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Onboarding with an M1

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Re: Onboarding with an M1

#91
post #59

I am looking forward to the hopefully near term arrival of an “M2” based iMac. I use an M1 Air and it has been a dream to use, but fundamentally I prefer the power that you can tap from a properly ventilated desktop.

The M1 Macbook Pro has active ventilation, FWIW.

Re: Onboarding with an M1

#92
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it works for you, it works for you. However in 2021 I am not interested in a computer with less than 32GB ram. Sure, I could work around the limitations and close not in use programs/tabs to avoid going OOM, or using swap, but life is short and memory is cheap. I'd rather not have to worry about it.

I was similarly skeptical, but my old laptop died on me so I had to replace it. My M1 MacBook Pro is a better laptop for me as developer: my 16” 2019 MBP with 32GB of RAM I got from work has performance and memory issues (mostly too many open browser tabs) more frequently than my personal M1 laptop.

[deleted]

Re: Onboarding with an M1

#93

I always wonder why ppl do not use MacPorts? There was a great article on HN which basically drew a pretty clear picture how brew can easily mess your system up. Yet, being a new Mac user, wherever I go, I only see a reference to brew installs. I am using M1 for a over a month and it’s been a very smooth ride so far. Installing everything via MacPorts where I only had an issue with rabbitmqd which failed to build bec…

For me it was that I heard about Homebrew first, installed it, never had any problem with it. So, marketing?

Re: Onboarding with an M1

#94

I always wonder why ppl do not use MacPorts? There was a great article on HN which basically drew a pretty clear picture how brew can easily mess your system up. Yet, being a new Mac user, wherever I go, I only see a reference to brew installs. I am using M1 for a over a month and it’s been a very smooth ride so far. Installing everything via MacPorts where I only had an issue with rabbitmqd which failed to build bec…

I switched to Brew back in... oh, 2012 or 2013, I think, because I was sick of MacPorts breaking itself horribly during normal operations (installing/uninstalling) every 3-6 months. Brew’s huge package selection, rare breakage (sometimes on OS upgrades, usually easy to fix), decent UI, and ability to also manage nearly all the closed-source software I install, have kept me from bothering to look at MacPorts again.

I have completely the opposite experience; brew would screw something up every other time I upgraded a package, and didn't cross OS updates very well at all. MacPorts has been rock-solid, possibly because it is more careful about making sure that ports have exactly the right deps.

Re: Onboarding with an M1

#95

I always wonder why ppl do not use MacPorts? There was a great article on HN which basically drew a pretty clear picture how brew can easily mess your system up. Yet, being a new Mac user, wherever I go, I only see a reference to brew installs. I am using M1 for a over a month and it’s been a very smooth ride so far. Installing everything via MacPorts where I only had an issue with rabbitmqd which failed to build bec…

Homebrew starts from the MacOS CLI apps provided through XCode. It's a usermode package manager built on top of XCode components. MacPorts builds everything from scratch, which grants more power and optimization opportunities, but comes with many, many more rough configuration edges to deal with.

The optimization opportunities for some packages are typically on the order of 2x-5x faster, which isn't enough to deal with the headache of extra config for a personal dev box. So, my rule of thumb is, unless I know exactly the performance trade off I am trying to take advantage of by going with MacPorts, I will be better served by using Homebrew. I will wind up spending more time fixing config then I will have saved on execution processing time.

Re: Onboarding with an M1

#96

I always wonder why ppl do not use MacPorts? There was a great article on HN which basically drew a pretty clear picture how brew can easily mess your system up. Yet, being a new Mac user, wherever I go, I only see a reference to brew installs. I am using M1 for a over a month and it’s been a very smooth ride so far. Installing everything via MacPorts where I only had an issue with rabbitmqd which failed to build bec…

I switched from brew to macports recently, so here are my thoughts: - before, I had generally heard of homebrew a lot, and macports very little. Brew's marketing is better. I think this is intentional (as in Macports doesn't really do any) - The docs for macports are very poor. They are comprehensive, but barely navigable. Keyword search doesn't work well. They're obtuse. Further context: I also find brew docs poor,…

Interesting observations. Why does Brew seem more secure on first impression?

Re: Onboarding with an M1

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I am using one. There are workloads that don't fit into 16G ram. Even with paging, there are legitimate needs for 32G and beyond memory sizes.

What specific workloads? If you bought a 16GB machine to keep 32GB of data in RAM then clearly you bought the wrong machine. But I am able to run WAY more applications in 8GB than the 16GB intel Mac I had previously.

> But I am able to run WAY more applications in 8GB than the 16GB intel Mac I had previously.

Then your limitation clearly wasn’t RAM.

Re: Onboarding with an M1

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to Brew back in... oh, 2012 or 2013, I think, because I was sick of MacPorts breaking itself horribly during normal operations (installing/uninstalling) every 3-6 months. Brew’s huge package selection, rare breakage (sometimes on OS upgrades, usually easy to fix), decent UI, and ability to also manage nearly all the closed-source software I install, have kept me from bothering to look at MacPorts again.

I have completely the opposite experience; brew would screw something up every other time I upgraded a package, and didn't cross OS updates very well at all. MacPorts has been rock-solid, possibly because it is more careful about making sure that ports have exactly the right deps.

Weird. Macports is the one I was always having to edit packages for to un-break them, with a totally normal installation. Seemed like their packages were poorly-maintained. Must have gotten better I guess.

Re: Onboarding with an M1

#99

I always wonder why ppl do not use MacPorts? There was a great article on HN which basically drew a pretty clear picture how brew can easily mess your system up. Yet, being a new Mac user, wherever I go, I only see a reference to brew installs. I am using M1 for a over a month and it’s been a very smooth ride so far. Installing everything via MacPorts where I only had an issue with rabbitmqd which failed to build bec…

Homebrew starts from the MacOS CLI apps provided through XCode. It's a usermode package manager built on top of XCode components. MacPorts builds everything from scratch, which grants more power and optimization opportunities, but comes with many, many more rough configuration edges to deal with. The optimization opportunities for some packages are typically on the order of 2x-5x faster, which isn't enough to deal wi…

> Homebrew starts from the MacOS CLI apps provided through XCode

As does MacPorts. https://guide.macports.org/#installing.xcode

> MacPorts builds everything from scratch

This has not been true for many years: https://trac.macports.org/wiki/FAQ#fromsource

Re: Onboarding with an M1

#100
post #83

I wonder how much extra work Apple is generating audio companies like Native Instruments. I've been hoping for years that they would start supporting Linux, but I've settled with the fact that this won't happen. If one year ago one would have asked NI if they plan to support ARM chips, they would probably have laughed at you, but I'm sure that they now have already started working on this, now that Apple has forced t…

I know there’s already a decent amount of pro or at least “pro-sumer” audio production software on iPad. I don’t know if those are totally separate products and codebases from Intel PC, or if some of these companies have already done the work to make their stuff portable.
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