I now use OS X. In the end I got tired of desktops with tons of broken stuff. The transition away from GNOME 2 and KDE 3 was rough, with years of no usable major desktops at all. So I switched to barebones window managers like i3, FVWM, and Xmonad. (I have XMonad to thank for introducing me to Haskell, which I still use daily.) I got tired of reading man pages to do simple stuff like change my clock.
The thing that broke me in the end was doing my US income taxes. Our taxes are complicated so it helps to have software to do them. There's nothing for Linux. So I filled in my taxes on PDF forms. Even that was not easy: not all Linux PDF readers have the ability to do forms, and figuring out which ones do requires forum searching or trial-and-error. So I resorted to Adobe's non-free software. Even then, doing a US tax return on fillable PDFs is awful. I considered using an online service but I did not want a cloud solution for my private data.
That pushed me over and I got a Mac. I had actually tried Macs a few years ago when they were making the white plastic Macbook, but I returned it and stuck with Linux. I found that OS X had come a long way since I had last tried it. I enjoyed doing little things like downloading a song--things that would be a pain on Linux (do I have the right codecs installed? the right package?) And there's a ton of third-party software available. Some of it costs a few bucks, where something similar on Linux would be free--like a little tool to graphically show what is eating my disk space. But it's worth spending a few bucks to save hours hunting for something on Linux and fixing the breakage.
So that's why I don't use Linux. My time and my ability to get things done is more important than nebulous "freedom". Proprietary software provides an incentive to some companies to produce useful software. So be it.
Oh lord, I used a WM I loved on my EeePC, until I wanted to change the clock from 24 hour time to 12 hour time. Three days later, I still couldn't get it to display properly. I can't remember which WM it was, I feel like it was the one that shipped with Crunchbang.
Because Linux is only free if your time is worthless is still about as true today as ever before.
Oh sure, I can use most of my hardware without too many issues. It took me hours to configure my monitor because of some issue with EDID, but I'm willing to count that as an outlier.
The problem is I get Ubuntu working and then I still have to deal with fucking Unity.
OSX works out of the box with the hardware, and the OS is just a much more pleasant desktop experience while being a good enough OS to get work done (vs windows being more difficult).
I solve that by using neither Ubuntu nor Unity:-)
> OSX works out of the box with the hardware, and the OS is just a much more pleasant desktop experience while being a good enough OS to get work done (vs windows being more difficult).
But macOS is only pleasant if impeding your workflow doesn't affect your pleasure.
Yes, certainly, trying to use one of the major desktop environments as a replacement for macOS may be worse (although I'm personally unconvinced: GNOME & Unity don't cause me pain like using a Mac, but I'm sure I could get used to the latter). But try using a tiling WM, with a good terminal emulator, an editor & a browser.
After having spent, maybe, two weeks total effort customising my environment, I have something which is a much more pleasant computing experience that either macOS or Windows. My computer gets out of my way when I need it to; it's an extension of my brain; it's a tool, not a toy I'm constantly playing with.
Frankly, the desktop metaphor was probably a mistake in the long run, and choosing to ape the desktop metaphor was probably a mistake for free software. We should have focused on the next advance, not tried to reproduce an advance, but this time with fewer resources and more folks pulling in different directions.
GUIs are great, but draggable windows really aren't so much. GUI elements are great, but being forced to mouse around for any action really isn't so much. Curated software can provide a great ride, but it's not so great when you need to get off the rails and explore new territory.
No. I don't want to. i don't get off on tweaking window environments and other BS. I don't want an ugly half baked interface.
This is why I honestly do think "linux is free if your time is worthless" is more than just a snarky comment.
> After having spent, maybe, two weeks total effort customising my environment
Two weeks. That's absurd. I can go into the apple store and buy a mac and just install homebrew. takes minutes.
> No. I don't want to. i don't get off on tweaking window environments and other BS. I don't want an ugly half baked interface.
That's a bit like not wanting to use a jackhammer to break up asphalt because it doesn't have velvet handles. A tiling WM is neither ugly, nor half-baked, nor does it require tweaking (or require much).
> Two weeks. That's absurd. I can go into the apple store and buy a mac and just install homebrew. takes minutes.
That's a bit like saying it's absurd that it took four years to build the Golden Gate Bridge, when after all anyone can build a footbridge for his backyard in a weekend. The interface you have available to you on your Mac hinders you more than the interface I have available to me on my Linux boxes; the interface you have available to you on your Mac augments you less than the interface I have available to me on my Linux boxes. I invested two weeks, and they have made me an order of magnitude more productive.
This is, yet again, a case of the Blub Paradox. Surely you can see that there are less-powerful, more-painful interfaces to use than that of a Mac — is it so difficult to believe that there are more-powerful, less-painful interfaces than a Mac?
If you accept that it's at least possible, are you willing to entertain my contention that window management is in fact wasted time? Are you willing to entertain my contention that having all my regularly-used programs a few keystrokes away can be faster than moving my hands off of the keyboard and using the mouse? Are you willing to entertain my contention that a minimalist interface is — or at least can be — less distracting and thus enables one to enter the zone more easily and stay in it longer?
Part of the problem may be our myopic view of the past, from where it seems as if Apple revolutionised computing on something like a yearly basis. A system that "just works" seems to bore today's "professionals" – even though I'd argue that SSDs and retina displays were two of the last decades' largest improvements in performance and ergonomics, respectively.
Hahaha so good. So true. One thing that's totally crazy is Linux on Windows what a world. Why? So you can run Photoshop?
As someone who's never bought Apple HW (but used it, when paid for by employers, as secondary devices): There is no "glorious" PC hardware anymore (though, the top-of-the-line thinkpads from about 2000 were amazing (a20p, anyone?).
But today, compared to Apple's pricing, they are so cheap that I can get equivalent HW for half the price (equivalent wrt performance, not manufacturing quality!). I can have it serviced around the world without having to find a vendor-specific shop. And if it really is FUBAR, I can invest the 50% I saved on the initial purchase and get a brand new, next generation PC.
How true is this? For instance, I often see the XPS brought up as an alternative to the MPB, but whenever I look into it, it seems like the price is comparable for similar hardware configurations.[1]
[1] http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/apple-macbook-pro-13-...
- i5 Quad Core (i5-6300HQ)
- 8GB RAM (upgradeable to 32)
- 256GB HD (upgradeable)
- 2GB Graphics card (GTX 960M)
Lowest quality new model MBP (15" w/ touch bar) is $2399:
- i7 quad core
- 16GB RAM (not upgradeable)
- 256GB HD (not upgradeable)
- 2GB Graphics card (Radeon Pro 450)
So for $750 you get a little more RAM, slightly better CPU, and Mac build quality (I have no idea how the graphics cards compare). That seems like a pretty big difference to me for fairly similar specs. Especially considering that you can upgrade your XPS in the future.
I'm on a Macbook Air now, but for my next laptop I'll be deciding between the 2 above (or possibly the last model rMBP).
True, this is a real issue, and I agree we're paying premium_price^2 for the newest MBPs.
However, in this day and age of networked computing and fast WiFi why would 256 GB not be enough? Did you check the performance of the XPS SSD compared to the MBP?
I take it the RAM is DDR4. The 16 GB LPDDR3 RAM means more battery life. The resolution of the 2015 MBP 15" is also in between 1080p and 4k, a sacrifice, for battery power.
The graphics card isn't upgradeable on either machine. And I did look at the XPS. I'm not going to buy a machine which makes a lot of noise, and the XPS has coil whine. Why don't you compare to the 2015 rMBP? I tried out the butterfly keyboard of the 2016 version in store and I found it far too noisy (the travel also isn't a good aspect). Do you really need the graphics card? Have you looked at eGPU?
I've been hearing it for 20 years from Mac users: "Why would you want XYZ feature anyway?"
It's hilarious and there is no wonder in my mind as to why the vast, vast majority of businesses use Windows and not Mac.
Well, I can't speak to most businesses but every corporate I've worked at in the last few years has been characterised by an SOE that involves strangely spec'd machines eg. only 4GB RAM but 1TB HDD which is 95% empty but thrashes nicely when swapping (just running browser with a few tabs, office and outlook). It will also most likely be an i7 that never gets to top out, meanwhile the underwhelming wifi infrastructure (not PC specific) means boot times (due to profile and policy replication) are in the order of minutes. Oh, and regardless of how old they are they never get upgraded (eg extra RAM, switch to SSD) because the bureaucracy disincentivises doing so.
At least they have a configuration to choose from! If they shopped Apple, they'd get 3 choices: Cheap overpriced crap that they have no control over, overpriced crap that they have no control over and Expensive overpriced crap that they have no control over. But hey, it would be shiny! They'd then just have to build their own infrastructure to manage their fleet of Macs like Google did because nobody else builds stuff like that for Macs since nobody uses them in business.
My rMBP is only 256GB, and while it's "enough" - only barely. Having to think about disk space regularly and make sure to remove software I'm not using regularly is something that I've not had to do in a very long time. It's tight enough that I'm hesitant to dual-boot Windows with Boot Camp like I have on every other Mac I've owned for gaming and such.
Based on the Ars review of the HP Spectre x360 [0], though, I'd probably add that to your list as well. I'm eager to try one myself.
[0] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/hps-new-spectre-x360-...
If I was underwhelmed about anything, it was the rMBP feeling slightly slower than the bottom-of-the-line MBP I got in 2010 with upgraded RAM & SSD.
Granted, the hampered rMBP performance was probably mostly due to that specific model being underpowered for the new retina display.
Just built a PC at home for gaming and Windows tinkering, and I have to say - it feels pretty glorious.
Also, and I feel like a shill for having said this so many times, the new Razer Blade laptops, Surface Book Pro, and Surface Studio have successfully plucked the "top tier industrial design" mantle from Apple, in terms of innovation and coolness factor (which, as Apple has proved time and again, really does matter).
Which is more interesting - a massive touch screen computer that moves weightlessly, with a hockey puck sensor that makes those cool radial menus we see in every other science fiction movie, or a laptop with a touch screen above the keyboard?
I think there is a great future for 'glorious PC hardware', both for enthusiasts like myself who build their own rig, and from companies like Microsoft, ASUS and the like, who have had their clock cleaned by Apple for the last few years and have finally come up with a response that's not just "copy the MacBook" (and not "novelty for novelty's sake" either).
I feel like the recent output has been releasing new features for the sake of doing it because it is possible, not necessarily because there are significant usability/ux improvements.
I found the dial & touch to be a bit fatigue inducing and less efficient than using a keyboard/mouse for anything beyond the first 20-30 minutes of work. Touch works on smaller screens because the physical effort to swipe a finger is minimal, but on large screens, it's fatigue inducing. I'd be guessing that Apple has tried these other input methods, but hasn't quite figured out how to address usability in this context of a large screen.
The fatigue issue of raising a hand to a screen (even if the studio is laid down flat) is pretty huge, or resting a dial on the screen taking up pixels becomes an interference to either constantly move on/off or keep stationary next to the keyboard.
Most people working hours a day on the computer can keep their hands within several inches, but the other input methods do feel gimmicky for general purpose use. Not to discount the dial entirely, as there was an old 3rd party Apple accessory maker who released a dial exactly like the surface dial over a decade ago, but targeted film & music makers who would use the dial for scrubbing video/audio.
Microsoft is definitely upping it's ante, but there is a certain touch of refinement that feels missing, while Apple is slowly degrading in their small touches of refinement that bring user happiness.
If you're not using keyboard input as much, I can definitely see the utility of the dial. I've got one of those Palette Gear setups above my keyboard that I've integrated with IntelliJ for some common tasks, works pretty well.
> Just built a PC at home for gaming and Windows tinkering, and I have to say - it feels pretty glorious.
Oh, I was just speaking about laptops since that is what the OP was talking about. You are absolutely right, building stationary setups is still lots of fun, probably even more than a decade or two ago.
The former.
Which would I buy? The latter. Which would I rather use? The latter.
I agree with you that the macbook is more practical - but that's not the argument that Apple is making. Apple is trying to say that their devices are beautiful, innovative, and cutting edge, when that's simply not the case anymore.
Agreed. With Linux I can control the price of my hardware. I can move my environment, the part I care about, up and down the price spectrum as I care to and where I can afford.
I care much more about what I'm doing with the abstract "computer" in front of me than what it physically is. Particularly something as fast-changing and fast-obsoleting as computer hardware. And obsolescence does matter, as newer softer slowly comes to expect newer hardware.
Also, finding suitable notebook hardware to run linux on is still a nightmare unless you enjoy spending time debugging the device that is supposed to improve your productivity. All the unique hardware is missing drivers (SP4, surface book) and things like touch screens and wifi drivers across more "normal" hardware is still finicky.
My main gig is iOS dev, so I obviously can't completely swap, but there just isn't any comparable hardware out there that can just run ubuntu out of the box (minus some exceptions like that dell developer edition xps.)
* Screen coating wearing off and leaving horrible marks behind (I now use it plugged into a monitor more often than not)
* Inputs (trackpad and keyboard) occasionally lock up, usually when unplugging external keyboard/mouse. Closing and opening the lid sometimes fixes this, toggling bluetooth or plugging/unplugging keyboard also sometimes fix; failing that I have to power-cycle using the keyboard power button (the only button that seems to still respond)
* Wifi connection has all sorts of problems - access hangs for ~30 seconds every couple of minutes or so. This is very intermittent, and seems to be a problem with our home connection, but other devices don't appear to suffer.
I mainly bring this up because the latter two pretty much match your examples of linux complaints - Apple machines are far from perfect!
Which macOS version? Did you check /var/log/wifi.log?
Strangely my MBP 2010 has a similar issue, while my new MBP 2015 doesn't.
[1] http://howtoapple.com/mavericks-wifi-issues-fix/
[2] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/01/why-dns-in-os-x-10-10-i...
I've had over 10 Apple laptops in the past decade, and wifi is one of the things that has always been rock solid. Whenever buggy wifi showed up, it was usually the cheap wifi router to blame, since buggy wifi would affect all the wifi devices.
Compared to my previous laptop (MBP 15" 2011) the trackpad sucks but it's small and fast. GNOME Shell has massively oversized window borders but the extensions platform makes it easy to fix with "Pixel Saver". Having the system package manager handle everything is nicer than each app having its own autoupdater + app store + homebrew.
I don't regret the switch.
I know it's a decision point of mine, as after the last MacBook Pro release, I decided that my next hardware refresh will most likely be a PC based laptop running one of the BSD's. I was really hoping for a 32 GB ram option. With my need for virtualization and needing to run other machines 16 is getting a little light. I was really disheartened when they went to the soldered ram as it constrains one to the max ram offered via Apple. I just cannot justify buying another 16gb laptop so it's kind of the straw that broke the camels back for me.
It is apparent to most that they are moving away from the needs of the developer (in relation to hardware) and many of us don't want to be further constrained by those decisions. I have no ill will towards Apple, just stating my reasoning. They made a business decision and I don't factor into that decision as the best course of action. I therefore have to make the best business decision for myself and factor in how I adjust. It sucks, I like Apple products and will miss OSX but the lack of some hardware capabilities in now outweighing the benefits of the OS.
My next machine will most likely be a Sager Laptop running a BSD.
This article is garbage. If he likes Linux, that's fine, but don't pretend that Apple's actions in 2016 caused him to travel back in time years ago and switch to Linux...
The article doesn't even mention what his reasons were for switching.
Nowadays, PC "ultrabooks" like the XPS13 and UX305 are similar in size and build quality but come in a variety of configurations with better battery life and a choice between low power low res screens and high power high res screens. And they're significantly cheaper.
Linux works perfectly on the Intel chipsets these computers use as well with open source drivers from Intel themselves. I haven't had any problems with Ubuntu, my install is pretty much stock Unity.
I used to work for Apple and still have Apple stock. As a stock holder, I think they need to make a similar leap with their computers as they did back with the MacBook Air.
The two things I would most want from them are a 40" curved screen iMac and and a MacPro replacement that looks something like the Razor Blade Stealth where a full powered GPU attaches via USB-C. I mention these 2 designs because they require a lot of tinkering to get working on the PC side and while Apple doesn't really make anything new, they do polish existing technology extremely well.
Does anyone know of any non-apple machines that truly are at parity in build quality? The new Thinkpad X1 looks nice.
The surface book is closer - I like its features/specs but still find it very ugly - I can't get over that huge gappy hinge.
I want to like MS products but they are not the quality I want yet. Surface Studio really turned my head though.
Regarding the ugliness, that's matter of taste.
It makes me really wonder if we can be talking about the same thing. After similar comments, I looked at one in a store looking forward to being impressed but it turned out to be a flimsy thing with no key travel. It reminded me of a cover of ring binder. The sort of thing that if it bounces around a bag for a couple of months it would become dog-eared and split at the edges.
> Regarding the ugliness, that's matter of taste.
I don't know... I really feel I can make the case that its ugly! It looks like its not properly closed and that it won't be protecting the screen properly. If a metal pen gets loose in a bag its going to love bouncing around scratching up the screen.
At first I thought the Core M processor would be slow, but it's comparable, maybe 15% slower than an i5, once it reaches the full thermal throttle.
(And the keyboard isn't backlit but I always thought that feature was kind of lame anyways.)
By all accounts a strict downgrade right?
Except by the end of ownership I had grown so tired of Windows and Linux that I had to Hackintosh it to be bareable. That disabled the 940m (which I didn't miss anyways) and messed with power management so aim guessing the i7 wasn't turbo boosting anymore but it was still worth it to get an OS that supported all my monitors without fuss, had developer mindshare, didn't crash from sleep and had a bash shell without compatibility layers and VMs.
I posted about it on here in another comment and realized how silly that was and looked up someone selling a RMBP and asked for a trade the very next day (I'd have bought a 2016 MBP but I want to see the what next model will bring). Tellingly enough, the i7 UX305ub has depreciated so much faster than the i5 MBP that I should have owed the guy.
The supposed "exodus" from Macbooks has the strangest timing to me.
6 months ago if you asked what the best hardware for a development machine was, you'd get some Thinkpad answers, but the mainstream was a 2015 MacBook Pro.
Suddenly the 2016 comes out and isn't what people want, so everyone acts like the 2015 ceased to exist...
Now people are recommending laptops that they used to recommend the 2015 RMBP over as where to head! Is it a need to have the shiniest new MBP? 2015s went on sale in most retail outlets so the prices are even better now. It's not like the hardware degraded because there's a new model either.
Or maybe there's less substance to all the commotion than HN comments and posts would imply?
That and their sales worm insisted I could run Linux on a t400 I bought new and have no problems with support (paid for NBD repairs.) Screen flakes out and their tech team insisted i reformat to Windows before they're replace an obviously hardware defect
So spying issues and BS salesmen == no more Lenovo for me
Dell developer 13" and 15" can be beefed up pretty nicely. That and Dell is officially supporting Linux through and through; have heard first hand stories of calling in and getting help with Arch related issues. They ended up fixing it in new drivers.
That to me makes Dell the only alternative to Apple (these days I get by fine with a maxed MB Air, running Ubuntu only booting off a tbolt disk into OSX)
Mine runs Xubuntu beautifully (I prefer the minimalism of XFCE).
For me, it was the unibody and screen hinges - they were just way more durable than anything else out there, at almost any price. Now I share your affinity for the trackpad.
I think I'm at the end of wanting a full-function laptop at this point. Once my 2015 rMBP dies I'll likely replace it with a powerful work/gaming PC at home and a convertible tablet PC like a Surface Pro.
Anything else feels tiny now and multimonitor setups are just plain annoying in comparison.
> And they're significantly cheaper.
I tend to disagree, when I shopped around I found the zenbook and xps 2 to 3 times the price of a mac air.
why?
> MacPro replacement that looks something like the Razor Blade Stealth where a full powered GPU attaches via USB-C.
oh god why?
both of these just seem like gimmicks instead of just making a top notch dev machine.
Lots of ram, good CPU, discrete GPU option, fast SSD, decent port selection, great battery life (tweak machine options to get a bit more or less, but always good).
That's why the 2013 was such a great machine. Mine is still easily good enough today.
Now we have gimmicky touchbars, the ram hasn't increased, the CPUs are older models, they have dropped a bunch of useful ports (HDMI, magsafe power supplies), and the battery life isn't even what it used to be.
A big discrete GPU box that works over thunderbolt is just a gimmick. Windows laptop makers do stuff like that but their touchpads are still pretty much meh.
A valid use case for this could be someone travels a lot who wants a thin, lite laptop but when they are home, they want to play AAA game titles.
How heavy are gaming laptops with enough GPU grunt to play the latest AAA titles on ultra settings?
If we're comparing those laptops running linux with macbooks running macos, I highly doubt it.
Many of the recent articles that have been posted about Apple's new Macbook Pro line have been very low-quality compared to the rest of HN. The comments here provide an order of magnitude more value than the articles themselves.
They're more or less serving as a "discuss this currently controversial topic" thread; the articles are irrelevant. While I think they could be easily replaced with a new feature in HN itself, the current solution is working. I'm OK with the article spam.
Razer makes really nice hardware. Visit a Microsoft store or Fry's electronics to see some in person. Aluminum build, current generation CPUs and GPUs. NVidia GPUs not the garbage Apple ships. 32GB RAM and RAID 0 available on the Pro. Hands down superior hardware. Good value for the money.
>He then does not identify a single OS X flaw or a reason he loaded Linux onto his Apple hardware.
I can easily install developer software on Linux that is blocked by Gatekeeper and SIP on Mac OS X. Every time I update, I have to delete /usr/bin/git again because it's just an Apple stub and I have no intention of installing Apple's developer tool package that is gigabytes large. It's bad enough that the last OS X system update was 1.7GB.
Furthermore, you can't even install Linux on a new MacBook or MacBook Pro. Apple transposed digits in the PCI class ID for the SSD so it's not even recognized as an SSD by the installer.
Then there's Docker. Docker == Linux.
And that steps on its own thesis by admitting he still uses Apple hardware, so he'll be one of the "90%" you see using Apple systems?
How did such a terrible "article" get upvoted in the first place?
Fact is, I can't find a single Windows laptop right now with anything close to the high quality feel of a MBP right now. I love working in Linux so the OS isn't an issue... but it's like every Windows laptop I use feels plasticy or flimsy in some way.
OSX has its own fair share of issues, sure. But fact is, it's productive if you're a developer. With Windows (until WSL matures a lot) you find yourself using hacky workarounds and VMs to get stuff done.
I wouldn't agree that there are no machines with "anything close" to the feel. I agree that the MBP is still at the top, but the Dell XPS, Thinkpad X1, X2x0, X4x0s are close in case, keyboard but lose in speakers and display. HP's top end models are close. Surface Book is extremely close.
To be honest, the removal of MagSafe actually drops the overall "quality feel" of the 2016 Mac a step below the older Macs for me. As does the removal of certain other features over the years - such as the battery lights, pulsing sleep light, charging indicator light, tiny microphone input flowers replaced with single larger holes, inbuilt IR remote, etc. I would classify these things as "design quality" - so possibly not the build quality of what is there, but definitely contributed to the machines feeling like they are a cut above what else is out there.
The fact that I can't upgrade the Mac at all is basically a deal breaker for me. I thought I could live with it, but after four years of having personal Macs (Air) that can't be upgraded, and work MBPs, seeing my spend on computer hardware literally double thanks to shorter new machine cycles, higher cost of "upgrades", and reduced resale value, I've had enough. Not only that, but my machine satisfaction drops a lot near the end of a machine's usable life (where previously it would be quite linear as I periodically upgraded things), and having to make compromises on storage etc is just too much.
Whether OSX is productive as a developer depends greatly on what your particular environment is. In many cases I've observed that Linux can be more streamlined for everyday development, and the disruption that is OSX software updates has increased to the point where it's just as bad as Linux updates. If you can take advantage of Visual Studio for your dev and use some of the integrated toolchains there, you may even get superior productivity to OSX.
* Run the software for whatever purpose they want.
* Inspect the software so they can see what it's doing.
* Change the software however they want.
* Share the software with anyone.
Call me an idealist, but aren't these things important?
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
There are things that are open source, but not free, like the Unreal Engine.
https://www.unrealengine.com/eula
the Unreal Engine is not Open Source. Not least because you can't share the source code without restriction.
As I understand it, the difference between free and Open Source is a difference in philosophy rather than a difference in licensing. For Free Software people the importance lies in freedom, but for Open Source people the importance is that it's a better way to develop software.
For example, a Free Software person would always use free software even if was inferior to a proprietary alternative, because they wouldn't want to give up their freedoms. An Open Source person would use whichever is superior, regardless of licensing. I'm in both camps but I tend to use the term Open Source because Free is confusing because it means both 'no charge' and 'liberty'.
The FSF and the OSI both have a list of licences they endorse. I think some licences are endorsed by the OSI, but not by the FSF. Those are candidate for "Open Source, yet not Free".
Besides this small detail, I agree.
Would you consider to use term "libre software", because "open source" is confusing because it means both "one can read the code" and "one can do certain things with the code"?
* Proprietary software makes me dependent on the whims of a business. If the business shuts down, stops updating its products, or changes their products in ways I dislike, I have to discard the investment I've made (time, money, learning, etc).
* Proprietary software makes it complicated to share my work tools with friends and even family.
* Proprietary ecosystems prevent me from learning. On the other hand, I am profoundly grateful for the learning opportunities given to me by the free software community ever since I was a teenager.
* Proprietary tools are hard to integrate with. For example, whenever a new version of Apple's mail program is released, the makers of the GPG plugin have to reverse engineer the changes before they (hopefully) can update their software.
* Proprietary tools often use proprietary formats, which prevents collaboration and contributes to the problem of digital rot.
And so on...
What could this mean? Well they could do something malicious (which they quite often do), they could allow something malicious to happen out of ignorance of the original programers and we'd have no way to fix these issues (think all the window's 0-days), they could even just revoke licenses of software that is in use for critical systems (think medical records).
A worse side effect then all of these is the one that is most egregious: It prevents younger generations who are starting to learn about computers from understanding how the lower part of the stack works. That's why, in my opinion, many older people have no problem delving into lower level systems code and many younger people today have a very hard time doing such. They've been robbed of the experiance of hacking their OS/Machine to shreds and loving every minute of it. Hardware, software, and even documentation is under lockdown and it's an assult on not only our principles but also our youth and self interests.
Stallman's default assumption that proprietary software is malware rings true to me, too... if not now, it will be in the next update.
Rhetorically, I think Stallman's ethical strength contributes to the integrity of the Free Software movement, but also tends to alienate people who do not already agree.
As I see it, this is a common dilemma for good causes. For example, I think animal rights rhetoric tends to alienate people who don't already strongly agree that animals have rights.
I'm influenced in my thinking by reading things like Alisdair MacIntyre's book "After Virtue", especially the second chapter, which begins:
"The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this just that such debates go on and on -- although they do -- but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture."
Another source informing my approach is Richard Rorty's "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity". I see free software as way to actualize solidarity, and yet I'm skeptical about the possibility of convincing people that proprietary software is "wrong" or "evil".
That's not a fact, that's rhetoric.
The fact is that there is no system - absolutely none - which doesn't define how users interact with it, and set limits on what users can and cannot do with it.
FOSS doesn't solve this problem. At best it allows a tiny subset of technologically expert users some limited opportunities to make incremental changes and adaptations.
But it also creates some unfortunate side effects, including a perpetual ferment of hobby-quality unprofessional tinkerer code that doesn't have to deal with end user feedback because "Issue closed because I don't understand your problem and don't care about it anyway."
There's certainly an argument to be made for making software more open, but FOSS more or less nets out to a break even on the whole. It's certainly good to have around, but the suggestion that it's The Only Way Forward is more dogmatic than fact-based - not least because there's nothing in FOSS that selects for quality of user experience over quantity of development effort.
1. Open Source makes me dependent on the whims of a particular community. If the group has infighting or lack of activity, enjoy your abandonware. Yes, you could resurrect the project yourself, but that is a ridiculous burden for most situations.
2. It's often complicated sharing Open Source apps. They often require loads of tinkering, are poorly documented, and require specialized knowledge. Unless all of your friends and family are free software enthusiasts too, this isn't always simple.
4. Open source tools can also be hard to integrate with. You exchange licensing being a barrier for integration with lack of resources for designing good integration schemes. The larger projects can have significant resources to get around this.
However, even though it's flawed it's not totally incorrect. You sometimes can change something -- maybe look at the internals and write some trivial patch to solve an immediate problem; maybe change some scripting bit -- and sometimes if there is infighting in the official community, a fork can happen. Not saying forks are not messy or even always possible, but the possibility is there and it happens.
There is a huge difference between "it takes too much time/knowledge to change this piece of software" and "it's illegal to change it".
It's also kind of like open knowledge, like science and math. Sure, it's hard to learn algebra or biology, but with hard work you can master it and contribute.
Even if I cannot always fix things myself, looking at (and breaking!) free source code taught me a lot about programming.
Quite often I've used a fork of software that continued providing a feature the core distro discarded or added an experimental feature the main line hasn't been able to perfect enough to put into production.
And it's common for someone else has to take up the banner to continue producing a library or software the original developer no longer has time or interest in producing.
With commercial software however for the most part you're stuck providing a patch file with some hopefully not too complex instructions on how to hack it in.
2. Most free software is also available on proprietary platforms. Seldom an issue. Some people will say they "cannot" read your .odf document, but if they can't even install LibreOffice, they likely have more urgent problems, such as the crapload of malware that is most likely infesting their computer right now.
4. Don't have any counter-argument. You may be right.
I'm still dependent on Intel providing the drivers for their wifi chips. I'm still dependent on AMD/Nvidia providing drivers for their video cards. I'm still dependent on a lot of non-libre software that I need in order to do my job.
All of your points are important from a theoretical standpoint, but that's based on the idea that the end user actually knows how to do any of that. And those skills are very, very uncommon.
But if you think open-source gets rid of that issue, I'd like you to look up "Ubuntu Amazon search ads", maybe "systemd vs init", also "pulse audio" just to name a few. Yep, it's possible to get rid of all of these things, but again, only if the user knows how. Which again, isn't a common skill.
That said, growing up I've come to realize that one's time is valuable, life is too short and at the end of the day you have to pick your fights.
Even as hackers, there are times when we find ourselves with the "end user" hat on. Creative work for example (photo/music editing in my case) is already challenging and time-consuming enough not impose additional burdens upon yourself, like dealing with inferior / immature desktop Free software when there's an alternative that gets you there faster.
macOS in my view has always struck that rare balance between polished end-user tools and large amounts of familiar Unix / open source / standards based components under the hood to satisfy the hacker in us.
As most people I'm slightly worried about Apple's hardware vision lately, but the state of desktop Linux simply isn't good enough to warrant a switch back for demanding users yet.
After all, looking back I can't easily point at actual harms created by (for example) photoshop's proprietary nature. But it's almost universally accepted that there's a danger in the walled gardens of Facebook or Google.
I'm hoping that the idealists will be able to defend/create open protocols and networks. There have been some successes, mostly when it was in the interest of industry heavyweights as well (i. e. Apple killing flash, html5 takings its place). Currently endangered is E-Mail and essentially dead is personal publishing.
* The trackpad is awesome, it's well integrated with the OS and feels fantastic. I've yet to use a PC trackpad that isn't completely awful.
* Networking doesn't randomly break. This used to happen A LOT. The most stable solution I could find was just using wpa_supplicant and maintaining a load of config files, which was irritating and time consuming.
* There's a pretty unified well tested operating system that is designed for this piece of hardware. And it shows.
* The battery lasts for ages, even in this 2.5 year old laptop.
* The text rendering is pretty.
* The operating system is aesthetically pleasing and it's interface makes sense to me.
* The trackpad works. I use a mouse anyway.
* Networking didn't randomly break so far.
* Don't care about "unified". Apart from a suspension bug, it works.
* The battery lasts for 6-7 hours of programming.
* Text rendering is pretty.
* Xmonad + LXDE is pleasing and their interface make sense —to me at least.
I have used my laptop for heavy computation, software dev, academic work, major presentations, video and multimedia, casual browsing, gaming, etc, and it has NEVER given me trouble due to compatibility. Having spent way too much of my life thinking about those problems on Linux, you have no idea how liberating it is to be free of those concerns.
I get OCD about using a specific brand of disposable pen, so you'd better believe I think about the most important tool in my life: my laptop. The MBP is too good to accept any alternative. The 2016 was underwhelming, but it's still the best laptop/OS combination out there. It costs too much for the market and it's not enough-better to justify the upgrade, but dammit there's nothing that even compares.
I've been thinking hard about alternatives to the MBP during the past few months, and my decision is that I can't give all this up and still be a functioning academic and entrepreneur. I'll pay the $1000 premium and if I value my time at $25/hour, I'll recover that additional cost within 2 months compared to Linux maintenance. I wish it weren't so, but the maths don't lie.
I've had that "just works" experience for both of them, on a variety of cheap laptops, pretty much from the start. Whatever they do to detect hardware, it works.
I wouldn't even remember how to hand-edit a config file anymore, seriously. That knowledge is gone.
One reason is, it's not Linux's problem to solve. It's the hardware vendor's. Those morons still don't ship with proper drivers, firmware, or even specs —possibly because spending a single cent on Linux isn't economically viable or something.
Last time I checked, suspend and power management does work flawlessly on Linux… when the hardware is a couple year's old. But it will never work properly on new hardware unless the vendors make it so themselves.
On the other hand, Wifi hardware vendors now often ship with proprietary drivers. Proprietary sucks, but it at least works.
> I'll pay the $1000 premium and if I value my time at $25/hour, I'll recover that additional cost within 2 months compared to Linux maintenance. I wish it weren't so, but the maths don't lie.
Let's be generous and assume MacOS requires zero maintenance. 1000/25 means 40 hours (a full work-week), of Linux maintenance.
A full work-week in only 2 months, aren't you being a tiny bit hyperbolic? I spend a few minutes per month in maintenance.
I spend more than a few minutes a month administering my MBP, so I have no idea how you get along doing so little for a Linux machine. In fact, I spend more than a few minutes a month administering my Linux servers...
I honestly think my 1-hour-per-day estimate is in the ballpark and your experience sounds unlike mine.
At this point I doubt we mean the same thing by "administration". To me, it means updating the system, fixing what doesn't work, and installing new programs. Spending en entire hour per day just for this sounds insane. Perhaps you had other tasks in mind?
Also bear in mind that I'm currently using a "long term support" release of Ubuntu, on hardware I knew would be well supported (I've read a couple reviews). It's not Arch on a random laptop.
That criticism doesn't make much sense to me. Linux is just a kernel and virtually none of those things (except sometimes in the case of the very shiniest new hardware) have any kernel issues. Distros, on the other hand, have different priorities and you should pick accordingly. Don't use something like Arch if these are your main priorities. Pick a stable LTS release of a casual user-centric distro like Fedora or Ubuntu and pick hardware that's well supported, and you won't have any of these issues. It's no different from OSX, where using unsupported hardware also requires constant tinkering and research before updates.
I suspect many of these unfortunate user experiences come about because users don't do research and pick something at random. You can't do that with Apple, because you don't get any meaningful choices in the first place, so you can't make the wrong ones.
Just like people are used to OSes that crash all the time, they're used to unusable trackpads. Sad.
Arch is the very definition of "tinkering around". That's the appeal, that you can (and have to) customize it to what you want. Mint, Ubuntu, and Fedora are all "out of the box" experiences. The old Unix greybeards on the Internet hate them because they're one-size-fits-all, but that sounds like exactly what you're looking for.
Did you try using NetworkManager instead of netctl? netctl can be a bit fiddly.
In any case, as an Arch user for a few years, I can definitely say that Arch is not for people who want something that Just Works. If you go back to Linux, you might want to look at Linux Mint, or even Ubuntu, if you aren't put off by Canonical.
The frustrating thing is that nothing in the system tells you why. Networking suddenly just stops networking over wifi. No logs show that anything happened at all -- but it's not going to work again until you restart services (or in some cases, reboot).
This happens to me 2-3 times a week, usually at the most inconvenient times...
Nearly as much fun is using the nvidia driver. Every time I pull down kernel updates, I hope that my desktop will return... actualy this was a worry under noveau as well, so perhaps it's only made worse by nvidia.
With that said, I still like it better than my few years with Mac OS. It probably costs me ~2 hours a week in "crap I should not need to waste my time on", but I accept that tradeoff in order to have an environment that lets me work the way I prefer to work.
(Not to mention the bump in hardware performance, memory, and ssd size that I was able to get for the same $$)
Without any hints from the system, though, I find I'm not really interested in doing the deep dive needed to figure out the real cause. If it was just a little more frequent - so that it became more impediment than nuisance - I'd likely end up doing so.
In my case, I'm sure some of the problems are self inflicted. I got away from NetworkManager because of the same issue. I tried wicd, and am currently just using direct configuration in /etc/network/interfaces.
Since it still occurs and presents the same way, it seems to suggest either wpa_supplicant or the driver itself is at the root of it.
You were using a distribution made for people who want to take time to tinker, then complain that it requires that you take time to tinker.
Using Arch is sometimes a status symbol, a way to signal that you are a hacker that likes to control every bit of your system. There is no need to try this hard. You can also simply use Ubuntu or any variants, or even Fedora for what's matters. That's what I do.
Remember the times around 2006. when many developers were jumping to Apple ecosystem, rise of TextMate, Dtrace, the magnificent Snow Leopard came out year after that...
So I think things move, and that's the good thing. If you are not satisfied or productive on current platform/setup, then go and search for something that will fit your needs.
I bought 13" MBP last year (2015. model) and I am really happy with the machine, to the point where I don't have a single gripe (except macOS thingys).
I used to dislike macos so much that went mbp 2015 > thinkpad > sp4. I realised how much better macbooks were than their comptetition that I bought it again only with more storage. I think Surface line will bethe next thing for me but it was still too buggy for daily use.
What looks more tempting to me, is new Lenovo Carbon X1 that got announced a day ago on CES. That could be sweet Linux dev. machine, light, with solid battery life, thin bezels, nice keyboard, trackpoint...
Some are. Also on the other direction (and to/from Windows). Complaints for Apple, 32GB RAM option etc aside, I see no much reason to believe the numbers have changed in any large way.
If for once a US-based developer conference (and its speakers) are not predominantly Apple laptops, we can check this again.
The problems:
* Lack of focus on macOS (compared to iOS), and the iOSation of macOS.
* Lack of hardware upgrades on Mac Mini, Mac Pro, Macbook Air. MBP specific: focus on size and weight (and butterfly keyboard with less travel) instead of DDR4 32 GB RAM / stronger battery / latest gen processor (read: MBP becoming MBA). Gimmicks like touchbar, force touch.
* "Bullying." +300 EUR extra tax on MBP. Ridiculous things like having to pay 100 USD to release a Safari extension.
[Please, feel free to make addenda on these.]
A post with some random picture of GNOME 3 with a Terminal is just cringeworthy though. What does that have to do with developers? I see no development taking place. Could be a sysadmin's workstation for all we know.
I very much like macOS. Its excellent for development. You have the software from macOS (which includes some software not available on Linux). You got UNIX under the hood. All of the software is managed with Homebrew which is excellent (macOS has come a long way in that regard). Really need Windows? You got all the options available from Linux (VM, WINE) plus Bootcamp. Microsoft even provide a VM with Edge themselves. The keybinds and workflow in macOS are consistent and feel natural (with the addition of Amethyst for window management, Tmux in iTerm (fullscreen with Powerline, and Vim), and Alfred instead of Spotlight), and I'm very much used to them. That being said I could just use a Terminal with Git and SSH and Vim or Sublime Text on Linux or Windows as well, but I'd lose some of the above advantages. Linux has far less software, the workflow is clunky, and I'm scared for all the hardware working well. Windows just isn't UNIX under the hood and you notice that when you work with open source software just like you notice WINE isn't native on Linux or macOS.
Instead there are the unsolicited, constant, and annoying nags from the MAS.
I found it easier to rebind keys in GNOME than Mac OS.
Dual booting OSes has existed longer than Mac OS X.
Are there many truly Mac-only apps these days? Apple's own apps used to be a draw for me but they got rid of the one I used seriously (Aperture) and change the others so much it is hard to keep up.
Adobe apps are honestly the only reason I am keeping my Mac partition at this point.
I used Linux on the desktop for many years (1994 to 2007) and until now on servers, but I have to disagree respectfully. It's great that on macOS package management of third-party software is decoupled from the OS. It means that one can upgrade third-party software (per Homebrew) without upgrading (and potentially breaking) the whole OS. On Linux, it is normally a choice between a stable OS and stale software, or fresh software with an unstable OS. Of course, things like Snap, AppImage, etc. are changing that.
I found it easier to rebind keys in GNOME than Mac OS.
More important to me are consistent shortcuts. On macOS virtually every native application uses the same keyboard shortcuts. With Linux it's all over the place.
Are there many truly Mac-only apps these days?
Yes. Omni{Graffle,Focus}, Little Snitch, TweetBot, etc. And then there are many applications that are only available on Windows or macOS, besides Adobe software, the Affinity apps, Microsoft Office, 1Password, etc.
Brew is more than Brew because of Brew Cask.
More mature, how? Can you already install multiple versions of a package with Linux package management? From what I read, NixOS comes close to the way Apple works with .App. Debian and Fedora don't use that. Don't get me started on Debian. Stable, yet always out of date.
macOS is also UNIX while Linux is Linux (and has Systemd which I'd have to learn, while for example Launchctl I already know). macOS comes with PF (which I know how to use and is much easier than IPT), and a Little Snitch license is only 30 EUR. Then there's X11 and Wayland. Is Wayland default already? I don't know.
> It would be nice if brew upgrade installed OS security patches etc.
softwareupdate* allows that. If it bothers you to type, make some shell scripts. Not a big deal. You even see they're available in the Dock.
My main gripe with Brew is Brew Cask. I need to check with a shell script if the closed source packages have been updated. But on Linux I'd be using APT repositories or would have to check manually as well.
Windows has Chocolatey which is nice, but like I said you notice Windows isn't UNIX all the time (tho it has improved, and so is Microsoft!).
> I found it easier to rebind keys in GNOME than Mac OS.
You don't get it. I don't have to rebind much. The default are consistent, logical, and useful already. I don't use Spotlight or Siri so that is disabled. Alt + Space leads me to iTerm (with Tmux), and Cmd + Space leads me to Alfred. Caps Lock is bound to Ctrl. The rest is default.
When I looked for Linux notebooks the price of a MBP 2015 was slightly higher (while there was an in between 1080p and 4k) but then I know I don't have a learning curve, and the above advantages also remain.
Finally, my gf can use Microsoft Office on my MBP if she really has to (I don't use it myself). I tried to get her to LibreOffice but there's a learning curve involved and we both CBA.
I just run softwareupdate -dir.
Feel free to ad your own home-brew formula to run softwareupdate. But as it stands, having that handle OS updates, similar to freebsd-update works fine for me. I also personally use nix to handle package management on OS X which I argue works better than most linux package managers in general. If a bit finicky.
Sketch is a mac only app example, amongst others. I keep OS X for a few reasons:
- it upgrades fine, I've had issues with upgrades on almost every linux distribution ever
- it supports multiple monitors without pulling teeth and fingernails
- more recently, high dpi support, i tried windows 10 and its a bit of a tire fire based on what you run, not a fan, linux was pretty close
- overall just get out of my way ness of full screen mode works fine and the touch gestures
1) What data other than anecdotal (e.g. it feels like things crash more) do we have that supports the assertion? 2) What features would you ask Apple to focus on? What improvements are necessary for macOS to be a better development platform for you?
I don't have any major complaints about macOS itself for development purposes. Others may and I read a lot of gripes about it generically but very little specifically.
Oh, I was echoing the opinion of a vocal minority there. Personally, I find the software in a relatively good spot. I made some comments on potential improvements hereunder.
In the past I had issues with either WiFi or DNS (could've been both I honestly don't remember) but this was fixed in I think El Capitan (that I forgot as well...).
> What improvements are necessary for macOS to be a better development platform for you?
The filesystem. HFS+ is ancient, but stable. I'd like a filesystem with support for CoW for snapshotting and checksums for data integrity (like hardware RAID, ZFS, and Btrfs). I know Apple's new FS is going to support those features, as well as native cryptography. I know this partly overlaps with system administration which is a bit outside of macOS league but still [and I do think Apple could actually advance in that area with features like ZFS and PF but that is a totally different topic]. (A workaround is using ZFS, or just wait for the time being.)
Time Machine. I understand Apple wants to sell Airport Express and Airport Capsule but that is no longer developed. Why does it still need AFP? Make it support whatever protocols which can be used native or via Fuse (SMBFS, SSHFS, NFS), and make Time Machine integrated in the new FS. (A workaround is using AFP on a server, or using CLI software like Rsync and Git.)
Out of date software shipped. Bash, Python, Git, OpenSSL to name a few. (A workaround is using Homebrew [or an alternative for Homebrew like Macports or Fink or ..] and using those binaries and libraries in /usr/local one really needs to make sure they're using the correct binaries and libraries though.)
Apart from that I feel its Homebrew and .App format which makes software management good. (I don't use an IDE, but I know they're widely available for macOS.)
Cant we call this sort of article what it really is? Im mad because I dont think apple is thinking of my needs anymore. It could be because Ive changed or theyve changed, but either way Im going to write an article to to justify my feelings, even if my arguments dont hold water.
Linux: Free Softwaaare! (My favourite)
MacOS: It Just Wooorks! (And is damn pretty)
Windows: Gaaames! (And a host of other programs)
Another way to look at it is, Linux is Hippie, Windows is Business, and MacOS is Beauty.
Of course it will get religious: if you deliberately chose one platform, you likely care about its strongest suit enough to shun the other two. Most free software advocates will use GNU/Linux, and urge everyone to follow suit. They're virtuous. Most people who need such and such software will use Windows, because they have work to do, dammit. They're practical. Apple users are… I don't know, loyal? Apple does have strong followers.
Me, I still feel a little guilty about my Windows desktop. But… games…
While I do use Mac and Linux wherever third parties require it - I prefer Windows by far. I also think it's the most practical choice for anybody that needs a solid general purpose OS. Some other thoughts:
- I like the Microsoft business plan the best - they don't want to lock me into hardware like Apple and their stuff isn't infinitely fragmented like Linux.
- Windows has the best all around UI and they cater to power users. Meanwhile, Apple hates power users and Linux thinks that "power user" means programmer/beta tester.
- The vast, vast majority of businesses use Windows desktops and not Mac or Linux. These are my customers.
- There are very few useful things that I can't do with Windows. Meanwhile, I can find hundreds of things that Mac and Linux can't do (or can't do easily/well) that Windows can.
Nowadays, I do most my work in Emacs and I can find, navigate, and edit code with extreme ease - without having to click around, with fingertips staying in the home row of my keyboard. That I'd say is extremely convenient. Visual Studio? Meh. I've seen that, I've been there. I'm happy I'm out.
The Linux community would have me doing rote memorization of shitty command line apps from the 1970s to do my programming. No thanks! I'll stick with my modern GUI!
To do anything for Apple, you have to use their backwards UI and Xcode.
Meanwhile, Microsoft caters hand and foot to developers.
To this date I really don't think there's a polished GUI/WM that can compete with OSX. The app ecosystem is vast but spotty. Even CLI work feels clunkier in any of the desktop distros. Is it better than 5 years ago? Maybe a bit. I just think with this huge community there'd be something as attractive and natural as OSX or Win10.
And that's ignoring the hardware aspect altogether. Yes, you can buy some very solid machines now, but every review I read about Mac-killer laptop hardware ends with a bunch of things that just don't work as well as a MBP.
Elementary Os is probably the closest, imo.
> And that's ignoring the hardware aspect altogether. Yes, you can buy some very solid machines now, but every review I read about Mac-killer laptop hardware ends with a bunch of things that just don't work as well as a MBP.
I think the ideal linux setup would be a slightly older MPB with a good distro running on it. Prob Ubuntu for compatibility.
Up until recently Mac shipped with an 3.x version of Bash. To star it had a version of sed that was in effect broken in several use cases. Mac also lacks the system profile capabilities of Linux such as perf and the new BPF tools.
Most of the tools like top, netstat, strace, and vmstat aren't as up to date on Mac either.
Regarding the other tools you mention, keep in mind they are system tools. You cannot simply take the source of Linux netstat, compile it on your mac and call it a day. The data displayed by these tools is obtained from the kernel and different kernels have different interfaces (for instance, OpenBSD doesn't have /proc which is where Linux netstat gets information).
I know you can't just compile and call it a day... Kind of what I was getting at :)
I have my gripes with Apple, but to say everytime over the last 10 years, just clicking a textfield you get the beachball makes me doubt you. That or you are the unluckiest person I know that always touches a broken mac.
I couldn't even figure out how to shutdown via the GUI for the first few months of using the system and would always open a terminal and run a shutdown command until a friend caught me doing it and told me how.
So - in my experience, any decent desktop environment feels a lot better than OSX. Be it Unity, KDE or Windows. CLI is much better on Linux or FreeBSD than OSX, simply look to the clunky hack package management systems used on OSX.
Maybe I'm past the point now where learning is easy for me, or maybe I just wasn't interested in learning OSX that much. But with all the "oh the GUI is so amazing" reviews I sort of assumed it would Just Work.
Eventually I just gave up, I had to get off it - the GUI was too annoying on OSX to use on a daily basis and I found myself always running my Bootcamp'd Windows. Last week I blew OSX away and replaced it with Ubuntu, it took a bit of hoop jumping to get all the hardware happy, but it works now and I'm never buying Apple again. As for better hardware - I'm probably buying Dell next time, they ship 4k displays now, better resolution than Apple and have better Linux support. Also, cheap accidental warranty and a better GPU at a lower price.
Much later once they had a multi-user operating system and a user menu, it would make more sense to have the user's name, shutdown, logout, and switch user in one menu.
It sounds like you were just trying to get work done. I suppose if you'd wasted an hour a day for a week or so exploring, that the operating system might have revealed some advantages.
1. The main innovation in the newest MBPros is... an Emoji keyboard accessory? Okay, that might actually be useful but:
2. Worse, said newest laptops have battery issues to which Apple responds by removing the battery ETA indicator? That was actually useful since I knew how much battery life I could rely on while doing the same task.
3. Since 2013, they don't have a desktop for desktop (not web) developers any more.
Minis are too underpowered, iMacs are noisy under load and who knows how long they will last when kept heated the whole time, the Mac Pro is a video editing machine and little else.
Right now I'm doing fine with a MBPro and a hackintosh, but if they keep making dubious decisions about the laptops and not offering a developer's desktop, I'll have to consider Linux again.
They've always had some process that went runaway and ate most of the CPU for no reason. Just the name of the process changed across hardware and software versions.
The problem is, now they're removing an useful indicator to swipe the current problem (and I'm sure a large amount of people do have it) under the rug. It's this decision that worries me, not that they botched something on this laptop generation.
This was changed before the issues referred noted.
I can't tell if you literally think that's what it is, or if you're just trying to be dismissive. Emoji support in text fields is just one of the many things it does. It's a dynamic set of buttons that change depending on your task, and I actually really want it. I've been running a third-party app called Touché (https://red-sweater.com/touche/) which gives you the touch bar in a window on your computer, so I can see what things it offers (this isn't actually very useful for actually using, because if I have to switch to my mouse and click a button, there's probably a faster way anyway), and there's some cool stuff in there. What looks especially useful is if you're using Xcode to debug an app, the touch bar has a dedicated button that pauses the debugger, even if Xcode isn't in the foreground, and AFAIK there's no other way to accomplish this (even if you set up an applescript to pause the debugger and hook it up to a keypress, the app will still see you beginning to press the keys before it pauses, potentially changing the state that you were trying to debug at).
> Since 2013, they don't have a desktop for desktop (not web) developers any more. […] iMacs are noisy under load
I haven't ever noticed my iMac being noisy. I'm pretty sure it's quieter than my laptop, and my laptop is pretty darn quiet.
> and who knows how long they will last when kept heated the whole time
I'm really confused as to why you said this. If you think iMacs are noisy, then you think they have strong fans, which means there should be no problem with heat. Now of course I don't think iMacs are noisy, but I think they still do have good heat dissipation and have no worries whatsoever about lifetime.
If you want a developer's desktop, you really should look at an iMac.
There's very clearly no future here for me, but I'm switching to Linux sort-of by default, not because it's better. In many respects, it's worse. There's always Windows, which would have the benefit of a (comparatively) low-maintenance system, and I could get working versions of many apps that have been making my life easier on the Mac for some time, but the system itself feels alien to me.
I'm certainly not switching to Linux on already existing Macs, because macOS hasn't become bad enough to do that, not by a long shot. What's driving the slow changeover right now is hardware. So I got a PC, and I'm running it side-by-side with a Mac via Synergy, but honestly I spend most of my time on the Mac side. When I switched to OS X it was immediate and without looking back, whereas now I'm dragging my heels.
All of this makes me very unhappy. I wish more vendors would just cross-compile to all three platforms. There should be very few, if any, apps that absolutely can't exist on multiple platforms. I understand that a big part of the problem is platform-independent UI, but even that shouldn't be such a huge deal if you just take care of that from the start - instead of suddenly being in the situation where your app is so intricately interwoven with your UI toolkit that it can't be separated anymore.
I laid out above why this doesn't solve anything for products that haven't been developed with that in mind from the start. These are the majority of commercial software.
> Support costs money. That isn't feasible for a ~3% market share OS.
That's part of the reason why many vendors didn't (and still don't) support OS X either, whereas those who did turned a tidy profit. It's certainly worth it if you just charge for it. And there's always the prospect of growing your market share with an underdeveloped platform.
Personally I think it's largely psychological. Vendors assume Linux users will likely not pay for professional software. But with more developers switching over that could change.
1 package format (so Flatpak needs to win because most other distros will never accept Snappy packages)
1 UI kit (GTK has this bagged)
1 core set of libraries
and most of all consistency. Even from LTS to LTS there shouldn't change too much. I'm pretty sure someone that's used to OS9 could pick up Sierra and be reasonably productive. Try teaching an average person Gnome 1.0 on Debian 2.1 and then drop him in Gnome 3.2 on Debian 8.6..... yeah
I'm not a really heavy application user, but I am curious about the limitations of centralizing packaging using something like Flatpak or Electron. If you try to build a program like Photoshop or Solidworks, do you run into some of the bottlenecks of those services?
And even if you hypothetically did get it somewhat performant - we need to get rid of feeling the need to run everything on Electron. Atom runs on Electron. GitKraken runs on Electron. So does WhatsApp. I don't want to spawn 5 Electron instances just to run some apps. Its just horribly inefficient. WhatsApp on OS X, a chat client, uses 500Mb memory(!). Safari with 5 tabs open uses 550Mb. Telegram, which basically does the same as WhatsApp uses 125Mb, because its written natively.
What would be best is a unified repo that solely contains Flatpaks. Flatpaks contain all the libraries the application needs to work, so no more issues supporting 20 different distros. However, that will never happen: 2/3+ of Linux users are on Ubuntu and Canonical will always want control (and they want to force their own standard- Snappy packages), and the other 1/3 does not want to bend to Canonical and their weird contributor license.
I've already voiced it elsewhere but (mainline) Linux could be as solid as OS X, if only there was more consistency. If almost all distros were purely Wayland+Gnome+Flatpak (and mostly on the same versions) then most companies would feel comfortable targeting that instead of the constant moving multi-target that Linux is now.
brew also causes all manner of issues. It's not the best designed package manager in the first place and it also suffers by dint of not being the default mode of installing software on a mac.
Homebrew has been installing to /usr/local since the beginning of times:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100317015208/http://mxcl.github...
Do you know if other package managers for macOS (or Mac OS X as it was called back then) did install in /opt?
A lot of commercially available software for Linux actually uses Qt, not GTK.
To be clear, I don't mean to be pointing the finger or blaming anyone. Rather, I think there's an inherent (but by no means unsolvable) problem with large, volunteer-driven free software/open-source projects: how do you make these projects attractive to good designers, in the same way that they are attractive to good engineers and developers?
This is just my gut feeling as someone who has used Linux daily for the past few years, so take with a big grain of salt...
But I'd have to develop with GTK on windows to support that, which is a worse experience now than using e.g. XAML/WPF on Windows (which is declarative, has better HiDpi support etc). So I would hesitate to make a windows desktop app cross platform at that cost, unless the linux user base was large.
You've described all the reasons it's currently sucking, but not any of the ones that would motivate you to switch to a platform you admit sucks.
The reason is that these environments are designed with user-friendliness in mind. Now what does that mean? it means that stuff should be easy to find, simplified enough for somebody who is learning how to interact with the machine, trying to remember what, where and how. As a professional programmer you should not care at all about that. You are not a user, you are a frigging master of the computer universe.
You should care about avoiding unnecessary clutter so that you can focus easier, minimizing time from thought to action to avoid breaking the flow, about flexibility so you can adapt the environment to your personal needs and increase productivity. Erik Naggum nailed it long time ago [0].
You can have a tablet and do your non-work related activities there, iOS, Windows, whatever, but when you are working use your workstation! if you don't have one create it. You will be amazed by how much more productive you can be, how much happier you can be.
I use StumpWM, Emacs, Conkeror, Ergodox with a custom layout and blank keys, and a trackball. The only thing a "user" can do on my machine is move the pointer and pull out the power cord, but in my hands this thing flies!
[0] http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3065048088243385@naggum....
Edit: Let me be clear, this is my personal journey from Windows to MacOS and finally to a custom setup on Linux and the reasoning behind it. I certainly do not mean to preach.
I concede that thinking hard is and always will be the main component of professional work, but perhaps from time to time we should ponder what an environment could be like if it was made for professionals not for users. If we simply keep accepting what is available and let others think for us we will only get more of what Apple does and less of what might be best for us. We are not the majority of Apple users, and probably never will be, it is not in their best interest to put us ahead of them when making various decisions.
I don't develop on Windows, but I know a few engineers that use Windows are some of the best, most productive engineers I've met. I went to college with one that's been at a few high profile places and live-streamed and his workflow is pretty amazing.
As for me - environment is never the bottleneck for me when it comes to solving hard problems, and those are the problems I care about.
I can agree with that, but your original comment strongly implies that your ideas about what makes a workstation should apply to everyone.
All the servers I work with are linux based, I wouldn't know the first thing about managing a windows system, but i'm significantly more productive in windows than I am on a linux workstation.
I just can't seem to find a stable well-working linux workstation after years of trying. I end up spending more time fixing my display manager or messing with config files broken in an update, or farting around with driver issues and running the multiple screens than I do actually getting shit done.
I'm now using windows 10. It works great. I have my 3 monitors, beefy hardware, and just about everything I use is cross-platform or web based anyway, so it all works great. Throw in git-for-windows so I have a linux-ish environment (at least a handful of the GNU tools and most of bash), and i'm happy as a pig in shit. (Yeah, I do know about the bash-on-ubuntu-on-windows thing, but it's not quite ready for me yet)
Also the flat look of Windows compares well to the decoration used as default in Linux WMs - what purpse to the shiny bits behind all these icons serve other than making them look less distinct? http://cialu.net/images/apple-linux-desktop.png
Even before 1997, it was individuals rather than IT departments who first demonstrated business uses for PCs.
I'm not taking a position on either side of this debate, just pointing to the trend....
The ironic thing is that in 1997 there were many more, what they consider, "professional" programmers. Today most programmers are targeting the web, and therefore wouldn't gain anything from ultra minimalism.
Frankly arguing for a enviroment so minimalist that it wouldn't contain a web browser is a non-starter for almost all professional programming jobs in 2016. And even for the few non-web development jobs that still exist (e.g. game development), you're still dependant on platform libraries in MacOS/Windows/Linux (e.g. OpenGL).
Ultimately people can continue this course, but the world has already decided their argument is wrong since this environment doesn't actually exist and it has been almost twenty years. I personally don't know a single development job that would work in such a cut down environment.
Of interest is his third paragraph, the one that starts "in _every_ field ..." and it really makes me wonder if he had ever actually dealt with enterprise software at all.
I agree that ergonimics is important, especially in terms of hardware. For developers, hardware is screens and keyboards, and pointing devices. As for operating systems, window managers etc., I couldn't care less. I basically don't use the OS while developing. I launch one app and that's it.
I'd go so far as to say that if my IDE would run on only one OS, then my professional machine would simply run that OS. And I'd be fine with it. If I'm using XCode today but Visual Studio tomorrow, I'd be happy to switch. The IDE matters, the hardware matters, but the OS not so much.
My workstation is my IDE. Or as close to it as I can make it.
> As for operating systems, window managers etc., I couldn't care less
And we should not have to. So I personally go out of the way to rid my workstation of stuff that is not what I care about.
This is a point I have been making too: everyone has a "DE". Whether you integrate it yourself by tiling a text editor and a shell or two, or if emacs or Xcode does it for you doesn't matter.
What matters is that when you are in your development environment - it's free of distractions and promotes your workflow.
When I launch an IDE, the IDE is now my window manager. I never need to leave it. Just like your OS is your development environment, the equivalent is that my IDE is my "OS" for doing work. And by the analogy that you don't want unrelated crap in your OS - an IDE is often created only as a tool for professional development.
So that's why I don't care if my OS looks cluttered behind my IDE, or if it comes with 100 apps I don't need.
It's exactly as if your development OS was a VM running inside any other OS. When you are developing, you would not care what the host OS was.
I also use the hell out of bash for building and orchestration.
Even if I did it all from the IDE, I'd need a good mail client and a good calendaring app to work in a team. These differ from OS to OS. I love scroll through my IDE with my Magic Trackpad, boom, locked into macOS again.
I've looked into switching operating systems on my professional machine because I spend 95% of my time in IntelliJ, but even then the underlying OS matters more than I thought. Of course, YMMV.
Great line and great comment. I've seen people like you and it's always remarkable to watch. Some day when I have time I hope to spend acclamating to this type of environment. For now my best approximation is tmux/Vim.
I really like my development environment in Ubuntu. I like the power user stuff + desktop user friendliness in one place.
And I tried to like OSX, I even bought a MacBook Pro Retina, used it like a year or two but ended installing Linux on it a couple of weeks ago, heh.
I'm supposed to work on the code my boss is paying me to work on, not tinkering with some OSS project to get it just the way I like it. Basically, my OS needs to be able to launch an IDE, a shell and not bother me with irrelevant shit ('Windows just found an USB mouse...').
Setting up something complex definitely takes time and has its cons but that time is definitely finite, I am not saying that I magically got to my setup, it did not take me a year either. And once it is yours, it is yours. Moreover, when the environment is easily extensible like Emacs and StumpWM are it is easy to mold them to a new task that lands on your table.
This is one of the nice things about macOS, every update is just a small refinement of the previous years OS. Most of the time when you update to a new major release you have to go looking for things that changed. Sure there may be new features but many of them you only notice when you dive deeper into some of the functionality. The basic desktop is still the same.
It is pretty subjective though. And what you can create is pretty much irrelevant to what platform you are using, it more about your brain.
I had to do professional sw-dev work in windows and osx environments. Both are not primarily aimed at sw devs, but can easily be coerced to be almost as efficient an interface as any unix. I still prefer my fbsd with evilwm, but the alternatives are not this bad.
The kinds of programming I do:
1. Machine learning
2. Distributed infrastructure (systems programming type stuff--message queues, data pipeline services and such, for example)
3. Scientific computing
4. Game development
You know what "environment" I find suits me just fine? A terminal window with a combination of some muxer (e.g. tmux) and emacs, in the default WM/GUI environment that comes with whatever flavor of Linux I'm working with. I don't need a lot of extreme tailored environment to do my work and be efficient at it.
I also don't think I'd care one way or another whether a "user" could use my laptop or not. It wouldn't be a point of pride for me if they couldn't, or if they could. I simply don't care.
How up-to-date is Conkeror in terms of handling "things most modern websites use"?
In any case, thanks for posting this - it gave me some more things to look at.
Strange because this is exactly why I love OS X. Because it's empowering and gets out of the way.
For instance, it's the only OS where multi-touch gestures for desktop/window management works instantly and controls everything as I'm doing it. A common thing to do is to select some objects on one desktop, click and drag them with the trackpad, then swipe with 3 additional fingers to move to another desktop, before dropping. It just works.
The browser works like a tablet and I can zoom and pan and navigate back easily. The OS is smart enough to reposition all my windows to their previous location when I unplug and replug an external monitor, instead of giving me a bunch of cropped apps in the corner. Renaming or moving a file makes apps pay attention and save to the new location. Preferences apply just by changing them, labels and controls everywhere update to track underlying changes, every listing is live. I can instantly preview anything with a spacebar tap, without losing keyboard focus on the finder window I was working with. Even the little icon in the titlebar of a document window is interactive, letting me drag a file I have open to a new place without making me go find it again, or right click it to get a dropdown menu to all parent paths.
Plugging in devices and drives, managing audio inputs and outputs, managing network interfaces and VPNs, backing up to external devices, it's all right there and instantly accessible, without 3 layers of legacy control panels or a bunch of config files to go dive through.
All of these things preserve my flow state by letting me manipulate the objects and the state of my desktop without having to make a chore out of it, by acting exactly like the natural and traditional objects around me. When I turn on the light, I don't open the "light preferences", click a checkbox and hit "Ok", I don't go edit /etc/light.conf, I just switch on the light. Why "professionals" think it should be any other way keeps amazing me, but then, I recall a study a while back that said that when it takes a lot of small steps to perform a particular task, it seems faster, even if it actually isn't.
Where I started programming, every dev had a Linux machine.
I remember one gig, where I had to build a site with Mac that had these metal trackpads that give you instant RSI.
I thought, Macs, in a dev shop!? Did I enter the wrong door or something?
But then a few people around me started using MacBooks, especially in the start-up world it's considered good taste.
I never really considered developping on a mac until I had to do it for my first programming job.
The thing is that it felt better than programming on Windows (because you do have a neat terminal), but it still felt inferiour to programming on linux.
It felt like being less in control on a mac and I for one did not like the UI of the mac at all. I'm sure the latter is purely subjective and the former is maybe due to me not looking around enough to figure out how to do so on a mac.
Still happy to not have to develop on those machines anymore though.
No with Bash on Ubuntu on Windows, this could change though and Windows could become viable again.
Also, some of us didn't like where gnome went.
I never used this sleep stuff, so I probably didn't notice.
I used xfce most of the time
Linux would still be my favourite OS for development, and on a "work-only" desktop that's still what I would use. But I have one laptop, that I use for both development work and personal stuff.
OSX comes with a proper unix base, with almost all "Linux tools" installable from homebrew. It's not as good as apt-get, but good enough. At the same time, OSX handles hardware and multimedia out of the box:
* No more xorg.conf hacking. Can hotplug external monitors via HDMI and displayport, and rescale my screen resolution smoothly.
* When I turn on my bluetooth headphones, they connect automatically, and adjust volume to my previous settings.
* Power-saving and sleep modes work. I killed my previous Linux laptop by closing the lid, putting it in my padded backpack, and boiling the battery because it didn't go to sleep.
And probably countless other such "casual comfort" benefits that work out of the box, but would need a few hours of config file hacking on Linux for each. I'd rather pay $1000 in Apple tax than spend time on it.
Honestly I'm baffled that anyone doesn't use a laptop, except for people with extremely heavy computational workloads that can't be offloaded to a server cluster, ec2 instance or equivalent.
Saved lots of money, and I discovered Arch linux. Spent a couple of days and made a much better personalised OS environment than what OSX dictates to use. Plus, I learned lots in the process.
- better UI. Window management in i3 is much more usefull for me than macOS window management
- native Docker (partly solved for macOS now)
- control and security
- belief, that Apple goes the wrong direction
- HW choices
- SW I write is deployed on linux anyway
But not even offering the option of having a normal keyboard with function keys... that's just ignorance.
I disagree with that statement. You can argue that many developers like to use MacBooks, but from that to saying that it's standard there's a long way...
> and sells overpriced hardware
Apple has ALWAYS sold overpriced hardware
But people realised it now, so they write short blog posts about it now.
I always thought a good device was going to cost at least £1000.
Apple recently sells obsolete hardware overpriced (e.g. 2-3 years old minis or Mac Pros).
Aside from that, they din't historically sell "overpriced" hardware. What they did sell was only/mainly high end hardware (not in raw cpu/gpu performance, in the construction, feature set, etc).
Time and again, when websites or people tried to match item per item the respective Apple PC with an equivalent Wintel PC (of the same class, e.g. VAIO back in the day, Dell XPS, etc) AND match the various features, they always ended up in parity or very near parity. And with some features without match at all on the other side (e.g. no magsafe option, lesser trackpad quality, etc).
Even in stuff like tablets, anybody who's been there at the time, remembers that competitors to the iPad took more than a year to bring a device with matching specs AND a smaller price out. The responses from various vendors were up to 20% to 30% higher than the iPad asking price.
Overpriced, compared to what? To competitors, which can't even produce similar product? Overpriced in terms of market demand, while making big profit?
If you buy your PC components from Apple, that's your problem. Nobody complains that Bosch automotive industry components are expensive if you buy them from Tesla in the form of Model S.
Not to mention that Apple's price always include both hardware and software, because they are bundled, so you don't actually know the price of hardware, because with Mac, you also buy a licence for OS X, essentially.
Got a source saying that the i7 I buy from Intel is somehow inferior to the one that ships in an Apple product?
I can't find the source just now though I do remember reading about apple prebuying all perfect chips of certain classes therefore making then unavailable to the competition. Given their purchasing power I don't find this wholly inconceivable.
Okie dokie.
I did come across this article where Cook essentially says buying these components is a company secret.... http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/01/18/apple_commits_3_9_...
Each microprocessor is graded in the factory
It looks like this:
Memory controller went bad and can't handle ECC? Looks like an that E3-1??? vX just became an i7-X???.
Virtualization went bad? That i7-X??? just became an i5-X???
Bad 1/2 cores? Well that i5-X??? just became an i3-X???
There is additional binning but that just determines if the processor can have an unlocked multiplier or not.
No, a lot of Apple hardware was/is competitively priced when they launch, they just never lower the price so you have to be smart about the purchase. Macbook Pros compared to similar quality Thinkpads/Elite Books/Dell Latitude/Precision have never been really overpriced for what they offer, it's different for the latest generation though.
Around 2 years ago, I started developing for iOS/Android and had no choice in using a Mac desktop (Mini i7). At first I hated it, but then, everything just works. When it came time to upgrade my laptop, early last year, buying a Retina MBP was an easy decision.
As for upgrading it, I'll wait a generation, this round of upgrades was inhibited by Intel's lack of progress on Kaby Lake and Apple's fetish for changing connectors. By the time I upgrade (probably 2 years from now), USB-C/3.1G2/TB3 will be fairly ubiquitous. Docks will be available, good 5K monitors with USB-C to power the laptop.
The current crap about only getting 16GB and not being worth the money is just that. Don't buy one. Get a 2015 MBP if that floats your boat. It has effectively the same performance without the "limitation" of USB-C.
Have I dicked around with OSX? Yes, I run Karabiner, firefox, magicprefs etc. Reading these comments I found Alfred. But when I install these apps, they install, they work as advertised. Macports has everything I need to get a GNU like env, including latest versions of bash etc. It does it cleanly in /opt and doesn't screw around where Apple wants to lock things down (/usr etc).
My MBP sits on my desk closed attached to dual monitors that just work. When I take it on the road, it works when I plug it in to a projector at a meeting. It's a workhorse. I can muck around for fun on a linux VM or on AWS.
macOS gives me that good balance between Windows (for play) and Linux (for work).
Which is also why the latest elementaryOS posts on Medium are kind of cringy. One moment the author says how Apple users are disatisfied that Apple may be abandoning powerful desktops, next moment he emphasizes how you can install Linux on any laptop.. starting with your Macbook. LOL? As if replacing the OS on the same hardware is going to solve the disatisfaction of a power user? And installing a much more broken, inconsistent collection of constantly broken packages? WHich you need to updated CONSTANTLY. If you don't like Windows updates, man, Linux is even worse. Every friggin day there are updates, they are all somehow VERY important, and they are all potential bombs that will fuck up your config or break some apps you installed. Fuck, I'm running a LTS version and I still get updtes everyday, probably for completely insignificant fixes.
I think I may end up installing Linux again on a partition because my Ubuntu VM is too sluggish for front end dev (especially CSS animations/transitions) but I would never expect that to be a better solution that straight up OS X.
I think this is yet-another kind of bubble people submerge themselves in.
Many people don't care about conferences at all, or their employers don't care (and hence these people don't feel like spending hundreds of bucks from their own pockets to attend), some don't want to go on conferences and so on. For/to many developers they are just irrelevant. Obviously not everyone goes to coffee shops, either.
Your experience can be different, but without a global survey, there's no way to be sure.
The closest proxy we can probably find is what CS students are using - as they'll likely continue using that platform going forward. There aren't hard reasons to switch as there used to be -- VPN software tends to work well on all 3 platforms, and there's not nearly as much client-side native development as there used to be.
I do hope that Figma would release an Linux app to use system fonts and allow for upload of slack files that use weird fonts for example.
Apart from that (and iOS development), Linux is a perfect dev environment (ofc we still need a few more apps like a good gui git client - I use Fork on mac and I love it), but Gitkranen can be a situable alternative till a good client comes along.
Seriously though, if someone is willing to offer XCode over the web, or even a cheap dedicated vm (most VMs i've seen are insanely expensive for what they provide), that'd be great
Figma - https://www.figma.com Fork - https://git-fork.com/
Even Windows today offers a pretty good experience for developers, and it's remarkable that Microsoft is actually working hard to make Windows a good alternative to MacOS and Linux.
I didn't switch - I have - and use - both Linux (a Dell laptop, an Acer "netbook", a Lenovo "server") and macOS (an rMBP, a Mini) and, quite frankly, there is no real difference. The rMBP is an awesome laptop - light, fast, great screen, but the Dell feels faster and the Acer is lighter (and much, much cheaper). The trackpad on the Acer and Dell annoy me. I don't trust HFS (been bitten by silent corruption more than once)
Like I said before, people worry way too much about the program they use to run their terminals and text editors. If it has a Unix-like environment, even Windows (I prefer Cygwin) works.
I see no evidence that dev's are switching to Linux for their dev machine.
And this recent peak in anti-apple sentiment stinks to me of the same mentality that led to Britain leaving the EU and Trump becoming president. It goes along the lines of...
"This thing isn't perfect by the definition of perfect that matters to me. So I declare it to be fundamentally and irrevocably broken. It should be thrown away and everyone should do this other ill thought through thing that I like"
There's a case to be made for Linux, but if your case is always presented with an "Apple sucks" pre-amble, then I think you're really just a fanboy.
[edit] To be fair, op/article mention no statistics to support the assertion that "developers are switching from Mac OS X to Linux", so on that basis I think it's fair to say the piece is pretty anecdotal or fluffy. But there are plenty of reasons why people switch from OS X to Linux (see other comments, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13317879 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13317234 ).
Oh, you don't like React? Damn Brexiteer!
Future is here.
This is classic..
I don't really think that is a good analogy... If I move to linux, as long as I have the tools available, I just affect myself. The move to Brexit has wider reaching effects than just personal ones.
That being said, linux is becoming more and more accepted in the mainstream. MICROSOFT supports .NET Core on linux. Pretty much every language/IDE/tooling kit is supported on linux first. Most devs are probably using Macs like linux boxes anyway, with Homebrew and Macports.
I think previously the barrier to entry/change was higher going from Osx to linux. That barrier is pretty much gone. linux installations, especially on current/slightly older mac hardware, is plug and play. People seem to be upset about the moves that Apple is making, and for those people (admittedly this may be a vocal minority), it's easier than ever to switch. So they are.
-Increasing annoyance by subtle changes to various native mac apps.
-Migration of OSX towards more of a Windows, hiding details from the user.
-Wanting a machine with NVidia GTX 1070 to explore 3D and ML.
-Apple's migration towards a fully soldered machine.
-Removal of ports and DVD drive.
-The Apple premium is too out of whack.
Essentially:
-i7 CPU
-NVidia GTX 1070 GPU
-16B RAM (now 32GB, with $100 of RAM)
-1TB HD
-256GB SSD
-1920x1080 display
-CD/DVD burner
-11 ports for stuff
The downsides:
- its a beast (almost 10 pounds, and 18" - not sure it will fit under an airline seat, needed to buy a larger backpack).
- its a "gamer" laptop... with all the tacky red lights and styling deemed necessary by marketing.
- the display isn't as nice, but more than sufficient for my needs
Ideally I'd like to just by a laptop with a preinstalled and supported hypervisor where I could trivially install any OS image I'd like (preferably in a way that would let me seamlessly run in either a cloud (AWS) or my local device). If I can slog though it, my ultimate plan is to get things running on here with a minimal arch linux as the hypervisor. Not looking forward to dealing with all the driver pain.
Your processor is also quicker / more power efficient.
16 GB DDR4 will impact the battery life negatively, while 1920x1080 display will impact it positively. Both have their price.
The weight of your laptop is more than 2 times the weight of the 15" MBP 2015, approx 1,5 times the weight of a 15" MBP 2010, and roughly 2,5 times the weight of a 15" MBP 2016 (there is no 17" MBP anymore.)
DVD drive or burner I won't miss. I would've removed it from my old MBP 2010, but I am afraid it will cause instability. Its also a bit tricky to remove.
1 TB HDD is also IMO pointless. I just use networking if I need to access data. WiFi is quick enough.
A major advantage of your beast is the graphics card. If I'd find that important (I don't) I'd consider a eGPU.
Regarding bad battery life, if a device uses USB-C I can see power banks being useful in that regard.
Good luck, hope to read from you how it works out for you.
I run Arch nowadays and that is certainly not as turn-key as Ubuntu, but there's just too much "magic" in Ubuntu and I was tired of it. But Apple folks should like that sort of thing...
Are these perhaps apple events?
But seriously, that numbers seems hugely exagerated, at least from the events I have been at. He is probably talking about a specific field for these talks, but this is quite a silly statement imo.
The events hosted by my former university have a _few_ macs, but mostly I see people running Linux or Windows.
And then there are the microsoft-oriented events, but it is safe to say these do not count here :-)
Not saying that we should not demand more and better from Apple but I think many of the complaints are not very warranted.
For example, I don't know why people are complaining that MacOS has "suffered" compared to iOS. In my opinion, the latest Sierra version is way better than Lion for example.
Now that Apple is catching up, unless Asus/others release a good ultrabook by the end of this year my next computer might just be a Mac. The future is going to be made of USB Type-C so I want my next computer to bet heavy on those, including charging.
I think the statement really is "development in a unix/linux style on windows is really painful". If you like doing development with text editors and shells and have any tools that are command-line only then yes - it sucks on windows.
Windows development in an IDE is usually just fine, not to mention that it's often exactly the same as running the same IDE on linux.
None of these things were problems with OSX.
Are things different in the Windows world?
I like the polished look of macOS, and its Unix roots which make it fairly easy to follow instructions for Linux on macOS.
Because EVERYONE used Windows. That changed mid-00s (Ubuntu and x86 Macs).
Personally Firefox stoked a lot of interest in FOSS for me, and the mature version (2.0 was a big deal) came out around then too.
- it was Unix (I'm a vi/command line guy) and you could run all the backend software (Apache, Oracle, WebLogic/JBoss and other Java stuff such as Ecplise)
- yet you also could use commercial desktop apps (Adobe, MS Office, other graphics apps, the occasional game)
- great out of the box experience with optimal hardware support and no time consuming tinkering required; practical innovations like Expose, Spotlight, later also TimeMachine
Basically "Linux with QA and taste". And because using MacOS put a smile on your face.
Now Mac OS and Apple's latest computers only serve to demonstrate a lack of vision for the platform. Apple seems focused to integrate/unify iOS and MacOS, which might make sense in a beancounter way of thinking (eg. seeing MacOS as a cost center), but sends out the message that Apple is willing to loose "Pro" users as collateral damage.
I certainly hate to loose the ability to buy Apple equipment for my work, but without Apple taking really bold measures, Apple is a lost cause in the Pro market as it stands.
Price itself isn't so much an issue as is the feeling that you're being ripped off for rigs that lack any "pro" features, yet are as expensive or even more expensive than the "pro" stuff Apple used to make.
I've been using Ubuntu up until 10.10 (if I'm not mistaken) and then Arch (for about 4 years). In the last two years I've gone from Android+Linux to full Apple.
The reasons were:
1) At the time there was no notebook that could compare with MBPr (late 2013 in my case). Yes, you could have find some with the same hardware and even same size\weight, but I haven't hold a single one of them that wouldn't creak. Macbooks are build to be with you all them time. Other companies build them to be compact alternative to your desktop. From what I've seen - nothing really changed since then.
2) Free\opensouce\etc shit. Don't get me wrong - free is good, opensource is awesome, freedom is what all people need. But not the price it comes to your sometimes. Sometime free can be more expensive, opensource can be more binding. One of the reasons to live linux was the number of forks of all the libs and utils in the system. Every now and then some team splits or somebody decides his new chrome and shiny fork is something people need and voila! you have a zoo of this shit. Because the very next day some projects will split because they can't come to agreement about what lib to be using now.
This is not a bliss, this is madness. When it comes to my user experience - I don't care what lib does mpv uses and can use, or... whatever. I only care if it does the job as well as before and I don't what all of the said forks in my system, this is a mess.
3) As soon as I got my MBPr I realised I want to try the so called BIG A ECOSYSTEM and bought an iPhone 6 on my birthday (my bd was on the same day the phone came to my country).
I was amazed by the level of comfort. Everything works out of the box, the god damn design is always consistent[1], no need to dive into python (or something else) to seamlessly use your phone with your computer. Yes, this comes at a price - without jailbreaking you are tied to your apps, services etc. You can't just upload your music to your phone via usb and some other things, but there are solutions. ONE TIME SOLUTIONS, LINUX!, not one week prior the next update ones.
It is what you make of it. If you pick brand new shiny things from unproven teams at war with their sourcecode's origin community, you're going to see some churn. You moved from the relative stability of Ubuntu to the constant churn of Arch, which suggests you've missed the point of cadence distributions. Newer is often not automagically better.
We've been using and developing with and deploying on Ubuntu for years now. It's not the zoo you describe — though you are free to make it one with poor choices.
No, that's not what I made of it, but them
I went from Ubuntu to Arch becase they desided they are now the coolers kids in the town and started to introduce shit like Unity and other things. Be the time 10.10 came out - I had to rebuild 1/3 of the system to make it as nice (in my opinion) as it should be and as it was up until they decided to fuck it up (again - just my opinion).
Anyway - Arch was the best thing I could find among all other distros. Modular approach, KISS, very easy to install and maintain.
The problem (both with Ubuntu and Arch, mind you) comes not with what you described as "new shiny things from unproven teams" or "Newer is often not automagically better.".
Here is an example for you. At some point Jim was using program A for audio editing and program B for video editing. A used some libA library and B uses libraries libA and libB (among many others). At some point something happened inside the team of libA and now we have libAa and libAb. They have some differences (obviously). Now the teams of A and B have to decided what library to use. Fighting among them leads to new arguments about functionality and other this and two new forks appear.
So now we have programs Aa, Ab, Ba and Bb. Now Jim, as a use of their previous versions had to chose what to use from this moment onwards and sometimes, it happens so that he needs all the functionality that B had, but not it is torn between Ba and Bb. So by the end of the day he has two forks of B installed, one fork of A, two libraries that do the same thing and he is praying nothings starts to get in conflict with the others.
And this happens all the time.
>We've been using and developing with and deploying on Ubuntu for years now.
This makes it sound like you are talking about something that works as a server for services or software you deploy. I'm talking about using linux at home as working\media machine, not as a server. The latter has no such problems (not to this extent at least)
I use Linux everywhere. I'm a user. A developer. An Ubuntu member. An advocate. I help people for free (Oli on Ask Ubuntu and #Ubuntu) and I also professionally deploy desktops and servers and kiosks and single-purpose boxes, and write software at all levels (kernel to user interface).
I sympathise with desktop nomads but all desktop environments (closed and open) are opinionated. You didn't like Ubuntu's. Neither did I; I moved to Kubuntu. Literally a single meta-package swap, no rebuilding necessary.
I find it curious that you're allowed an opinion about desktops but the developers who write your software aren't about the software they use.
Moreover, in a maintained ecosystem (eg Ubuntu) end users don't really have to worry about build deps. Yeah the confusion between (eg) libav and ffmpeg can really draw on but mostly things just work. apt install this and that and it doesn't matter if that's Aa or Ab. As long as A installs the user is happy. It's the maintainer's problem to keep that going.
Even on Arch —where you are exposed to more of this— the community is usually pretty decent at fixing builds.
Now as a developer (and maintainer) I get pissed off when my libraries change their deps but that really has nothing to do with my operating system, or even the concept of open source. It is what it is and it's built into my workflow.
>I find it curious that you're allowed an opinion about desktops but the developers who write your software aren't about the software they use.
Well, first of all, I am a developer, just as they are and by any sane logic - they are allowed to have an opinion as much as I am.
What you are describing (from my point of view at least) - is something similar to Garbage Collector. Yeah, garbage is not okay, but we have GC to deal with it. My point is - I don't like garbage in my room at all. Even with GC doing it's job - sometimes 'things' do happen.
And yes - you are right about the community part. This is one of the best things about linux, actually. Chances are as high as they can be that problem will be reported, documented (in some way) and fixed rather quickly. You can't compare Arch's forum (which did me more help even while I was pretty new to Ubuntu, ironically) to Apple's forums and most of the 'have you tried to reset your Mac's SMC & PRAM?" posts on the web.
>to do with my operating system, or even the concept of open source
But it's still part of it, face it. The fact that it is built into your workflow does not change this fact.
I'm not advocating for moving from open to proprietary, I'm just saying, that some people would rather prefer a system, that offers closed code, that just works. Apple did this and you still have the same opportunity to build and used open source on their system. I had apt-get and pacman, now I have brew. But I don't have to worry about some configs in my system I'd rather not know about at all.
Again, I don't see why that only applies to open source. I've implemented both open source and proprietary software that have changed how they work after upgrades. Both have also provided long-term support on older versions to work the old way.
When I say I build this into my workflow, the basis for this is understanding how the software I depend on is maintained. Things like Ubuntu, Django, Nginx, Postgres all have long and predictable lives if you opt into that. I can deploy something on 16.04 today an still deploy it on 16.04 in 2021. The infrastructure will have received security updates, but the APIs remain static. My software will continue to work as it always did.
That's also how you'd aim to do it with proprietary software but you can still make bad decisions. If you insist on staying on the very latest everything (instead of opting for long term support versions) you will have to test and upgrade your application a lot more frequently.
Just to round on Apple here, they're not perfect at this either. They make no commitment to how long their software will be supported and on average versions of OS X are supported around ⅔ the time Ubuntu LTS versions are. Ubuntu (or RHEL) are far better bases if you require a predictable and long-lasting product.
And I have not yet since anything that wowwed me. Linux for me "just works" and has done so for a decade. Am I missing something? Is there are a MacOS secret tweak utility that would get rid of these annoyances? asepsis stopped working on Sierra.
Logic Pro X (no Ardour doesn't cut it, sorry. I even subscribed for a while).
Xcode (for iPhone/iPad development. KDevelop and Geany or Nemiver, CodeBlocks etc. isn't going to cut it, sorry).
Ability to AirPlay to my AppleTV 3rd gen. Does anyone know anything I can easily broadcast to from a video inside a web page? On Safari or Quicktime I just have to click the airplay icon.
For reference, I write C++ for my dayjob and for fun (who doesn't??)
Chromecast is really cheap and works like a charm. I can mirror my desktop or web browser tabs.
Chromecast would fit your needs, maybe?
For iPhone development I'm sure you need a mac, but if you want an IDE, look no further than IDEA. It's much better than Xcode in general, and does have a C++ plugin. (Of course.)
> Ability to AirPlay to my AppleTV 3rd gen. Does anyone know anything I can easily broadcast to from a video inside a web page? On Safari or Quicktime I just have to click the airplay icon.
Chromecast.
I'm wondering, can one use a VM?
However, there's no way to do it legally. It violates the Apple EULA. If you ever get in trouble and take it to court, Apple will probably win: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psystar_Corporation
You can 'cast' you whole desktop of a specific chrome tab. Youtube videos and many streaming sites can cast directly to your TV.
I currently use the VideoStream[0] extension to play local videos on my TV, but soon VLC should be able to do this. (It supposedly works in the beta releases, but it doesn't for me YMMV)
Plex can cast directly to your TV.
[0] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/videostream-for-go...
[0] - http://airflowapp.com/
And I say this having used Linux from 2.0.n (RedHat 5.2 - no, not RHEL, proper RedHat when KDE1 and GNOME1 were new and LinuxConf was still a tool that existed) branch for years and years until ~4 years ago when I got tired of reinstalling Fedora every other release. I'm not here just to bash Linux for fun - I was stating the issue.
MacBook Pro with Ubuntu Server in VirtualBox.
All git repositories, runtime env. is linux.
Editing is done with my Editor of choice over SSHFS, editing linux files directly.
This is the very best setup I have had for decades (yep, I am that old...).
No current Linux distro can beat Apple when it comes to stability and peripherals support. Yet, my actual work is still runs on a native Linux as I like.
I already run a Ubuntu VM full-time for development. Only using VirtualBox for Microsoft's IE VMs would be great. I suppose I could also run Illustrator in Windows, but 2 out of 3 of the designers I work with regularly have embraced Sketch, so I might be out of luck with that plan anyway.
With the new MBP 15 I can drive...
2x 5k 27" screen + the internal one.
No other notebook can do this. Most struggle already with 2x 4K monitors.
Along with absence of tiling window manager these will be my only complaints when using Mac as development environment.
This article makes the assertion with pure zero facts to back it up.
So far: KDE is incredibly nice. I'm pretty blown away. Aesthetically I actually like it more than Aqua. The file manager is nice, the terminal is fine, there is a spotlight style search, virtual desktops, pretty much everything I would miss moving from OSX.
I miss 1Password the most. Right now I'm using a CLI client (passcards) to access my 1Password vault. I haven't setup notes yet but it seems like there are decent Notational Velocity alternatives. Relearning muscle memory to use CTRL instead of CMD is painful. I'm wasting a lot of time tweaking keyboard shortcuts.