Dude, operating system is one of the most fundamental things to consider when getting a dev machine.
MacOS is literally useless for me, because I depend on the Linux kernel.
MacOS is literally useless for me, because I depend on the Linux kernel.
I think the way this conversation played out was "given how I use my device, is there an optimal device to buy?" A lot of the answers are, in turn, "why don't you use your device differently? having ignored your use cases and preferences, this is the device I'd recommend."
It might be a valid opinion to say "I don't use Linux and I enjoy using MacOS on Apple Silicon" but... it doesn't actually help the original poster, does it? So why post that at all?
I guess I could point out to the poster that I use Windows 10, and I built a desktop PC. It doesn't really meet any of their criteria (except #3 computing power), but... it works for me. So maybe they should change and be more like me!
As a previous BSD engineer please explain further, this entire thread is just horrendous and should be downvoted to oblivion.
Nobody cares what laptop you decide to use, nor are you incapable of doing your own research. My grandmother calls me for laptop recommendations.
My M1 Max 14" MBP has 64gb ram, mucho cores and is the fastest machine I've used. My gaming/dev desktop is a 12core ryzen with 64gb and I prefer to use the Macbook which can sit on my lap without even having a fan running.
Did I used to hate Apple? Yes. Do I have a $2500 Dell XPS 13z sitting in a closet that I never use because it throttles so horribly it's useless? Yes.
And you would need to jump through hoops. I am an embedded dev and I have tried. Theoretically it is possible, but you would miss a lot of tooling on the way.
I don't really care about performance that much. I have an MB Air with M1 and I like it because the battery and display is very good. But it isn't really used for productivity. I also work in industry and everything here is Windows and maybe Linux. MacOS doesn't exist here.
Good luck attaching your Mac to a reflow soldering machine (I have tried too). It just doesn't play well with others and is rather exclusionary itself.
Edit: Missed the 'z', sorry, possibly explains different experiences.
The XPS 13 is a much larger device (better cooling). The 13z ruined me ever buying another Dell. I really wanted to love that laptop and NOT buy a $3k macbook. I really want the 2n1 feature.
My XP13 9370 running Fedora lasts maybe 2 hours at a push. I'm actually considering moving back to a 14" MacBook Pro because of the battery life.
Rumours of an imminent M2 upgrade are about the only thing stopping me now.
I really liked my XPS when I got it, but I'm pretty jaded about Linux support for laptops ever being good enough to compete with something like Apple. And at the end of the day I care a lot more about having a high quality Unix based OS than whether or not that OS is libre (sorry to say).
I switched to MacPorts when Homebrew moved on from macOS Mojave... now I wish I had done so much sooner!
Honestly, Nix is the only package manager I really like on Mac.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30917354#30918593
> seems to be an issue of macOS and the root dir being read-only
> Took me a month to finally remove Nix from my macOS
https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/6206#issuecomment-105938...
I have a 2020 Mac with the highest fucking configuration (32GB RAM and i7 8-core 10th gen) and the fans on it are always going off.
I figure a laptop with a discrete GPU can handle external screens and graphics much better than integrated, but was wondering what your take on the M1 mac for this would be.
I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing.
As an Emacs user I find the whole concept of a "touch screen esc key" as deplorable and regressive.
And this is on top of the poor reliability and high cost of repair.
> I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing.
You have an older version made sometime between 2016-2019. They got rid of the butterfly keyboard for the 2020 models.
I can well understand that people who like / want deep key travel would dislike them.
1. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/269174/disable-the...
edit - I just timed the sleep functionality. After 60 seconds it dims, and then 15 seconds later it goes to sleep completely....such a horrible implementation
However since apple decided that only "either" was an option, I'm much happier with having the function keys back.
I like the key travel of my (personal) 2015 MBP compared to the 2019 MBP I have for work. I put a keyboard cover on the 2019 and it feels less bad.
Take those away and I'd just go back to buying used Windows laptops on Ebay, putting Linux on them, and being sad.
Same.
It's also interesting to think of this in terms of the real $ value of the OS. If I had to choose between a $1000 Windows laptop or a $2000 macOS laptop, I'd still go for the macOS laptop, even if they had the same specs. The specs of a laptop matter far less to me than the OS and surrounding ecosystem.
Same as how a $10K Mac Studio would still be useless for gaming. Could have the world's best GPU, and it would still have no value to anyone looking for a gaming computer.
BeOS was nice. Windows could be nice but they decided to make it adware and spyware and completely ruin the settings screens for no good reason. Sigh.
The two things that bug me: no markdown support, and no built-in export (but the format's simple and well known and there are existing 3rd party tools that can do it). Everything else is so good and so stable that I've been hesitant to go looking for something else to try to fill in those two features. I can live with a formatting bar and export being a little annoying if everything else is basically perfect.
First thing I did when I got my M1 though is partition the drive and dual boot asahi though.
I wish it had more and better extensions, but the battery life savings and general lighter feel/effect on overall system responsiveness is so large that I put up with that unless I really have to have better dev tools or something. All my normal browsing happens in Safari. Took me like 3 years to convert after starting to use Macs, as I initially dismissed it, but damn, it's way lighter than FF or Chrome.
> Preview is the PDF viewer right?
It's a lots-of-things viewer, but its PDF support is so good that it made me go from hating when something was in a PDF, which had been the state of things with every PDF viewer I'd ever used since first encountering the format some time in the 90s, to liking PDFs. It's lightweight (like most of Apple's tools, I can just leave it in the background and forget it's there), crashes are extremely rare (maybe one or two in a decade or more of use?), and it supports all kinds of nice-to-have stuff like compiling a PDF from pages of other PDFs, removing or re-ordering pages, signing, light image editing and markup capabilities, et c.
It's inspector is just so different from the rest and you can't even have a custom font to be used! because, security...
Terminal is almost good but somehow it doesn't vertically stretch to 100% height when I automatically hide my dock.
Pages and Numbers are decent but no one else uses it, so I have to keep my Office 365 subscription to use Office in the browser.
Preview surely is a godsend when other OS can't somehow make the same basic app for almost 2 decades? Mail is great too unlike Windows' very poor default one.
Windows now looks 10 years behind with no ability to catch up to the ARM standard and Linux, well, never.
> It's inspector is just so different from the rest and you can't even have a custom font to be used! because, security...
Yeah, it's far from perfect but it's really light on battery and is ~never the cause of beachballs while I'm using some other program, neither of which were the case with FF or Chrome, for me :-/ My ideal browser doesn't exist, but Safari definitely feels closer to it than FF or Chrome do. They get all the add-on stuff right, while Safari gets the fundamentals right.
> Terminal is almost good but somehow it doesn't vertically stretch to 100% height when I automatically hide my dock.
Bizarre. I'm a dock-hider (carried over from being a start-menu-hider on Windows for years and years) and hadn't noticed that. If I open a terminal window and drag the bottom down, sure enough, there's a little bit at the bottom I can't get it to go past. Oddly, if I use Spectacle to "maximize" it or send it to the left or right half of the screen, it manages to go a little lower (still not quite all the way!), but then the top has a tiny gap, like it's splitting the bottom gap between the top and bottom. Thanks, now that will bug me forever :-) I wonder if it's got something to do with line height?
> Pages and Numbers are decent but no one else uses it, so I have to keep my Office 365 subscription to use Office in the browser.
Yeah, it's no Office replacement if you need Office. I'm fortunate that it's just for my own use or for generating PDFs. They're like Abiword and Gnumeric on Linux (which were what I preferred over the bloated mess of OpenOffice on that platform) in that they're relatively lightweight but still fairly capable—except they don't crash as much and just, you know, work better.
> Preview surely is a godsend when other OS can't somehow make the same basic app for almost 2 decades?
It's straight up stupid that Preview can be an actual selling point for macOS in the year 2022, and yet, I can't point to a single similar program (or even just a PDF reader) on another desktop OS that's even close to it, and I've used tons of them over the years.
I can walk into any office store, plop down 350 dollars, and get a laptop that will probably work very well with Linux. Any problems I end up hardware-wise is probably going to be the same sort of problems I would run into if I was running Windows.
With plenty of companies providing great support for Linux I don't know why anybody would want to deal with Evil Corp Apple and then spend day struggling to get a mostly working system. Apple are the people who make a living on creating and pedaling spyware ffs.
Why? Because the host machine sucks less at all the desktop stuff that Linux is horrible at and the VM wins at all the server and dev stuff the Mac sucks at.
Any OS can virtualize Linux, so the host doesn't really matter.
Besides, it's usually the software that matters and not the OS.
I cab run a Ubuntu server VM at good performance on VMware.
The only remaining limitation are missing some ARM docker containers (which is slowly being solved) and the machines not being suitable for ML (in which case you need a desktop or to rent server time on the cloud).
Also consider gaming. Considering that GPU virtualization is not really a thing still, I cannot imagine, for example, gaming being easier on macOS, and the VM requires additional setup too.
Now some of that is alleviated if you are building non-machine learning ARM images, but you may run the risk of not having ARM versions of third-party containers you need.
I personally regret not thinking ahead about this and buying a MacBook Pro a few years ago. Either with Linux directly, or with Windows WSL2, I don't think developers need to buy a macOS machine unless they need to build iOS or macOS apps. And even then, you can rent time on GitHub-hosted Actions macOS runners instead.
See: https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubDMLoWz76U
Only real limitations are lack of ML because no server/desktop-grade GPU and some missing ARM-based docker containers. But the latter is slowly being resolved and the former isn't gonna happen on a laptop anyways.
Or just run it on real hardware! It's my preferred workflow.
These two comments of ours are equally pointless.
Before, there were a multitude of reasons not to develop in a VM: Poor support for accelerated instructions on laptops; Slow CPUs; limited RAM; slow file-sharing between the host and guest.
The M1 architecture solves most of the issues.
Modern laptops almost universally support accelerated instructions now. This means less overhead, so doing everything entirely in the VM is worth it now. So no more dealing with slow file-sharing.
The speed of the M1 also means you're not limited compared to your desktop. Depending on the benchmark (especially any benchmark relying on CPU cache size), it may be faster on the M1 air than on a 5950X. Even in workloads where the laptop is slower, it is now fast enough.
Running docker containers in a VM on a 16GB *non-M1* machine is untenable. The M1's RAM is not only higher bandwidth and lower latency, but the compression and caching has improved so much that you can fit much more in that same 16GB.
In use-cases where you need more than 16GB, the M1's NVMe disk is so low latency that swap usage is indistinguishable in performance from RAM usage. So the laptop has no memory limit, for practical purposes (though the wear on the disk is increased in this case).
In addition, ARM architectures were a pain to deal with before, so most people emulated x86_64 and assume that you'd still have to do that on the M1. Nowadays, there is no reason not to run an ARM Linux in the VM. Most programs run just fine, and the remaining holdouts are a few Docker containers that haven't been updated. But even those aren't a problem because recent improvements to Docker greatly simplify running x86_64 containers under QEMU.
Combine all of this with the Mac app ecosystem (which has its problems, but is generally OK to use, especially if your other devices come from Apple), improved battery, the return of the good keyboard, and greatly lowered TDP, there really isn't a choice to make anymore.
The remaining reasons not to use it are basically as follows:
1) Compatibility with external devices, or work on embedded controllers
2) Anything requiring significant GPU compute (ML, etc.). But this would likely be done on a desktop rather than a laptop, which wasn't the scope of the question.
3) Disk capacity requirements (though external NVMe over thunderbolt mostly solves this)
4) Extremely multi-threaded work (video editing, etc.) where a desktop CPU outperforms the M1's multi-thread score.
Less pointless now?
Yeah! Now you added substance. Great!