Comment by yusyusyus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yusyusyus | Hacker News Reader

For my work, macs have never been really useful to develop on without additions. The whole "I can run virtualbox" and having a good out-of-the-box unixy setup is what has kept me coming back. Linux/others are not a realistic option as a daily driver for what I do.

No x86, no virtualbox. No virtualbox and I'd rather just get (with much sighing, complaining, and general ill will) a windows laptop. I mean, the terminal is becoming slightly more useable in windows, right? And sometimes you just need to run a windows VM, so you need x86 virtualization.

There are downstream effects to losing the "nerd" base and I suspect this move is a bad idea, but apple has a track record of pulling rabbits out of hats and knowing what really matters. Maybe this customer segment just doesn't matter.

The thing I like about macOS over Windows when it comes to the terminal is that it's a native part of macOS and I don't have to monkey around with as many things. On my Macs, things aren't that much different compared to when I'm working on my Ubuntu server.

I don't feel the same using WSL. It's not a seamless experience. Also, I've never found a terminal emulator I enjoy using on Windows. Maybe it's still way too early, but even the new Windows Terminal left me less than impressed.

what do you find lacking in the new Terminal?

There seems to be a lot of people just assuming that ARM macs won’t be able to run x86 virtual machines. It’s a reasonable assumption, but since they’re designing the chips themselves, and it’s highly likely that they’ll do a Rosetta-like translation system to maintain backward compatibility, it seems almost inevitable that they’ll have some built in hardware for x86 virtualization. Maybe not as fast as native x86, but might not be far from it. The only problem is it might take quite a while for software like Virtualbox to be compatible with it, if Apple even makes the instructions or APIs publicly available

Windows has an ARM version.

Yep, but windows apps are typically distributed as binaries, so the OS doesn't help when you need OS+architecture to make things run and folks build for x86.

It does come with a slow-ish emulator.

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