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Comment by rauhl | Hacker News Reader

> I have a MBP, as do all of my engineers. Within a few years all of these machines will age out and be replaced with m1 powered machines. At that point the idea of developing on ARM and deploying on x86 will be unpleasant

Is it not at least somewhat possible that at least some of those Apple laptops will age out and be replaced with GNU/Linux laptops? Agreed that developing on ARM and deploying on x86 is unpleasant, but so too is developing on macOS and deploying on Linux. Apple’s GNU userland is pretty ancient, and while the BSD parts are at least updated, they are also very austere. Given that friction is already there, is it likelier that folks will try to alleviate it with macOS in the cloud or GNU/Linux locally?

Mac OS X was a godsend in 2001: it put a great Unix underneath a fine UI atop good hardware. It dragged an awful lot of folks three-quarters of the way to a free system. But frankly I believe Apple have lost ground UI-wise over the intervening decades, while free alternatives have gained it (they are still not at parity, granted). Meanwhile, the negatives of using a proprietary OS are worse, not better.

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> Is it not at least somewhat possible that at least some of those Apple laptops will age out and be replaced with GNU/Linux laptops?

Has Linux desktop share been increasing lately? I'm not sure why a newer Mac with better CPU options is going to result in increasing Linux share. If anything, it's likely to be neutral or favor the Mac with it's newer/ faster CPU.

> But frankly I believe Apple have lost ground UI-wise over the intervening decades, while free alternatives have gained it (they are still not at parity, granted).

Maybe? I'm not as sold on Linux gaining a ton of ground here. I'm also not sold on the idea that the Mac as a whole is worse off interface wise than it was 10 years ago. While there are some issues, there are also places where it's significantly improved as well. Particularly if you have an iPhone and use Apple's other services.

> Has Linux desktop share been increasing lately?

At least I feel I see a lot more Linux now, not just in the company I work for but also elsewhere.

The speed advantage over Windows is so huge that it is painful to go back once you've seen it.

MS Office isn't seen as a requirement anymore, nobody think it is funny if you use GSuite and besides, last time I used an office file for work is months ago: everything exist inæ Slack, Teams, Confluence or Jira and these are about equally bad on all platforms.

The same is true (except the awful part) for C# development: it is probably even better on Linux.

People could switch to Mac and I guess many will. For others, like me Mac just doesn't work and for us Linux is an almost obvious choice.

> At least I feel I see a lot more Linux now, not just in the company I work for but also elsewhere.

I see it far more now than I did ~5-10 years ago when it was my daily driver. I'm just not sure if it's gotten a baseline support and flatlined or if it's growing consistently now.

Fully agree with almost all of your points, and if MacOS did go off the deep end in terms of functionality, I'd be back on Linux. It's why I'm a big fan of what Marcan is doing and follow it closely.

If Linux support was as good now as it was when I switched, I'd likely have never switched to the Mac.

But now I just stick around for the hardware.

You have to be clear that you're talking about developers here.

For the rest of the company, MS Office may very well be essential. In particular, Excel is king for many business functions.

At the company I work for (400 people in Norway, offices in Sweden, Denmark and Romania as well) I don't know anyone who has a MS Office license.

There is a procedure to get one, but so far I don't know anyone who used it. Quite on the contrary I know one of our sales guys used to install and run Linux on his laptop.

Yes, I work and an above average technical company but we do have HR, sales etc and they aren't engineers (at least not most of them).

(email in my profile ;-)

As much as I would like it to happen, I think it's unlikely Linux will be taking any market share away from Macs. That said, I could imagine it happening a couple ways. The first being an increasingly iPhonified and restricted Mac OS that some devs get fed up with.

The second would be Apple pushing all MacBooks to M1 too soon, breaking certain tools and workflows.

While I think both of those scenarios could easily happen, most devs will probably decide just put up with the extra trouble rather than switch to Linux.

> The second would be Apple pushing all MacBooks to M1 too soon, breaking certain tools and workflows.

I don't think this is an issue. Apple has been fairly straight about timelines and people who want to stick with Intel have plenty of time and options to get their stuff in a row in advance. More important, Apple fixed most of the major irritations with the MacBook Pro. If they hadn't launched the 16" MBP last year, people would have been stuck with a fairly old/ compromised design.

I suspect Apple is going to maintain MacOS right where it is now. People have been worried about "iOSification" for nearly a decade now and while there have been some elements, the core functionality is fundamentally the same.

Big Sur has me more worried about iOS-ification than ever before. The UI is a train wreck. It looks designed for touch and I have no idea why. I guess Sidecar?

They changed a ton about the UI in Big Sur, none of it for the better as far as I can tell. They took away even more choice, I can't have a "classic" desktop experience.

My biggest frustration is that they were willing to make such drastic changes to the desktop UI at all. I have to re-learn a ton of keyboard navigation now. And there doesn't seem to be a coherent design to the workflows.

Such a drastic change seems to be an admission that they thought the previous design language was wrong but they seem to have replaced it with... no vision at all?

I am hopeful for the next generation of M1 MacBook Pros and whatever the next MacOS is. Hopefully they get their design philosophy straight and stick with it.

> Such a drastic change seems to be an admission that they thought the previous design language was wrong but they seem to have replaced it with... no vision at all?

Sure, but Jonny Ive just officially left. He was head of all design (when he should have been head of hardware design only). It’s natural that there would be greater-than-usual changes as someone new took over.

Big Sur has some pretty terrible changes. There’s nothing surprising that changes occurred. The only surprise is how bad they are.

Yeah exactly. I understand what is going on here. I’m just frustrated I have to suffer through it for the vanity of Not-Jony-Ive.

The frustrating thing for me is the whole idea of rebooting things visually when it's not based on productivity or additional features. So much of this is just a visual reboot.

Overall though when I hear about the "iOSification" I worry foremost about locking down the OS which doesn't seem to be a big issue.

My personal computer is on Big Sur, but I've kept my work laptop on Catalina so a lot of this doesn't hit me work wise. It doesn't seem too horrible to me when working on private projects but that's a small percentage of my time.

I quite like the Big Sur UI and definitely don't consider it a train wreck. I've been a Mac user since the PowerBook G4, and the M1 MacBook Air with Big Sur is the best "desktop" computer I've ever owned. I have it connected to a beautiful 32" display, it's fast, silent and I find the UI very usable

I see a strong vision in Big Sur, one that pulls macOS visually into line with iOS, but there are a lot of rough edges right now. Especially with some Catalyst apps bringing iOS paradigms onto Mac. Even Apple's Catalyst apps (News in particular) are just gross, can't even change the font size with a keyboard shortcut

Visually it is a dumpster fire. Window borders are inconsistently sized, the close/minimize/full screen buttons aren’t consistently placed.

There’s an enormous amount of wasted space. You need that 32” monitor. My 16” RMBP now has as much usable space as my 13”.

Keyboard navigation is bizarre. Try this:

1) Open Mail.

2) Cmd W.

3) Cmd 1 (or is it Cmd 0?!, hint: it’s whatever Messages isn’t!)

4) Without using your mouse select a message in your inbox.

5) Without using your mouse navigate to a folder under your inbox.

6) Without using your mouse navigate to an inbox in another account.

All of this is possible in Catalina and earlier with zero confusion (selections are highlighted clearly) and can be done “backwards” using shift. In Big Sur some of it is actually impossible and you have to just guess where you start.

When native apps aren’t even consistent in their behavior and appearance that is a trainwreck.

You may be able to read the tea leaves and see a grand vision here but I have to use a half-baked desktop environment until Not-Jony Ive is satisfied they have reminded me they are not Jony Ive. To them I say, trust me, I noticed.

I don't have a problem with using the smaller MacBook Air 13" screen for development (I upgraded from a 15" MBP)

I'm not a huge Mail user so I'm not up-to-speed on keyboard shortcuts. But I was able to navigate with the keyboard easily — I hit tab to focus on the correct list then use the up/down arrows to select the inbox or message (your 4/5/6). After hitting Cmd+W both Cmd+0 or Cmd+1 bring the Mail window back for me. And Cmd+Shift+D still sends mail which is the main one I use

I am a huge Xcode user and primarily use the keyboard for code navigation, and that is as good as ever on the 13" MacBook Air in Big Sur. Also use Sketch a lot, and that has been just great too

I guess we have a very different perception of Big Sur but mine is generally favourable, and I don't see the wasted space that you see. There have been a few weekends where I have done all my work on the 13" MBA, which is only just now possible due to battery life, and the experience has been really, really nice

Yes but those shortcuts are inconsistent. Cmd 1 does not bring back Messages for example. I have to press tab several times in Mail to figure out where I am in Big Sur where in Catalina the selection is always highlighted. You can’t use the keyboard to change mailboxes in Big Sur as far as I can tell. There’s no clear “language” to the shortcuts.

You’d have more usable space with Catalina on that 13” screen. It was a noticeable loss of space upgrading from Catalina to Big Sur on a 16” RMBP. I used to have space for three partially overlayed windows on my 16” screen. Now I am lucky to get two. Usable space on a 16” Big Sur MacBook is similar to a 13” Catalina MacBook. I have both. My workflows changed. There is no benefit to me as a user.

Take a look at this visual comparison: https://www.andrewdenty.com/blog/2020/07/01/a-visual-compari...

Look at the “traffic light” buttons. Note how much thicker the top bar is in Big Sur. It’s 50% taller! That’s a lost row of text.

Both Messages and Mail both use Cmd+0 to bring the message viewer to the front. That's what the shortcut is listed as in the Window menu. Same with Calendar if you close the main calendar window

Messages does not have great keyboard navigation — I can't tab around like I can in Mail. I am putting this down to the fact it is a Catalyst app and they are a bit sloppy with consistency (not necessarily a Big Sur thing, as these were on Catalina)

You’re right about Messages vs Mail.

But in Catalina Cmd-1 selects the inbox and full sidebar navigation including between accounts is possible with arrow keys. Nested lists can expand and collapse with left and right.

In Big Sur Cmd-1 just reopens the window with no selection. In addition you cannot navigate the full sidebar with arrow keys.

Combine this with the lack of visual indication of your selection and keyboard navigation becomes a struggle.

I have not found a UI improvement in Big Sur.

> My biggest frustration is that they were willing to make such drastic changes to the desktop UI at all.

I feel you there, one of the reasons I didn't like Windows is big, seemingly random UI changes. I don't think Bir Sur is crazy like Windows NT -> Windows Vista crazy, just feels like a big change for MacOS which has been relatively stable for a few years.

Seems like Apple tends to go long when they make big sweeping UI changes, then in the following releases they dial things back or work out the glitches. It's frustrating for certain.

> Has Linux desktop share been increasing lately?

I run on Mac for desktop, Linux for projects. I don’t know that more people have been switching than before, but I thought the author of this[0] piece illustrated well that it’s easier than ever. That said, the author states that they opt not to have a phone. That’s much less lock-in than most of the market.

[0]https://orta.io/on/migrating/from/apple

Fully agree, seems like a good chunk of developer focused software is cross platform at this point.

I develop on GNU/Linux begrudgingly. It has all of my tools, but I have a never-ending stream of issues with WiFi, display, audio, etc. As far as I'm concerned, GNU/Linux is something that's meant to be used headless and ssh'd into.

Try a Raspberry Pi. It just works.

Except for when the wifi fails or your SD card that you boot off of gets corrupted or you try to do something that requires a bit more power than 1.2GHz and 1GB RAM can handle.

Raspberry Pi 4 has up to 8GB of RAM and a 1.5GHz CPU, but your point still stands. Even with those specs it won't provide a fully smooth desktop experience.

What distro do you use? I switched from Mac to Pop, and it’s great.

I had already decided that 2021 would be my year of the Linux desktop, but Apple forced my hand a bit early. My 2019 Mac’s WiFi went. Had to lose my primary dev machine for over a week as it shipped out to have a bunch of hardware replaced.

So, I built a PC with parts that have good Linux support. I think that’s the key. I imagine System76 machines would run smoothly. It’s definitely not as smooth a UX as Mac, but I like being in an open ecosystem on a machine I can repair. And it’s had a number of perks such Docker running efficiently for once.

Edit: I can now trivially repair my computer if it breaks. The entire rig cost about 1/4 what my MacBook cost, and it is much faster.

For what its worth I've been thinking about going to a Mac M1 laptop for email/HR plus an small-form-factor Ubuntu box for development (i.e. Intel NUC, Asus PN-50) that I can ssh into and run headlessly locally.

With a hybrid 1-2 days in the office and the fact that the NUC form factor has gotten smaller and higher performance, I could make a case to actually stick it in my laptop bag for the 1-2 days and do email/surf only on my train commute. I was never really that productive working on the train anyways.

> Is it not at least somewhat possible that at least some of those Apple laptops will age out and be replaced with GNU/Linux laptops?

And I personally hope that by then, GNU/Linux will have an M1-like processor available to happily run on. The possibilities demonstrated by this chip (performance+silence+battery) are so compelling that it's inevitable we'll see them in non-Apple designs.

Also, as it usually happens with Apple hardware advancements, Linux experience will be gradually getting better on M1 Macbooks as well.

I think we can look to mobile to see how feasible this might be: consistently over the past decade, iPhones have matched or exceeded Android performance with noticeably smaller capacity batteries. A-series chips and Qualcomm chips are both ARM. Apple's tight integration comes with a cost when it comes to flexibility, and, you can argue, developer experience, but it's clearly not just the silicon itself that leads to the performance we're seeing in the M1 Macs.

I wonder to what extent that's a consequence of Apple embracing reference counting (Swift/Objective C with ARC) while Google being stuck on GC (Java)?

I'm a huge fan of OCaml, Java and Python (RC but with cyclic garbage collection), and RC very likely incurs more developer headache and more bugs, but at the end of the day, that's just a question of upfront investment, and in the long run it seems to pay off - it's pretty hard for me to deny that pretty much all GC software is slow (or singlethreaded).

Java can be slow for many complex reasons, not just GC. Oracle are trying to address some of this with major proposals such as stack-allocated value types, sealed classes, vector intrinsics etc, but these are potentially years away and will likely never arrive for Android. However, a lot of Androids slowness is not due to Java but rather just bad/legacy architectural decisions. iOS is simply better engineered than Android and I say this as an Android user.

Not to mention it took Android about a decade longer than iPhone to finally get their animations silky smooth. I don't know if the occasional hung frames were the results of GC, but I suspect it.

I think there are serious concerns about Qualcomm's commitment to competitive performance instead of just being a patent troll. I think if AWS Graviton is followed by Microsoft[0] and Google[1] also having their own custom ARM chips it will force Qualcomm to either innovate or die. And will make the ARM landscape quite competitive. M1 has shown what's possible. MS and Google (and Amazon) certainly have the $$ to match what Apple is doing.

0:https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-reporte... 1:https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/14/21221062/google-processor...

That's why they acquired Nuvia.

Approximately zero MacBooks will be replaced by Linux laptops in the next couple years. There is no new story in the Linux desktop world to make a Linux Laptop more appealing. That people already selected to develop on MacOS and deploy to Linux tells you all you need to know there.

MacPorts and Homebrew exist. Both support M1 more or less and support is improving.

Big Sur is a Big Disaster but hopefully this is just the MacOS version of iOS 13 and the next MacOS next year goes back to being mostly functional. I have more faith in that than a serviceable Linux desktop environment.

> Big Sur is a Big Disaster

I may be naive but that seems like hyperbole. I updated to Big Sur shortly after is was released. It was a little bumpy here and there, but not more than any other update. I'd even argue it has been as smooth or smoother than any of my Linux major upgrades in the past 20 years.

I haven't updated but my impression has been that this is a "tock" release, as in "yeah we shipped some big UI changes but we'll refine them, very little of substance changed in the underlying systems". And that's great, and I look forward to being a medium-early adopter before the worst of the UI gets a big refresh next year.

Yeah that’s a great description.

I upgraded my personal laptop and it’s so bad I’m holding off on my work laptop until I am forced to upgrade.

It is mostly functional but visually a mess. “Better than Linux upgrades” is a pretty low bar.

This is why you run your environment on Linux and MacOS in Docker, so you don't have these screwy deployment issues caused by MacOs vs Linux issues.

Developing in macOS against Docker is beyond painful. 10-100x build times is not a reasonable cost for platform compat.

With some configuration you can map folders into drives on Docker. You can just build on MacOS and restart the app server in the container. I was using NodeJS though, so I'm not dealing with libc and syscall incompatibilities and such.

docker om MacOs is a second class citizen, because it runs in a VM. The networking is much more complicated because of this, which causes endless amounts of hard-to-debug problems and performance is terrible.

You can easily bring macOS up to Linux level GNU with brew.

I agree generally though. I see macOS as an important Unix OS for the next decade.

"Linux" is more than coreutils. The Mac kernel is no where close to Linux in capability and Apple hates 3rd party drivers to boot. You'll end up running a half-baked Linux VM anyway so all macOS gets you is a SSH client with a nice desktop environment, which you can find anywhere really.

> all macOS gets you is a SSH client with a nice desktop environment

Also proprietary software. Unfortunately, many people still need Adobe.

I personally like Krita, Shotcut, and Darktable better than any of the Adobe products I used to use, but it's a real issue.

E: Add "many people"

The micro-kernel design on macOS has benefits over Linux's monolithic kernel.

You also get POSIX compliance.

macOS doesn't have a microkernel, but it does have userland drivers and it's pretty good at being macOS/iOS. Linux's oom-killer doesn't work nearly as well as jetsam.

macOS has a Hybrid kernel with a decent portion being micro components I thought?

Mach started as a microkernel, but when they jammed together Mach and BSD they put it in the same process so it's not really separated anymore.

Recently there are some hypervisor-like things for security, and more things have been moving to userland instead of being kexts. I'd still say it's less of a microkernel than Linux since it doesn't have FUSE.

> bring macOS up to Linux level GNU with brew.

Ugh, not even.

Simple and straightforward shell scripts that work on decade-old Linux distributions don't work on Big Sur due to ancient macOS bsd tooling.

Just look at stackoverflow or similar sites: every answer has a comment "but this doesn't work on my macOS box."

(I've had to add countless if-posix-but-mac workarounds for PhotoStructure).

> Is it not at least somewhat possible that at least some of those Apple laptops will age out and be replaced with GNU/Linux laptops?

Sadly, fewer of my coworkers use Linux now than they did 10 years ago.

> GNU/Linux laptops

Could we do a roll call of experiences so I know which ones work and which ones don't? Here are mine.

    Dell Precision M6800: Avoid.
        Supported Ubuntu: so ancient that Firefox
        and Chrome wouldn't install without source-building
        dependencies.
        Ubuntu 18.04: installed but resulted in the
        display backlight flickering on/off at 30Hz.

    Dell Precision 7200:
        Supported Ubuntu: didn't even bother.
        Ubuntu 18.04: installer silently chokes on the NVMe
        drive.
        Ubuntu 20.04: just works.

Most companies wouldn't end up trying to shove a disk into a computer though, they would buy from a vendor with support and never have compatibility issues. I have owned 3 System76 computers for this reason...

> they would buy from a vendor with support

Like the Dell Precision 6800 above? The one where the latest supported linux was so decrepit that it wouldn't install Firefox and Chrome without manually building newer versions of some of the dependencies?

"System76 is better at this than Dell" is valid feedback, but System76 doesn't have the enterprise recognition to be a choice you can't be fired for.

Maybe ThinkPads hit the sweet spot. I'll have to look at their newer offerings.

Historically, Thinkpads have had excellent support. My T430S is great (although definitely aging out), and apparently the new X1 Carbons still work well. Also, both Dell and Lenovo have models that come with Linux if desired, so those are probably good ones to look at.

I'll have to look into modern thinkpads. I had a bad experience about ~10 years ago, but it wouldn't be fair to bring that forward.

> both Dell and Lenovo have models that come with Linux

Like the Dell Precision M6800 above? Yeah. Mixed bag.

Have used linux on thinkpads since the 90s.

Rules of thumb: - Use older thinkpads off business lease is great - stick to intel video graphics - max out the ram and upgrade storage (NVMe)

> Is it not at least somewhat possible that at least some of those Apple laptops will age out and be replaced with GNU/Linux laptops?

Some definitely will. Significant enough to assume they're not well-situated other-configs? Probably not. Even the most VIM- and CLI-oriented devs I know still prefer a familiar GUI for normal day to day work. Are they all going Ubuntu? Or Elementary? I mean, I welcome any migration that doesn't fracture the universe. But I don't think it's likely.

There is literally no chance of that. IT would find this an intolerable burden for them to manage, and I doubt the devs would like it either. Most of them seem pretty enthused to get their hands on a m1.

I’ve known colleagues that tried to run Linux professionally using well reviewed Linux laptops, and their experience has been universally awful. Like “I never managed to get the wifi to work, ever” bad. The idea of gambling every developer on that is a non-starter even at my level, let alone across the org.

FWIW, I have been running Linux as my desktop since 1999, and on a laptop since the mid-2000s. It is doable, and I no longer have the problems which used to be common. Once upon a time Ethernet, WiFi & graphics were screwy, but not for a long time now.

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