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Lima: Linux-on-Mac

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Re: Lima: Linux-on-Mac

#141
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"As a developer, why do you want to fight your operating system to get basic things done" After 10 years of linux it took me 1 month with a macbook to decide that i just dont have the time to keep my linux running the way i want to, play the hardware lottery and fear every major update (or every update after a vacation with arch).

I mean, I just don't understand the fascination with rolling update models for the core os. I've got other things to worry about than playing with config files, so I just install a new LTS distro every couple years or so and amortize the pain to less than the yearly macos updates.

I, too, dislike rolling updates for my workstation OS.

I don't like using anything OS- or package-manager-provided on my dev workstation for per-project development dependencies, since usually it's much less painful (sooner or later) to manage those with a special tool for that purpose, or to vendor them, or to pick some OS that you might not like for your workstation as your deployment target (Alpine, say, or a very vanilla stable Debian) and just use scriptedly-reproduceable VM or docker or whatever.

I do like rolling updates for my actual tools and programs that I, personally, use. Editors (code or otherwise—image, video, audio, document, whatever), multimedia programs, browsers, quality-of-life improvement tools, command-line tools that aren't build dependencies, that kind of thing. If I hit a bug, then see that it's fixed in the latest release, I want there to be a very good chance I can just update my packages and get the fix, no further effort required. Or at worst wait a day or two for the package to be updated, and get it that way. If I read that a tool has some functionality, and install it specifically for that functionality, I don't want to lose time wondering why the hell I don't see it in the program, only to realize that it's because Ubuntu's packages serve a version that dates to before that feature was added (real thing that's happened to me on Linux).

That's where LTS Linux distros end up being a bad fit for me, because I want most of the stuff I actually use to be newer than what's in the repos.

macOS with Brew is about as close to perfect (for me) as I've seen. Slow-paced and relatively-reliable major OS updates, but my tools and programs stay up-to-date, and I can install damn near anything though the package manager (the closest I've seen to being as good as Brew as far as likelihood of my asking it to install something without checking that it has it first, and that actually working nearly every time, including for closed-source software, is Gentoo's Portage). I wouldn't prefer to install a project-dependency (say, PostgreSQL) through my workstation package manager anyway, so I don't care that it's rolling, since if I need something pinned I'll be fetching it some other way.

Given how fragmented Linux's GUI desktop is, and the way so much of it blurs the line between system- and user-packages, I think it'd be very challenging for a Linux distro to deliver as clean an experience, if that's the workflow you prefer (as, I've discovered, I do).

Re: Lima: Linux-on-Mac

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Macbooks are solid laptops. Every other laptop I've owned hasn't stood the test of time as well as my Mac. If you are American. In the UK, I find the keyboard layout bewildering. It is not ANSI and it isn't ISO. It's some other thing, with keys that don't exist in any other English speaking keyboard. They even hide # behind a special alt key combo. Other things about it are good, but there are some design decisions…

> They even hide # behind a special alt key combo. That's way worse than removing the escape key.

It's things like this that make me say that Macbooks aren't for developers rather than running Linux in a VM.

Re: Lima: Linux-on-Mac

#143
post #123
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"As a developer, why do you want to fight your operating system to get basic things done" After 10 years of linux it took me 1 month with a macbook to decide that i just dont have the time to keep my linux running the way i want to, play the hardware lottery and fear every major update (or every update after a vacation with arch).

After 2 months with a macbook supplied by my employer, I am literally begging to go back to a Windows or Linux machine. I just don't understand how you can possibly be productive with these things if you have to do anything out of the norm. It's like bureaucracy as an operating system.

I have the same experience.

I was given a MacBook pro at my last job and had to request a ThinkPad after a few weeks - the lack of function keys alone was enough to drive me mad, but countless issues with docker and even homebrew pushed me over the edge. For context, I _used_ to be a hardcore mac fanboy and did all my development work on it, but the macOS of today doesn't feel the same as the OSX of yesterday - at least not to me.

Linux desktop environments definitely still suck, and there's always some quirks with hardware but for the work related tasks once it's initially set up, it's always rock solid.

Re: Lima: Linux-on-Mac

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's why I moved away from Linux to macOS: - I'm sorry, but no Linux DE I've ever used beats macOS in terms of stability. The file explorers are also a joke and frequently changing. - I've never booted to a black screen when upgrading macOS. - 99% of the work I do never needs anything that has to be virtualized under macOS. - Macbooks are solid laptops. Every other laptop I've owned hasn't stood the test of time as…

Dont' forget: - Multi- and highres monitor support out of the box with proper scaling and readable fonts - A package manager with up to date packages (granted there are Linuxbrew and things like Snap now for Linux.) - Applications that have a consistent UI/UX and all use the same keyboard shortcuts > All the customization doesn't offset the trouble that desktop Linux can bring. It's nice you can customize almost ever…

> A package manager with up to date packages (granted there are Linuxbrew and things like Snap now for Linux.)

On what planet is is homebrew better than Linux package managers? I agree with many of the other items in these lists, but this makes literally no sense to me. Homebrew is probably one of the worst things about doing dev on a mac.

Re: Lima: Linux-on-Mac

#145
post #93

I always thought “Windows Subsystem for Linux” was phrased backwards and should have been “Linux Subsystem for Windows”. It threw me for a loop when I read that phrasing on the readme.

"Because we cannot name something leading with a trademark owned by someone else." -- Rich Turner, former PM of WSL https://twitter.com/richturn_ms/status/1245481405947076610

So they can't use the obvious name Linux Subsystem for Windows but that still leaves other possible names.

Re: Lima: Linux-on-Mac

#146
post #137
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. It feels like the people going gung-ho for macbooks here are the type of people that would take their computer to best buy if they got a boot loop instead of just fixing it. Kind of incomprehensible to me that anyone in that mindset would be a developer.

> if they got a boot loop I have literally never seen a boot loop on a Mac. How would that even come about?

This poster gets it.

I use macOS because there's about 1/10 the likelihood that I'll have to burn half a day fixing its fuck-ups as there is with Windows and Linux. And I did plenty of that for years before ever seriously using a Mac.

Nowadays when I check in on the Linux desktop to see how it's doing now, I notice how easy it is to get into the old habits of "oh this is pretty good, just a little tweak and I can get the audio working the way it ought to, oh and this and that" down a bunch of little rabbit-holes and pretty soon I've burned hours on stuff that sure looks like work, but is 100% unproductive. When I catch myself doing that I go "well, not ready to switch back yet, I guess, maybe next year".

I think a lot of people using Linux on the desktop either somehow manage to use it very differently from how I ever have, or are completely blind to how much time they're losing to it because they're having to work around deficiencies, put up with bad behavior, or fix stuff. That is, I think both categories of Linux desktop user exist, not that it's one or the other. I was definitely in the latter category, and can recognize that in myself now. Last I checked (a few months ago) the Linux desktop remains something I need to avoid if I don't want to end up doing a bunch of fake work.

Re: Lima: Linux-on-Mac

#148
post #13

It's just a "better integrated" virtual machine: "Lima launches Linux virtual machines on macOS" This might be a controversial opinion, but I find developers flocking to macOS really bewildering. As a developer, why do you want to fight your operating system to get basic things done? This Lima thing, docker running in a virtual machine, Apple being actively hostile with the default coreutils requiring you to layer mu…

For me I stopped fighting the OS by abstracting the OS away from my work. The JVM is my target and it "runs everywhere" essentially.

Then I chose macOS over Linux or Windows because I like the way it looks, iTerm is good, brew is "good enough", my IDE (IntelliJ) runs nicely and looks good with nice crisp fonts on big 4k display.

I do Docker things but only because others write code in JS, generally I use tools like Google's Jib that allow me to build and push containers without needing Docker locally. Docker does nothing for JVM apps, we have jars/wars/nars for distribution and already get that "runs the same everywhere" for free without all the nonsense that comes with languages that depend on system libraries and architecture specific code like Node/Python/Ruby/Go.

Build with Jib, push to registry, run with k8s, enjoy life without Dockerfiles.

You can do similar with Bazel too but I imagine it would be harder if you need to cross-compile from Darwin to Linux, etc so probably only works this well with JVM.

Re: Lima: Linux-on-Mac

#149
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dont' forget: - Multi- and highres monitor support out of the box with proper scaling and readable fonts - A package manager with up to date packages (granted there are Linuxbrew and things like Snap now for Linux.) - Applications that have a consistent UI/UX and all use the same keyboard shortcuts > All the customization doesn't offset the trouble that desktop Linux can bring. It's nice you can customize almost ever…

> A package manager with up to date packages (granted there are Linuxbrew and things like Snap now for Linux.) On what planet is is homebrew better than Linux package managers? I agree with many of the other items in these lists, but this makes literally no sense to me. Homebrew is probably one of the worst things about doing dev on a mac.

Agree as a Mac user. I miss pacman from Arch. Now -that- is a nice package manager. It took the best (simple) parts from Gentoo and combined them with the better parts of apt/rpm/zypp etc.

Re: Lima: Linux-on-Mac

#150
post #13

It's just a "better integrated" virtual machine: "Lima launches Linux virtual machines on macOS" This might be a controversial opinion, but I find developers flocking to macOS really bewildering. As a developer, why do you want to fight your operating system to get basic things done? This Lima thing, docker running in a virtual machine, Apple being actively hostile with the default coreutils requiring you to layer mu…

Here's why I moved away from Linux to macOS: - I'm sorry, but no Linux DE I've ever used beats macOS in terms of stability. The file explorers are also a joke and frequently changing. - I've never booted to a black screen when upgrading macOS. - 99% of the work I do never needs anything that has to be virtualized under macOS. - Macbooks are solid laptops. Every other laptop I've owned hasn't stood the test of time as…

> - macOS is fundamentally the same as it was 10 years ago, just with some relatively minor changes to the design. I'm pretty confident they're not going to move the dock to the top and force a new window toolkit on me that most existing software can't use.

I don't know anything about macOS but that is an interesting point. I actually use Linux because of its stability. It is a deeply conservative operating system that tries its hardest to never break existing software. I recently booted up an old Netbook running Linux that is surely much more than a decade old now and hasn't seen any update and I still felt right at home.

Sure the Linux ecosystem has seen a bit of changes but most of them are opt in and can be avoided. If you were on Ubuntu you got experimented on quite a bit but thank god nobody is forced to use Ubuntu.

In contrast I am not even able to use a modern Windows system productively these days. The last version I used was Windows XP and it does not seem to have improved for the better UI wise to say the least.

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