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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

I've been considering doing this too for my dev machine. Thankfully I'm not trapped into the Apple ecosystem as I don't use any of their services (iCloud, Messages, FaceTime, etc).

On my work machine, 99% of the time I just use VSCode, terminal, Git, Docker, and a browser... I reckon all those will actually run better on Linux than macOS.

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At the moment Docker and Kubernetes are the reason I’m using Linux at work. Without those I’d just use the M1.

MacOS is basically Unix, so I don't think it'll run better due to the OS. The real reason to switch to Linux is you can get much more powerful hardware than Apple sells (or sells for a reasonable price).

Docker on Mac is actually running in a VM, since containers are a linux feature, not unix. You can't develop for linux servers like you can on a linux machine.

Literally any workload in the cloud is going to be running in a VM, this is total nonsense lol

The GP is talking about how developing using docker on a Mac involves a separate VM running Linux, not the production deployment. If your application involves lots of files, then docker has to spend a bunch of time syncing files between the host OS and the Linux VM.

It's a pretty well known problem. If you're dealing with a few smallish files you won't notice it, but applications with lots of little files (Node, Python, etc) will have to sync all those files, and that can be pretty slow.

...for a desktop, sure. For laptops, there is currently no real comparison on power and price.

I very much hope the rest of the industry can respond to the M1.

Yeah totally. I only use desktops now but if I had to buy a laptop I think I'd go for an M1 MBA or MBP.

Not true, if you buy one of those insane chunky "gaming laptops" it'll outperform the M1.

Docker runs ways faster on Linux.

Also, I own a cheap Chromebook and in general Chrome seems to runs much smoother than on my expensive iMac.

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