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Comment by jordanbeiber | Hacker News Reader

In my experience: it’s ”unix” on a laptop that just works.

Easy access to up-to-date tooling through brew: zsh, docker, bash, vim et al.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve been a Linux only user since the 90’s and for many years used the dell xps developer edition.

But, the mac touchpad (I know, I’m doing it wrong) and screen coupled with superior battery time as well as solid sleep/wakeup makes for a great experience.

The new air, without the ridiculous touchbar and updated keyboard is actually pretty great.

One nerds ¢2.

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Yes Linux does indeed just work on new Dell laptops now. I can personally testify that wasn't always the case. In years gone by it was a world of pain for the 1st 6 months while open source developed drivers for hardware they hadn't seen until the laptop was released.

That all changed when Dell started selling versions of their laptops with Linux pre-installed. And it didn't change a little bit either, in many cases it was a complete reversal. Drivers got released on Linux _before_ Windows - in particular Intel video drivers were repeatedly released on Linux before Windows in my case.

I presume that's developers are moving to Linux now. That was driven home to me just now when reading the Bling Fire post here, learning Bling Fire is an internal library used by MS's Bing search engine - then noticing all the instructions had a very nix'y feel, and the benchmark environment was Ubuntu.

What is "unixy" about brew or docker?

Well, it’s a different paragraph and sentence isn’t it? :)

Whether the tools are “unixy” is of course an interesting discussion. :p

I guess my line of thought was: kind of “unix” -> kind of “posix” -> kind of compatible with a lot of your familiar tooling.

All this equals pretty good platform for many nerds.

I could have made myself more clear.

I don't know much about brew (or MacOS at all) but docker is native linux technology. Docker for Mac runs linux in a VM in the background. The MacOS docker experience is similar to running anything in a VM: slower, memory limits, poor IOPS.

True, but the overhead is not that bad due to HW virtualization support.

Macos can use the xhyve hypervisor (bhyve port) which again points to “unixy” roots — it runs freebsd for example.

Through the years I spent quite some time hacking about to get bsd running on other hypervisors, and for the longest of time it was just a hassle with abysmal performance (vmware esx, xen/xenserver).

Docker on osx is by the way completely seamless from a UX perspective.

As a mobile/laptop dev experience I still think the new air is great. ;)

macOS is a BSD system. I think that was the point

I wish...

macOS is its own thing, where some functionality is provided by some very old versions of BSD tools. But using it feels pretty different from using a modern BSD variant.

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