Hacker News Reader

This will drain your battery. Better is to use GNU/Linux natively, e.g. Fedora, Ubuntu.

Please elaborate. Do you suggest to run Linux on the Mac or to run it in a VM?

I would think that one would get better battery life from running it in a VM, especially a headless one compared to running Linux 'natively' mainly because Linux desktop is notorious for worse battery life than Mac/Windows.

(yes there are ways to improve the out-of-the box battery life of Linux but that's another topic)

I think he means running Docker natively on a Linux distro of choice, since LXC / Docker rely heavily on Linux kernel features to implement their functionality (these do not run natively on Mac/Windows/etc). You can't run Linux on a Mac other than running it inside a VM so the overhead as a result would be a drain on battery life (at least that's what I assume chatman means).

That's how I read it, and I agree with him. When I'm running a linux VM on my Macbook Air the battery drains significantly faster than normal, even if the VM isn't actually doing anything. It must have something to do with the way that VirtualBox responds to power management from the host OS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com