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Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

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Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#71

Post by GongOfFour »

OldHand2018 wrote: post #64
skohan wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you need 32GB for? Video editing? ML training on CPU? I have to imagine this is a minority.

If someone needs 32GB then they need 32GB. The M1 is Apple’s low-end chip, currently available only on their cheapest computers. It’s like complaining that a Corolla can’t keep up with a Ferrari on a race track. The most charitable interpretation is that the person doesn’t understand the market position of the two items.

Was this entire comment generated by the GPT-2 Tautology Engine?

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#72

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

coldtea wrote: post #31
aodaki wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, it is. 16GB is too constrained even for native Linux desktop environment.

Is it? Up until now most devs still go with 16 or even 8 GB laptops. 32GB laptops are far between (Macs or not), and much fewer people use desktops... And we used to run Vmware with Windows (on Linux) or Linux (on Windows) in 2005 just fine, on laptops with a couple GB at best... Dozens of devs I know in a company I work with have 8GB Macs (and 2-3 years old at that), and run Vagrant and Docker with no issue. And tho…

I have a 2019 MBP with 32GB of RAM. I bought it thinking that I would be running a Windows VM under Parallels, on which I would then let my company install the execrable Microsoft "mobile iron" access control. (You know, the one where they can wipe the machine remotely.) But then they changed so that even machines with this enabled cannot access the company resources on Azure. It must be one of their own machines. (So what's the freaking point?) Anyway, if it would have worked out, that's definitely a use case for more than 16.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#73

Post by Moto7451 »

skohan wrote: post #57
_gqhf wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good for you and I'm glad you're happy but for some of us, considering the work with are doing, sometimes even 32GB is not really enough. Different people, different needs.

What do you need 32GB for? Video editing? ML training on CPU? I have to imagine this is a minority.

Not the OP, but I fill 32GB pretty decently when I run my work’s customer facing web stack, database server, ancillary services, and a couple search engine instances. Prior to moving to locally hosted containers my main memory gripe was Electron. I much prefer having all of my development localized though. It’s a lot closer to the good parts of when I wrote “shrink wrapped” desktop software.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#74

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

mhd wrote: post #41
apichat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus Torvalds: ARM has a lot to learn from the PC : "I think ARM is a very promising platform," he said. "At the same time, the ARM community has never had the notion of a standard platform. ARM never had the PC." https://www.networkworld.com/article/2220438/linus-torvalds-...

Nothing else ever had the PC. And IBM wasn't too happy that it happened to them, either.

It definitely makes Apple's decision to never allow generics seem wise in retrospect.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#75

Post by OldHand2018 »

skohan wrote: post #69
OldHand2018 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone needs 32GB then they need 32GB. The M1 is Apple’s low-end chip, currently available only on their cheapest computers. It’s like complaining that a Corolla can’t keep up with a Ferrari on a race track. The most charitable interpretation is that the person doesn’t understand the market position of the two items.

I’m just asking what would be a use case where you would actually need this

My work desktop is 32GB and it falls over any time I try to create really big R data sets for others. I have to use a cloud machine with 64GB, and I run that out of memory most of the time when trying to optimize the production pipeline. They refuse to give me anything larger, so that's my upper limit. If anyone knows how to create giant .rds files without storing everything in memory first, I'd love to hear it.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#76

Post by UweSchmidt »

gspr wrote: post #45
matwood wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the people who claim that 16 GB isn't enough are insane The problem is containers. Some development workflows appear to require running a container for every piece of software needed, and that adds up (and feels incredibly wasteful). None of my development workflow requires containers locally, so I get by just fine with 16gb.

I wonder when the pendulum will swing back and people will stop this insanity. I can already picture the buzzwords people will invent to describe "apps running on the OS itself ".

That would require people to clean up. Sometimes I squint at the installation requirements and then head over to hub.docker.com. I think it will get worse (i.e. more layers on top) before it gets better.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#77

Post by [deleted] »

Toutouxc wrote: post #30
aodaki wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, it is. 16GB is too constrained even for native Linux desktop environment.

What the hell, enough with this! My main dev machine until a few months ago was a Dell laptop with 8 GB of RAM on Ubuntu. I ran RubyMine on it all day, some Sublime, Spotify, Slack, MariaDB, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, and I had no problems whatsoever. The only reason it ever ran out of RAM was a memory leak in Firefox.

[deleted]

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#78

Post by macNchz »

skohan wrote: post #69
OldHand2018 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone needs 32GB then they need 32GB. The M1 is Apple’s low-end chip, currently available only on their cheapest computers. It’s like complaining that a Corolla can’t keep up with a Ferrari on a race track. The most charitable interpretation is that the person doesn’t understand the market position of the two items.

I’m just asking what would be a use case where you would actually need this

I find it easy to sneak up on 16gb of memory when running basic apps (editor, bunch of browser tabs, zoom, spotify) plus a complete environment for a mid sized web app (multiple services, dbs, message queue, caches, js bundler, workers etc), especially if I’m running tests and have mobile device VMs up. Pretty cheap insurance over the life of a machine to get 32gb of RAM and never have to think about it.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#80

Post by dmytrish »

gspr wrote: post #45
matwood wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the people who claim that 16 GB isn't enough are insane The problem is containers. Some development workflows appear to require running a container for every piece of software needed, and that adds up (and feels incredibly wasteful). None of my development workflow requires containers locally, so I get by just fine with 16gb.

I wonder when the pendulum will swing back and people will stop this insanity. I can already picture the buzzwords people will invent to describe "apps running on the OS itself ".

"A bare-OS application" sounds almost as cool as "bare-metal".
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