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Comment by resonious | Hacker News Reader

M* has caused nothing but trouble for most mac user engineers I know (read: most engineers I know) who upgraded. Now not only are they building software for a different OS, they're building for a different architecture! They do all of their important compute in Docker, wasting CPU cycles and memory on the VM. All for what: a nice case? nice UI (that pesters you to try Safari)?

It looks like Apple's silicon and software is really good for those doing audio/video. Why people like it for dev is mostly a mystery to me. Though I know a few people who don't really like it but are just intimidated by Linux or just can't handle the small UX differences.

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I'm an engineer that has both an apple silicon laptop (mbp, m2) and a linux laptop (arch, thinkpad x1 yoga.) I choose the mac every day of the week and it's not even close. I'm sure it's not great for specific engineering disciplines, but for me (web, rails, sre) it really can't be beat.

The UX differences are absolutely massive. Even after daily-driving that thinkpad for months, Gnome always felt kinda not quite finished. Maybe KDE is better, but it didn't have Wayland support when I was setting that machine up, which made it a non-starter.

The real killer though is battery life. I can work literally all day unplugged on the mbp and finish up with 40-50% remaining. When i'm traveling these days, i don't even bring a power cable with me during the day. The thinkpad, despite my best efforts with powertop, the most aggressive frequency scaling i could get, and a bunch of other little tricks, lasts 2 hours.

There are niceties about Linux too. Package management is better and the docker experience is _way_ better. Overall though, i'd take the apple silicon macbook 10 times out of 10.

Interesting. I do similar (lots of Rails) but have pretty much the opposite experience (other than battery life - Mac definitely wins there). Though I use i3/Sway more than Gnome. The performance of running our huge monolith locally is much better for Linux users than Mac users where I work.

I used a Mac for awhile back in 2015 but it never really stood out to me UX-wise, even compared to Gnome. All I really need to do is open a few windows and then switch between them. In i3 or Sway, opening and switching between windows is very fast and I never have to drag stuff around.

I'd like to offer a counterpoint, I have an old'ish T480s which runs linuxmint, several lxd containers for traefik, golang, python, postgres and sqlserver (so not even dockerized, but full VMs running these services), and I can go the whole morning (~4-5 hours).

I think the culprit is more likely the power hungry intel CPU in your yoga?

Going on a slight tangent; I've tried but do not like the mac keyboards, they feel very shallow to me, hence why I'm still using my old T480s. The newer thinkpad laptop keyboards all seem to be going that way though (going thinner), much to my dismay. Perhaps a P14s is my next purchase, despite it's bulk.

Anybody with a framework 13 want to comment on their keyboard?

I really like the keyboards on my frameworks. I have both the 13 and the new 16, and they are pretty good. Not as good as the old T4*0s I'm afraid, but certainly usable.

> The thinkpad, […], lasts 2 hours.

This echoes my experiences for anything that needs power management. Not just that the battery life is worse, but that it degrades quickly. In two years it’s barely usable. I’ve seen this with non-Apple phones and laptops. iPhone otoh is so good these days you don’t need to upgrade until EOL of ~6 years (and even if you need it battery is not more expensive than any other proprietary battery). My last MacBook from 2011 failed a couple of years ago only because of a Radeon GPU inside with a known hw error.

> There are niceties about Linux too.

Yes! If you haven’t tried in years, the Linux desktop experience is awesome (at least close enough) for me – a dev who CAN configure stuff if I need to but find it excruciatingly menial if it isn't related to my core work. It’s really an improvement from a decade ago.

>The UX differences are absolutely massive.

Examples?

Battery life followed by heat and fan noise have been my sticking points with non-mac laptops.

My first gen ThinkPad Nano X1 would be an excellent laptop, if it weren’t for the terrible battery life even in power save mode (which as an aside, slows it down a lot) and its need to spin up a fan to do something as trivial as driving a rather pedestrian 2560x1440 60hz display.

It feels almost like priorities are totally upside down for x86 laptop manufacturers. I totally understand and appreciate that there are performance oriented laptops that aren’t supposed to be good with battery life, but there’s no good reason for there being so few ultraportable and midrange x86 laptops that have good battery life and won’t fry your lap or sound like a jet taking off when pushed a little. It’s an endless sea of mediocrity.

This is going to change once Arm on Linux becomes a thing with Qualcomm's new jazz. I am mostly tethered to a dock with multiple screens. I have been driving Ubuntu now for over 4 years full time for work.

In my experience as a backend services Go developer (and a bit of Scala) the switch to arm has been mostly seamless. There was a little config at the beginning to pull dual-image docker images (x64 and arm) but that was a one time configuration. Otherwise I'm still targeting Linux/x64 with Go builds and Scala runs on the JVM so it's supported everywhere anyway; they both worked out of the box.

My builds are faster, laptop stays cooler, and battery lasts longer. I love it.

If I was building desktop apps I assume it would be a less pleasant experience like you mention.

The pain for me has been in the VM scene, as VirtualBox disappeared from the ecosystem with the switch to ARM.

Interestingly enough, the trend I am seeing is all the MacBook engineers moving back to native development environments. Basically, no longer using docker. And just as expected, developers are getting bad with docker and are finding it harder to use. They are getting more and more reliant on devops help or to lean on the team member who is on Linux to handle all of that stuff. We were on a really great path for a while there in development where we were getting closer to the ideal of having development more closely resemble production, and to have developers understand the operations tools. Now we're cruising firmly in the opposite direction because of this Apple switch to arm. Mainly it wouldn't bother me so much if people would recognize that they are rationalizing because they like the computers, but they don't. They just try to defend logically a decision they made emotionally. I do it too, every human does, but a little recognition would be nice.

It's not even a problem with MacBooks as such. They are still excellent consumer devices (non-casual gaming aside). It's this weird positioning of them as the ultimate dev laptop that causes so many problems, IMO.

Why would excellent machine be blamed for shitty software?

Because machines are tools meant to perform tasks, and part of that is being interoperable with other tools and de facto standards in the relevant field. For dev work, today, MacBook is not good at it.

Remember, though, that the binaries deployed in production environments are not being built locally on individual developer machines, but rather in the cloud, as reproducible builds securely deployed from the cloud to the cloud.

Modern language tooling (Go, Rust et al) allows one to build and test on any architecture, and the native macOS virtualization (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization) provides remarkably better performance compared to Docker (which is a better explanation for its fading from daily use).

Your "trend" may, in fact, not actually reflect the reality of how cloud development works at scale.

And I don't know a single macOS developer that "lean(s) on the team member who is on Linux" to leverage tools that are already present on their local machine. My own development environments are IDENTICAL across all three major platforms.

Virtualization and Docket are orthogonal technologies. The reason you use docker, especially in dev, is to have the exact same system libraries, dependencies, and settings on each build. The reason you use virtualization is to access hardware and kernel features that are not present on your hardware or native OS.

If you deploy on docker (or Kubernetes) on Linux in production, then ideally you should be using docker on your local system as well. Which, for Windows or MacOS users, requires a Linux VM as well.

It seems that you're trying to "educate" me on how containers and virtualization work, when in fact I've been doing this for a while, on macOS, Linux and Windows (itself having its own Hyper-V pitfalls).

I know you mean well, though.

There is no Docker on macOS without a hypervisor layer - period - and a VM, though there are multiple possible container runtimes not named Docker that are suitable for devops-y local development deployments (which will always, of course, be constrained in comparison to the scale of lab / staging / production environments). Some of these can better leverage the Rosetta 2 translation layer that Apple provides, than others.

I'm sorry that I came up as patronizing, I was more so trying to explain my confusion and thought process rather than to teach you about virtualization and containers.

Specifically what confused me in your comment was that you were saying Docker on Mac was superseded by their new native virtualization, which just doesn't make sense to me, for the reasons I was bringing up. I still don't understand what you were trying to say; replacing docker with podman or containerd or something else still doesn't have anything to do with virtualization or Rosetta, or at least I don't see the connection.

I should also say that I don't think anyone really means specifically docker when they talk about it, they probably mean containerization + image repos in general.

I don’t know a single engineer who had issues with M chips, and most engineers I know (me included) benefited considerably from the performance gains, so perhaps your niche isn’t that universal?

My niche is Ruby on Rails web dev, which is definitely not universal, but not all that narrow either!

You must have an unusual setup because, between Rosetta and rosetta in Virtualization.framework VMs (configurable in Docker Desktop or Rancher Desktop), I’ve never had issues running intel binaries on my Mac

I’m doing Ruby on Rails dev too. I don’t notice a hige difference between macOS and Linux for how I work.

There’s quirks to either OS.

Eg when on Gnome it drives me mad that it won’t focus a recently launched apps.

On macOS it annoys me that I have install a 3rd party util to move windows around.

Meh, you just adapt after a while.

what's wrong w/ Rails on M chips? I don't recall having had much trouble with it (except w/ nokogiri bindings right when the M1 was first available, but that's a given for any new release of OSX)

We have to cross-compile anyway because now we're deploying to arm64 Linux (AWS Graviton) in addition to x86 Linux.

So even if all developers of your team are using Linux, unless you want to waste money by ignoring arm64 instances on cloud computing, you'll have to setup cross compilation.

1) macs are by far the best hardware and also performance running intel code is faster than running intel code on the previous intel macs: https://discourse.slicer.org/t/hardware-is-apple-m1-much-fas... 2) they should use safari to keep power usage low and browser diversity high

It's basically required for iOS development. Working around it is extremely convoluted any annoying

I forgot to mention that as an obvious exception. Of course developing for Apple is best on Apple hardware.

I strongly suggest putting in the time to learn how to install and maintain a linux laptop ... Ubuntu 24.04 is a great engineer platform

It is, provided that the hardware vendor has reasonably decent support for power management, and you're willing to haul around an AC adapter if not. In general, I really like AMD hardware with built-in graphics for this, or alternately, Intel Tiger Lake-U based hardware.

Asahi Linux is shockingly great on Apple Silicon hardware, though.

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