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Lima: Linux-on-Mac

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Re: Lima: Linux-on-Mac

#361

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You can’t input paths for starters. That means you can’t open dot files or navigate dot directories. Of which there are a great many in FOSS. The answer is to open up a terminal and run ‘open .blah’, which is just an appalling work around to a simple problem. Even Windows handles this use case better and that’s saying something.

CMD+Shift+. reveals hidden files in Finder.

Great, another non-discoverable key combination I need to memorise. You can guarantee I’d have forgotten that by the time I next need to use it.

GUIs are meant to be simple for discovering features. I really dislike how Apple hides away all the useful features. It doesn’t need to be this way and it makes working with macOS a real pain in the arse.

Re: Lima: Linux-on-Mac

#362

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If you want to remove a lot of unnecessary pain in your life, completely abandon the idea of mounting a host FS within a guest VM. Doubly so if they're different OS's/FS's and triply so if this a development VM.

Oh, I have. My setup is now Remote VS Code to a Linux NUC that sits on my desk. All code lives on the NUC and all tests run on the NUC, but I can use my MacBook Pro as I move around the house, work outside, etc. It's pretty seamless, I'm impressed.

Thank you for commenting about this! I've been looking for a good solution to this exact kind of thing.

Re: Lima: Linux-on-Mac

#363

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> "accurate and versatile trackpad movement" I think you should leave this one out, because it's at best subjective. I've had a much better experience with trackpads on Linux than I have had on any Mac I've used, thanks to the synaptics driver. Far more customizable as well. Additionally, until pretty recently you'd be stuck with the nasty hinge-based touch pad on Mac laptops which required quite a bit of force to pu…

> Additionally, until pretty recently you'd be stuck with the nasty hinge-based touch pad on Mac laptops I don’t remember that being the case for at least half a decade, while my 2019 Thinkpad still has such an awful trackpad. I would agree that trackpads are good enough on Linux, but not great like on a MacBook. Things like gesture support are unquestionably better on macOS.

Yeah, I'm referring to the MBP I still have to use sometimes, which is mid-2014. The point being that it's not like Apple has a long history of consistently great trackpads.

Certainly PC trackpads are inconsistent, which is unfortunate. Ideally you should try the trackpad on a laptop in person before you buy it (although if it feels great, and cursor movement sucks under Windows, might be safe to assume that's fixable in Linux).

Interestingly, while I do appreciate some of the gestures on Macs (I don't use many of them), I'd trade that for having physical left/right buttons. I can even play casual games on my Dell laptop without plugging in an external mouse because the experience left/right clicking is so much more reliable.

Re: Lima: Linux-on-Mac

#364

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You're kidding right? There's a decent number of thin & light laptops with HiDPI and 100% DCI-P3 coverage screens offered by OEMs. Some offer 16:10 and 3:2 ratios too. The only downside is all of these high-end models will be Intel quad-core (even if Tiger Lake has been pretty good compared to previous Intel generations)

how many have 32gb+ of memory?

Sadly, I'll concede on this selection being dismal and in this form factor, the RAM is almost guaranteed to be soldered.

Re: Lima: Linux-on-Mac

#365
post #137
post #129

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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?

It happened to me on the big sur upgrade. Apparently there wasn't enough space on the internal HDD to finish the upgrade, but it tried anyways, got halfway done and just... failed.

Re: Lima: Linux-on-Mac

#366

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Oh what… by "Remote VS Code" are you referring to this? https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview Seems very handy indeed!

Yeah, the VSCode UI runs on my Mac, but it runs a vscode remote server on my NUC. Debugger, tests, etc. all run on my remote machine. I originally did this in a Linux VM, but got tired of the battery hit that running a VM 24/7 has.

Neato, that's pretty awesome! Can keep your main machine freed up to deal with actual editing and other usage, while the remote server does all the "heavy lifting". Thanks for the info!
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