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Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

dywypi.org

31–40 of 334 posts

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#31
post #9

I have been a Mac user for the last four years. I used to really like it, everything was stable and polished and just worked really well. But in the last few months, things started falling apart. My computer would freeze every few days, syncing would destroy parts of my data, the iPhone would crash every now and then, there would be weird random glitches... I'm certainly not ready to abandon ship yet, but I can see i…

May I ask if you've upgraded to Lion a few months ago? My 4 years old Macbook was not as bad as you described, but it does become a lot less stable than when it was under Snow Leopard. Even Safari does not work properly in Lion.

Snow Leopard was truly very stable, it's the best major version of OS X that I've used. I hope the minor OS X updates will fix out all of the Lion bugs.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#32
post #23

Inactive memory is not an OS X specific, and it's actually implemented in a number of other OSes, including FreeBSD. > when it's on disk, it definitely is not made active quickly. If an application is unloaded then many operations need to be taken to initialize stuff, reading the disk for various stuff, processing some data, allocating memory (which will be zeored out, then initialized with whatever struct and data t…

I feel you are being unfair about the uninformed rant. Picking at a couple of things I know about: 1) I've tried installing both Macports and homebrew, and some utils did not work, as whichever got put in the path first, confused the other. I suppose I could have made a seperate symlink directory, for just the binaries I wanted. 2) I found 'brew install coreutils' broke some build scripts , which expected proper mac…

I agree on package management; I haven't used Homebrew, but I definitely find MacPorts breakage much more often than I find Debian breakage, even in Debian sid/unstable.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#33

After two decades of Unix use, in 2000 I switched to Apple and OSX - the only reason I considered it was because of the design of the Titanium Powerbook, which I saw in those days as an amazing piece of hardware design, which - amazingly - gave me a Unix workstation in a fantastic portable package. I simply couldn't believe that Apple, of all people, were delivering what I'd wanted for years - a smart, functional, fu…

How is the power management? I run a linux (ubuntu) thinkpad for work, and while I find the OS pleasant to use, I have found the battery life dire compared to windows-using colleagues.

I run ubuntu 11.10 on a thinkpad and I find that battery life is on a par with Windows.

You might want to investigate the ASPM power regression issue; pcie_aspm=force might work for you (or wait for ubuntu 12.04 which cw the 3.2 kernel containing the fix)

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#34
post #23

Inactive memory is not an OS X specific, and it's actually implemented in a number of other OSes, including FreeBSD. > when it's on disk, it definitely is not made active quickly. If an application is unloaded then many operations need to be taken to initialize stuff, reading the disk for various stuff, processing some data, allocating memory (which will be zeored out, then initialized with whatever struct and data t…

I feel you are being unfair about the uninformed rant. Picking at a couple of things I know about: 1) I've tried installing both Macports and homebrew, and some utils did not work, as whichever got put in the path first, confused the other. I suppose I could have made a seperate symlink directory, for just the binaries I wanted. 2) I found 'brew install coreutils' broke some build scripts , which expected proper mac…

1) You could also create some wrapper scripts setting the path, or have someting inspired by virtualenv handle it, or maybe different terminal profiles. Those breakings really are edge cases.

2) Don't put them in the PATH. They're prefixed with 'g' so you can make an non-prefixed alias for your interactive shell, and use the prefixed variant in your scripts if need be. If you write portable scripts you're either using common features or use some vars for those utils, aren't you?

3) g++? that's not in homebrew...

Honestly though, MacPorts is a real pain. That's why I worked with others to bring Arch's pacman on OSX (dubbed ArchOSX) some years ago, but binary hosting was proving being a chore, and then Homebrew started taking off, and in my case Just Works.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#35
I think this is mostly a case of someone who develops for Linux, but prefers to develop on his desktop instead of a development server that is close to the production environment. This results in requiring the desktop to be closer to that of the production environment. I think this is the main reason I've seen people switch away from having a Mac. Personally, I've always seen my desktop and laptop as a terminal and this approach has been working for me for 20 years now, it also allows me to not having to upgrade my desktop a lot or waste a chunk of my life fiddling with it.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#36
I think the bottom line is that the author is used to working with Debian and thus perceives differences between OS X and Debian as bugs.

It is true that jumping between Linux and OS X can be difficult at times. It's also true that Debian's packaging system is better than OS X's.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#37
In one paragraph he says he has four gigabytes of memory, and after switching to LInux, he says he has eight.

It seems he's misunderstanding inactive memory, which can be either filesystem caching (since it's already backed on disk, can be freed with no penalty) or allocated memory by the processes but not recently used (which would count as used under Linux, and when running out of free mem, would be paged to disk on both Linux and Mac OS X).

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#38
I recently went back to GNU/Linux (Ubuntu). This was after a three year stint on OSX though. OSX is good for people who don't like to tweak. I'm much happier with my Ubuntu laptop than I was with my Macbook, now I have it set up how I like. I'm generally happier using free software anyway.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#39
This is fairly spot on. Apple makes really nice laptop/desktop hardware, but though OSX as been getting a lot better, it is still a terrible playschool excuse for a unix-based operating systems go when compared to *BSD or Linux.

OSX is certainly a better choice for the pointy-pointy-clicky-clicky masses than windows by far, but we have chromeos and ubuntu for them now. Lets face it, OSX is made to suit the needs of people who just want to use social networks, play farmville, and not worry about running constant spyware scans. It is also largely appeals for people that have been trained that the Adobe Suite is the only way to do professional media/web work, but at least know enough to realize the entire windows ecosystem is irrecoverably broken. (Obviously I am generalizing and there are certainly exceptions but you must admit this is the majority)

OSX is not, nor will it ever likely be made for serious hackers or sysadmins that actually care how things work at a low level, like to choose their own window manager, manage memory, write/apply kernel patches to support new hardware, run enterprise-level systems with rebootless kernel upgrades, have low level file-system control/choices, get and apply same-day security patches, have custom kernel-level security extensions that compile into every binary on the system etc. It is also certainly not for the wider range of users and developers that want an operating system they can install on their existing hardware that for most common tasks "just works", and/or want to easily manage all the software on their system with a mostly unbiased package repository system where everything is free, and where most of it can be legally modified.

I also found it interesting the author chose to give up the multitouch trackpad he liked for a lenovo, after just saying the macbook was nicer hardware. Debian runs great on Apple hardware.

I personally run Arch Linux on my macbook pro and I have full multitouch trackpad with the same gestures, keyboard backlight, all the special buttons work, etc. Many other major distros also have run smoothly on my new and old style mac minis, friends macbooks, and my macbook pro. I daresay many major Linux distros support a lot of Apple hardware better than Apple does.

Decent hardware, complete control over the software, and I can dual boot OSX when I happen to need to open some proprietary formatted file once in a while. Works out fairly well.

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