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Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

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Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#121

Post by hansor »

0x29aNull wrote: post #107
rgovostes wrote: post #93

I got an M1 MacBook Pro from work last year, and expecting to pay the price for being an early adopter, I set up my previous Intel-based MBP nearby in case I ran into any problems or needed to run one of my existing virtual machines. (I do varied development projects ranging from compiling kernels to building web frontends.) In reality I have hardly turned on the Intel MBP at all since I got it. At all. Docker and VM…

..want to get rid of your old intel MBP? The video on my 2017 is dying.

why your login is green mate?

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#123

Post by rvz »

c7DJTLrn wrote: post #4
rvz wrote: post #3

It would have made sense to simply ignore the M1 hype altogether since the tools you require do not work / run on ARM, or run worse than on Intel, you're better off staying on Intel to wait until the situation for VMs in Apple Silicon improves first: [0]. For developers using VMs, Docker, multi-pass, etc I think it is more trouble than it is worth to jump on to the new shiny thing and invest time in workarounds that…

Intel MacBook supplies are decreasing which has actually caused them to go up in price. In a few years they will be difficult to get. Any company which uses MacBooks is going to have to make the switch at some point - better sooner than later. Also, the post you linked is over a year old and the situation has changed since.

> Also, the post you linked is over a year old and the situation has changed since.

Yes. Exactly. It tells us that had the OP jumped all in to Apple Silicon since the day it launched, then they would have been waiting months to do their work. Little of the software from Intel was actually working in November 2020.

Thus, the sensible and smart action to do was wait and stick to Intel. By the time the software ecosystem caught up to Apple Silicon, the M2 Macbooks were announced meaning that they can upgrade directly to M2, skipping the M1 altogether with more working software than on release day.

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#124

Post by deeteecee »

Here's a few pain points I had:

* Virtual VM's don't solve my problem everytime. There's software that still requires x86 and a VM isn't going to solve that problem in a few cases. I wish I could get into more details here but I'm kind of a noob in this realm. (TLDR: I need to use something called UAExpert and to resolve this, I have both a separate Linux machine and Windows machine in case I need it)

* Have to install homebrew and an x864 version of homebrew to run the right software. Homebrew does not document this so this solution was based off stack overflow posts.

* While docker states that it supports multiple architectures, I don't find that to be fully true. For our codebase, I need to push up x86 docker images but accidentally pushed up arm64 ones instead. There's a solution for it but it's definitely not an out-of-the-box solution at the moment.

Overall, still pretty happy with it. My older macbook pro had gotten sluggish so the tradeoff for me was worth it.

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#125

Post by scarface74 »

michaelt wrote: post #90
brundolf wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is interesting how much impact GitHub has had by not having Apple Silicon support Putting on my tin-foil hat for a sec: GitHub is owned by Microsoft, who would really stand to benefit from slowing down Apple Silicon adoption a bit...

Alternative theory: Apple doesn't offer an M1 server. Github doesn't offer an M1 build server because M1 servers don't exist.

Apple also doesn’t offer an x86 “server” yet Azure DevOps offers Mac build servers.

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#127

Post by verst »

eslaught wrote: post #115
rgovostes wrote: post #93

I got an M1 MacBook Pro from work last year, and expecting to pay the price for being an early adopter, I set up my previous Intel-based MBP nearby in case I ran into any problems or needed to run one of my existing virtual machines. (I do varied development projects ranging from compiling kernels to building web frontends.) In reality I have hardly turned on the Intel MBP at all since I got it. At all. Docker and VM…

Are there more details on "docker buildx build" that you can point us to? The command line reference doesn't seem especially helpful: https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/buildx_... E.g. if I wanted to start building ARM binaries on a x86 host, is that the sort of thing this would enable?

You can build multiplatform images for x86 and ARM (e.g. M1 Mac) like so:

docker buildx build --platform linux/amd64,linux/arm64 .

I constantly use buildx to build x86 images on my M1 so that I can run these images in my x86 Kubernetes cluster.

https://docs.docker.com/buildx/working-with-buildx/

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#128

Post by [deleted] »

spockz wrote: post #95
rgovostes wrote: post #93

I got an M1 MacBook Pro from work last year, and expecting to pay the price for being an early adopter, I set up my previous Intel-based MBP nearby in case I ran into any problems or needed to run one of my existing virtual machines. (I do varied development projects ranging from compiling kernels to building web frontends.) In reality I have hardly turned on the Intel MBP at all since I got it. At all. Docker and VM…

Just to note. You can do `docker buildx install` to make it the default backend of `docker build`. So this precludes you from having to switch commands everywhere. I haven’t figured out how you can let it build multiple architecture by default, so without having to pass the —target flag. On my m1 I see 16x performance differences in builds in favour of native over emulated. Even simple shell script run slow or seem t…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#129

Post by dboreham »

nicoburns wrote: post #97
kitsunesoba wrote: post #44

It's been silk smooth for native desktop (macOS) and mobile (iOS/Android) development. I make it a point to keep the projects I'm responsible for running with the latest toolchains, though. The amount of trouble that some seem to be having with backend dev on M1 makes me wonder if maybe it wasn't the best idea for the industry to put its collective eggs in the single basket of trying to perfectly match dev and prod e…

It mainly seems to be Docker causing the problems. We run node.js apps, and all we had to do was update to the latest version node and a couple of dependencies (those with native modules). No app changes. We run macOS aarch64 locally and Linux x86 on production and have yet to have a single compatibility issue (and we run a staging environment that’s identical to prod, so if there was occasionally an issue it probabl…

To be fair: it's people using Docker that's the problem. For example expecting to be able to run an x86 container image on an aarm64 CPU. Docker is behaving perfectly in it's role of being Docker.

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#130

Post by highwaylights »

Losing eGPU really hurts.

I had three-up before, and now I’m back to the laptop and one central display.

I could get a cheap DisplayLink hub but the performance is poor and I’m not happy with granting their driver screen recording permission. Or trusting it at all tbh.

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