Mac’s share falls to five-year low • Hacker News Board

Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#71

Post by mcroft » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 8:45 PM UTC

fritzw wrote: post #57

gshulegaard wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Mac ecosystem is now ingrained into open source development. Interesting... > Anyone who suggests doing this either hasn't done it before or has way too much time on their hands. Oh... Quick question, when was the last time you did it? Currently I have three full time Linux boxes: * Custom PC build I did myself * System76 Galago UltraPro * Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition Oddly enough, the one that gave me the mos…

The second you compile one package to get any of those boxes to work, for me, the pro-linux box argument is negated. Particularly for work machines, I don't have time to compile and install just to get my box up and running. Mac worked for me for this reason, I presume the reasons are the same for many. You like the freedom and power your boxes allot you, I like the simple operation of the mac. My problem is Macs are…

Xubuntu is now my first choice operating system. I have it on 2 desktops (one Dell for work and my home desktop). It also works great on an old Lenovo X-series and a Dell latitude. I can honestly say that the one machine I need to keep Windows 10 on for work causes me hours more grief than my Ubuntu-based machines.

For me, the biggest annoyance is having Office365 at work and not being able to use things like Skype etc natively. The web apps are OK and I mostly don't notice, but there are times I wish Ubuntu got the kind of software support from MS that macOS has.

Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#72

Post by mgkimsal » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 8:45 PM UTC

jameslk wrote: post #67

gshulegaard wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Mac ecosystem is now ingrained into open source development. Interesting... > Anyone who suggests doing this either hasn't done it before or has way too much time on their hands. Oh... Quick question, when was the last time you did it? Currently I have three full time Linux boxes: * Custom PC build I did myself * System76 Galago UltraPro * Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition Oddly enough, the one that gave me the mos…

> Quick question, when was the last time you did it? Gentoo was circa 2005 and Ubuntu was circa 2012. I spent months trying to make it work, but it was too much. Software ran slower, installing package updates was like playing Minesweeper and worst of all, I had to use Wine. A friend of mine tried it as recently as 2014, then gave up as expected. > Currently I have three full time Linux boxes: I'm glad it works for y…

> Maybe you have more experience with Linux than I? Or maybe more patience? Or time? Or maybe I'm wrong? Regardless, for my multiple attempts over the course of months trying to make it work, I couldn't stand it.

Or... maybe different expectations? I never had audio 'just work' on various linux laptops from 2002-2008. Playing some music (amarok, whatever), then the IM client (pidgin or whatever) would make a ping, and ... music would stop. Not possible to play again until killing IM client. Oh wait... dude, don't use pulse! Use ALSA! No, wait... use the latest dev build of pulse! just upgrade your entire system! No... dude, just grab a binary from this site...

Holy crap, you want to plug in an external monitor? xrandr, kxrandr, go edit config files, install some new Xorg libs, etc.

Coming from that world, the Macbook world "just works". Yes, it's gotten a bit worse over time (2016 letdowns, etc). But I still have colleagues who spend far too much time making basic stuff work in various linuxes.

This is normally the point in the story where people either say "you did it wrong" or "yeah, dude, i feel your pain - it used to be bad, but... ubuntu 'just works' and is great now'. Trouble is, I heard that years ago too ("hey yeah, it used to suck, but it's better now") and... it wasn't any better. After going through various laptops (cheap and expensive) never having a decent "just works" experience (out of the box: printer, wifi, external monitor, audio in/out, playing dvd movies and writing to dvd all just working)... I gave up.

For people with different expectations (thinking that rebooting your session to edit an Xconfig file to get multi monitor support is acceptable, for example), they'll never believe there's anything wrong.

Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#73

Post by crusso » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 8:47 PM UTC

jameslk wrote: post #36

I keeping hearing the narrative from this crowd that the MBP is on its way out of being in vogue for developers, but I don't buy it at all. First of all, this is market share up to the release of the new MBP. It's not surprising that their market share has been slipping given that up to this point they haven't released a significant update to the MBP since 2013. But getting to the point, the Mac ecosystem is now ingr…

I find myself increasingly disenchanted with Apple's products. The removal of the iPhone7 headphone jack was an absolute disaster from my perspective.

The new MBPs with their 16GB memory limit, their removal of the esc key, and their useless touch bar, all have me looking enviously to other hardware platforms.

Recently, I tried to burn a DVD on my iMac running Sierra using the built-in Disk Utility. Apparently, Apple ripped out the DVD burning feature in that app because they're moving away from having an optical drive in all their newer products. Please don't compare the elimination of the optical drive to the elimination of the floppy on the original iMac. The floppy had one use, and Apple was boldly showing us we could do without it. DVDs, CDs, and Blu-Ray have other uses beyond just software and application data. They're still all over our consumer electronics and need to be supported as first-class citizens on a computer that attempts to be so media friendly otherwise.

To me, this is starting to feel like Apple felt in the early 1990's when their leadership appeared to be lost. I'm not optimistic that they're going to start making the sequence of good decisions that they'd need to in order to regain my personal trust in their products.

Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#74

Post by smoe » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 8:47 PM UTC

jameslk wrote: post #36

I keeping hearing the narrative from this crowd that the MBP is on its way out of being in vogue for developers, but I don't buy it at all. First of all, this is market share up to the release of the new MBP. It's not surprising that their market share has been slipping given that up to this point they haven't released a significant update to the MBP since 2013. But getting to the point, the Mac ecosystem is now ingr…

> Anyone who suggests doing this either hasn't done it before or has way too much time on their hands.

I switched to Arch Linux in 2015 after about 10 years of Apple.

Most of my dotfiles just continued working, so i could have been up and running for work within hours (basically make emacs, zsh and a browser run). But I decided to spent a weekend on configuring AwesomeWM, keyboard layouts and other handy stuff to really adapt the machine to me.

I update the whole system about once a week and so far run into less problems than with homebrew.

If you are not heavily reliant on proprietary GUI-tools, I don't see much problems in switching from OSX to Linux as long as you verify beforehand that your laptop is well supported.

Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#75

Post by grzm » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 8:49 PM UTC

walshemj wrote: post #70

derefr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I used to use a PC not too long ago and nothing would work Was this before or after the Windows 10 WSL environment was released? I think that has done a lot to change developers' views on doing ＊NIX development on Windows.

why would you do ＊NIX development on anything other than the actual kit the code is going to be running on?

It's important to ensure that the software you're developing runs as expected in the production environment. That does not mean that the development environment and the production environment need to be the same. For example, it's very likely that the development tools you're using will (or should) not be deployed. This extends to anything else about the development environment, as long as you're able to consistently deploy the software to the production environment.

This also assumes that there is only one production environment. Some software is expected to work on different architectures or OSes, some quite dissimilar to each other. For example, some software runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. A developer (or development team), probably has (and should have) access to all of these environments for testing, but likely does development in the one they're most comfortable with.

Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#76

Post by jameslk » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 8:50 PM UTC

gshulegaard wrote: post #69

jameslk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Quick question, when was the last time you did it? Gentoo was circa 2005 and Ubuntu was circa 2012. I spent months trying to make it work, but it was too much. Software ran slower, installing package updates was like playing Minesweeper and worst of all, I had to use Wine. A friend of mine tried it as recently as 2014, then gave up as expected. > Currently I have three full time Linux boxes: I'm glad it works for y…

> Gentoo was circa 2005 and Ubuntu was circa 2012. I spent months trying to make it work, but it was too much. Software ran slower, installing package updates was like playing Minesweeper and worst of all, I had to use Wine. A friend of mine tried it as recently as 2014, then gave up as expected. Ah cool! The reason I asked is that a lot has changed in the last four years or so. Dell's Sputnik ( http://www.dell.com/d…

You're right, I haven't tried it recently since it became the norm for OEMs to release computers pre-loaded with Linux. Once bitten, twice shy as they say.

Installing Linux distros were only half the battle for me however. Maybe that's changed too or maybe it was because I was always trying to force everything to run on top of KDE. I'll definitely keep an eye on this development, but my expectations are that it won't change the landscape much. Who knows.

Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#77

Post by gshulegaard » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 8:54 PM UTC

jameslk wrote: post #76

gshulegaard wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gentoo was circa 2005 and Ubuntu was circa 2012. I spent months trying to make it work, but it was too much. Software ran slower, installing package updates was like playing Minesweeper and worst of all, I had to use Wine. A friend of mine tried it as recently as 2014, then gave up as expected. Ah cool! The reason I asked is that a lot has changed in the last four years or so. Dell's Sputnik ( http://www.dell.com/d…

You're right, I haven't tried it recently since it became the norm for OEMs to release computers pre-loaded with Linux. Once bitten, twice shy as they say. Installing Linux distros were only half the battle for me however. Maybe that's changed too or maybe it was because I was always trying to force everything to run on top of KDE. I'll definitely keep an eye on this development, but my expectations are that it won't…

Totally fair, I myself only recently gave Linux on the laptop a try again (last 2 years or so). For a long time I had limited Linux to desktop use, but was pleasantly surprised by System76 and Dell so I feel compelled to spread the word.

At any rate, as I say in another comment, there are definitely many other things that might dissuade you from going the Linux route (gaming being my personal challenge). I was just trying to comment on the massive improvement in the driver space in recent years.

Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#78

Post by IMTDb » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 8:55 PM UTC

jameslk wrote: post #36

I keeping hearing the narrative from this crowd that the MBP is on its way out of being in vogue for developers, but I don't buy it at all. First of all, this is market share up to the release of the new MBP. It's not surprising that their market share has been slipping given that up to this point they haven't released a significant update to the MBP since 2013. But getting to the point, the Mac ecosystem is now ingr…

I think microsoft is well aware of this "issue". And they seems to be working towards it as proven by the recent Windows Subsystem for Linux https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/install_gui...

Microsoft will hopefully start throwing punch in that direction by trying to "win developers back" by increasing the POSIX compatibility layer. How long till we see a complete "homebrew" for windows ?

If the POSIX subsystem is "good enough" we might see a shift towards microsoft.

Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#79

Post by catnaroek » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:03 PM UTC

jameslk wrote: post #36

I keeping hearing the narrative from this crowd that the MBP is on its way out of being in vogue for developers, but I don't buy it at all. First of all, this is market share up to the release of the new MBP. It's not surprising that their market share has been slipping given that up to this point they haven't released a significant update to the MBP since 2013. But getting to the point, the Mac ecosystem is now ingr…

I use a GNU/Linux system, and never had to hunt for drivers, or had any problems with package updates. And I'm not exactly the kind of user who enjoys rolling up his sleeves and tinkering with the system until it sort of works. When I say I had no problems, it really means no problems.

The one thing that macOS has going for it is the Trackpad's gestures, which I don't think have any counterpart on non-Apple systems, but even that doesn't matter much anymore as my workflow has become mostly keyboard-driven.

Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#80

Post by gizmo385 » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:03 PM UTC

DoodleBuggy wrote: post #52

SnowingXIV wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great point. I recently bought the new MBP with Touchbar and was hesitant for the myriad reasons that were previously mentioned. Before I pulled the trigger I went to setup my dev environment on a fresh Linux partition at home (mainly a windows machine). I was fighting things all over the place to get it to a state of usefulness and productivity. I spent too much time doing this and still kept running into little iss…

How do you like not having a real escape key?

I don't have the new MBP, but how often do you really use the escape key? I'm use solely vim for my development work and I almost never encounter a need to use the escape key.