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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty keen on buying one of the last Intel MBPs late this year or next year. First-generation Apple products are always buggier than the subsequent versions, so even as a consumer I'd want to wait for second gen. More importantly, as a developer, I'm still deploying everything to Linux on Intel, so I value the ability to virtualize Linux without emulation.

That said, I'm excited about the potential for ARM over time with Apple's performance trajectory, and if Apple holds onto developer mindshare and doesn't totally nerf Mac OS in the name of iOS parity, then there could be a strong halo effect pushing ARM servers and cloud hosting forward. I just don't want to be on that bleeding edge of architecture transition pain.

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> More importantly, as a developer, I'm still deploying everything to Linux on Intel, so I value the ability to virtualize Linux without emulation.

Then why not just develop on Linux?

I was strongly considering it, given the touchbar and keyboard nonsense, but then they at least brought back the escape key and inverted arrows which was enough to keep me onboard.

Native docker would be a strong draw, but the thing that has stopped me so far is that I have refined workflows and a handful of killer apps (eg. OmniFocus) that I don't want to retool.

Some of us are not masochists at heart, and value the ability to switch between a GUI for my desktop things and a virtualized Linux image for development/testing.

Of course you should use whatever works best for you, but I disagree with your characterization of Linux users as masochists at heart.

I’m very much a person who values technology that “just works”. While my latest Ubuntu installation admittedly wasn’t quite as smooth as running macOS on Apple hardware, the gap has narrowed considerably. Especially for anyone who already possesses a fair amount of Linux experience from working with servers for work, and who sticks with known-compatible hardware, running a Linux desktop can be a delight.

Linux on a desktop can be fine, depending on what you want out of that desktop experience. But Linux on a laptop still tends to be Sisyphean: by the time you get all the hardware features working correctly and with proper power management and with all the firmware bugs worked around, at least one of the hardware or the distro will be years out of date. The only way to be satisfied is to decide you didn't need that feature anyways, or didn't need that last hour of battery life.

Out of curiosity, does this still hold true if you buy one of the System76 / Dell / Lenovo laptops with Linux pre-installed? I’m currently using a desktop, so don’t have any recent experience with this, but my assumption is the experience has also improved quite a bit on these OEM Linux laptops.

It's better but not perfect. If you tried Linux on commodity laptops a decade ago, you'd frequently run into awful hardware issues. There's less of that now with the OEM laptops (with some exceptions; looking at you, Killer wlan chipsets!).

UI jank is also reduced but not eliminated. Even Pop!/DE Ubuntu have a fair number of rough edges - not so much that you're constantly tearing your hair out, but there's definite room for improvement. Personally, I live with it because I also think Windows and OSX have regressed in usability and stability, but I'd be a liar if I didn't mention all the time spent yelling at things like DPI scaling w/ hardware dock-attached monitors.

e: also, expect to do some manual power tuning if you want anything close to battery life parity.

I never had any problems with my Librem 15.

When it works though, it is wonderful. I still have my G3 iBook that ran Debian Woody perfectly.

This is not true.

Indeed I'm not a masochist. That's why I avoid staring at a screen with poor LED backlight, using a crappy keyboard or a kitsch GUI, all of this brought to you by Apple[tm].

I use my Macs basically for browsing, as a thin client for Windows AWS instances via RDP, and also Linux development via VS Code Remote Development (ssh) for AWS Linux instances.

I find the overall UX quite good (Microsoft RD + Microsoft VS Code) and the fact that I do not have relevant data on the Macs allows me to hop from office to home, and second homes without having to carry a laptop.

>Then why not just develop on Linux?

I wasn't the one that downvoted you but to give a typical reason why some programmers don't run Linux on the laptop/desktop even though they deploy to Linux: they need to run critical software that only runs on Windows or macOS. (My previous comments with examples of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20312066, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20312336)

I also write software for Linux but it's backend processing utilities deployed to Linux servers and not client GUI software with GTK/Qt meant for Ubuntu desktops. In that situation, it's more reliable and less hassle for me to run macOS or Windows as the 1st-class desktop and then run Linux & gcc in a vm .... rather than the reverse of running Ubuntu desktop and trying to run Windows in Wine/vm and then finding out something is incompatible.

I completely agree with this sentiment. I remember one I was a TA for an introductory graduate medical informatics class, and a couple of the students insisted on trying to make a "PowerPoint" in LibreOffice (presumably because he has Linux installed on his laptop). I specifically told them that I would be grading a non-insignificant on their communication and presentation abilities. But they kept on insisting on using LibreOffice. The content of what they were presenting was so utterly distracted by the poor formatting, I had to specifically mention it in my grading. Frankly, I have never seen an aesthetically pleasing presentation in LibreOffice, and it get into so many conflicts/broken formatting when trying to migrate to PowerPoint.

The reality is that if you're going to be interfacing with non-technical people (managers, customers, exec level), they all expect a certain amount of polish that comes from presentations. I'm willing to dunk on MBA types that drop buzzwords all day, but sometime you need to be flexible with regard for what tools you use for your job.

Uh, LibreOffice and PowerPoint are just tools

You can easily create crappy presentations in PowerPoint

You were quite unreasonable in my opinion, and failed to communicate why they would need to use PPT

I’m saying this as a person with PowerPoint as the second most important tool at my workplace, after Excel

They did mention why:

>poor formatting...many conflicts/broken formatting

Yes you can create crappy presentations in Powerpoint but when you open those crappy presentations they still look exactly how they did when it was created. That's not always the case with LibreOffice when one of their files is opened in Microsoft Office.

When I was in university I had instructors who demanded documents be created in MS Office (which I did not own) and I did those assignments in the library where MS Office is installed on every machine.

Basic documents work just fine between LibreOffice and MS Office but the more advanced you get the worse the compatibility is. In your view, how much responsibility does the author have for broken formatting versus the reader? Basically, if I (as a student) submit a document with broken formatting, how do you as an instructor make the determination that it's because of a software error instead of a lazy student? And after you make that determination, how much time do you as an instructor put into fixing the student's broken formatting versus rejecting the document and moving on?

Things have certainly also changed with the move to subscription models, like O365. Students can now reliably produce MS Office compatible documents in web browsers on any internet-connected computer or mobile device.

This is a big shift from just a few years ago where significantly fewer students had the hard drive space, internet, and know-how to download and manage multiple licensed versions or bitnesses of MS Office products. Since professors might require older versions of software that are incompatible with other courses at the school (or simply not be aware of the newer version available to them), there's not much students can do except hope the professor will listen to reason or not grade too harshly on something they might be getting entirely wrong.

Poor professoring (or TAing) is a good way to get a chair or dean involved, so it's rare to have things escalate too far, but it's still a big source of stress for students who might hold certain parts of the system in higher esteem than they rightfully deserve.

That's funny, because we have an organizational policy not to disseminate any materials in ppt/pptx because, as you point out, presentation matters, and you absolutely cannot rely on consistency of appearance with PowerPoint.

The heart of it is that PowerPoint is a product, not a standard.

Because we can't assume everyone is a Microsoft house, we have to support presentations produced in open standard formats and proprietary ones alike. This is why we invest so heavily into our AV and conference spaces - we don't want to make fools of ourselves and our guests by neglecting simple and costless accommodations.

Could they turn in a PDF, exported from LibreOffice? Or were animation effects a requirement?

I am running Linux in a VM on the Mac, as I do need software, which is not available on Linux. But with the Linux VM running full-screen, I miss nothing from running Linux natively, but I can switch in an instant to the Mac desktop with all its niceties. Also, hardware support is no problem, as it is handled by the host system.

In my case, because none of the auditing software required by work will run under Linux. I got away with it for a few years because I started before we had an actual IT department, but eventually they caught up with me and I had to swap my Linux machine for a MacBook, I could have had Windows, and possibly would have done if it were today.

The year of "Linux on the Desktop" may actually be coming if enough developers want to keep Intel and apple finally drops support for x86 with their software updates (and they absolutely will at some point). Dual-booting between Linux for dev and Windows for video gaming could be a compelling use case for a lot of developers. I doubt Apple ARM systems will see much in the way of video gaming. I absolutely would go for Intel/Linux before I follow Apple down the ARM road just because they want to make more money and have more lock-in.

I work in games so the answer for me is Unity editor support on Linux is poor so I can't, although I'd like to. Have most distros gotten solid high-dpi support yet?

I can't believe Apple's the company making the strongest case for 2020 being the year of desktop Linux, right now.

anyone who develops to target linux servers should certainly be running linux on their laptop ... occasionally I fire up a osx laptop just to see how it compares to linux and after years of developing on a linux laptop the differences are stark ... I encourage any doubters to install linux on a laptop and see for themselves

Same here, I have a late 2014 27" which I can probably get about £1k for on eBay which is 1/3 of the cost of a new one of the spec I'm after. I want something I can run Linux on under Virtualbox and boot camp into Windows for gaming. A few days ago some results showed up on Geekbench for an unknown Mac running the latest gen i9 Intel cpu and delivery times for 27" machine just went to September, so we can expect a refresh soon.

For a pure Mac experience I'm sure the new ARM machines will be absolutely fine. My first Mac was a first generation intel machine and it was fantastic, so they're perfectly capable of nailing a transition like this. I'm just in a small minority with some specific reasons to prefer an Intel cpu. Long term it doesn't concern me either, there's no way I can predict what my needs will be in another 6 or 8 years when my new box starts getting long in the tooth. I'll worry about it then.

How do you virtualize Linux on an Intel Mac without it being terrible? Docker has been essentially broken for years. I’m actually looking forward to the ARM Macs because Apple mentioned they’re cooperating with Docker which I suspect could mean Docker will actually be more usable for virtualizing x86 Linux than it is now.

Parallels?

I've had good luck with VMware Fusion.

WMware is the only kext that I've seen to cause kernel panic on a Mac.

VirtualBox is free.

With important caveats.

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ#:~:text=The%20....

I'm not sure I understand that comment. Docker isn't virtualization at least as the term is normally used (of a full OS running in a virtual machine). It's containerization and, to the degree it's terrible (I haven't used it much), it may be related to the fact that MacOS is based on BSD and not Linux.

Big Sur apparently has native Mac virtualization for, initially, x86 although I'm unclear what the underlying tech and a query or two at the time of the original announcement didn't yield any results. So that may improve Linux virtualization.

As for ARM, virtualization is not emulation. There's going to be Rosetta 2. But my understanding is that you shouldn't expect x86 Linux to run on Mac ARM using virtualization, Docker, or anything else. (Apple demoed an ARM build of Linux running in a VM on ARM at WWDC.)

On a Mac, Docker runs a Linux VM and the containers are run inside this VM.

On an ARM-based Mac, I would expect an Linux-on-ARM VM and then ARM-based containers, images for which might take a while to appear.

OK. I get that. (Docker can also run natively on MacOS today which is what I assumed was being discussed. Docker presumably runs just as well in a Linux VM as Linux native other than any VM performance issues today and the parent was complaining about Docker on a Mac.)

But, yes, Docker can also run in a Linux on x86 VM on, well pretty much anything today, and will presumably at some point be able to run in a Linux on ARM VM in the future.

> Docker can also run natively on MacOS today which is what I assumed was being discussed.

It is. The "native" Docker.app is an Hypervisor.framework virtual machine and an 8 GB Docker.raw image in your homedir. The client utilities are native, and communicate with a docker service running inside the VM. It definitely doesn't run containers under Darwin kernel.

Ah. Thanks. I installed it and used it a few years ago but haven't for ages and obviously forgot the details.

My understanding is that docker on the mac uses some sort of vm to run the containers. Docker Toolbox use VirtualBox and Docker Desktop uses HyperKit.

https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/docker-toolbox/

I use VMWare Fusion for my day to day work and my experiences couldn't be better. Running it fullscreen is like running Linux on your machine, with the advantages of virtualisation, e.g. being able to suspend your VM.

I accidentally went full screen on an Ubuntu 20.04 VM running on a Nuc that I opened from Fusion. I only installed it to cobble together some instructions for usage for someone who needed help. Full screen from Fusion makes it really nice. There is a tiny lag when using the trackpad and typing has a has a very very slight delay, but I was looking for flaws. It's really compelling. I can only imagine that having it in Fusion but on my machine would make it even better. I will be upping the resources it gets and trying again, as it's really nice.

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