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Comment by commandersaki | Hacker News Reader

OrbStack is by far some of the best software I've encountered on Mac, but unfortunately I have difficulty convincing my employer to pay for a commercial license, and with my sparse Docker usage, I'm confined to using it only for personal/hobby usage.

What's amazing is it fixes an (almost) show stopper bug when using libuv (or software that uses it like CMake) with Rosetta 2 [1], with the bug present on all Docker/VMs I've tried except OrbStack. It just seems to get everything right.

[1]: https://github.com/libuv/libuv/issues/4279

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$8 a month/user for the speed and productivity improvement seems, err, shortsighted.

On the flip side, I empathize with the employer wondering why their "developer laptop" needs a monthly subscription to do what their Production server does for free. Maybe they should just use UTM in the meantime.

I'm not sure what you mean by prod server in this context, we deploy to k8s. We use testcontainers[1] that run locally on the laptop via IntelliJ. There's a bunch of integration tests that take a good while to boot via docker-desktop. If these tests can be sped up significantly then it's worth that $8 a month. I'd like to remind you that technically docker desktop isn't free, either. Nor is pushing tests to run via CI/CD first. That iteration cycle would take even longer.

[1] https://testcontainers.com/

Sorry to be blunt but your employer must be real penny pinchers, it’s not that expensive, and it’s a tool that would help you get the job done.

Fair criticism and I agree -- to that point, we're asked to bring our own devices to work without any compensation or the like (though it does have its advantages). I've considered paying out of my own pocket, but I just don't use Docker outside of work, and that's kind of where I draw the line at paying for software to do work.

You have to bring your own device? Do you have a major stake in the company you work for? Do you get an outrageously high salary? If the answer is no on both, you are taken major advantage of and you should quit asap

Spent all the budget on Apple hardware

MacBook Air M2 16gb ram leasing: 30€ per month

orbstack pro business license: 10€ per month

I don't think the hardware cost is prohibitive here. It's the death of a thousand paper cuts of a startup. I agree that orbstack would be a good investment, though.

My (somewhat sarcastic) comment was just that Apple hardware is more expensive than Linux/Windows hardware. If you use Linux then I would say the docker experience is quite good. I wonder if Linux hardware was an option; seems odd to require running stuff under docker but also force people to use macbooks...

Some places don't allow it due to MDM not being available/beta/untested for linux, althogh that has changed quite a bit over the past couple of years.

Ah yes, the ol'

> Why don't we support Linux? Because we don't support Linux!

runaround. When a company that mandates MDM chooses to buy an MDM software that lacks Linux support, that choice is the choice not to support Linux on developer machines.

> MacBook Air M2 16gb ram leasing: 30€ per month

How/where does one do this?

First hit on google for me: https://www.maclease.de/apple-macbook-air-m2-leasen-20211164...

It's a 5 year contract, but the now 4 year old M1 16gb ram is still perfectly capable of running regular containerized web dev workloads (e.g. running supabase + 4 node applications)

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