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

dywypi.org

41–50 of 334 posts

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

#41
post #7
post #3

Last July I bought one of the new Macbook Air's. The price for the hardware you got was unbeatable, and that was ignoring build quality! While previous Air's were anemic tarted up netbooks, the 2011 Air's were (and are) powerful enough for everyday use. There was just one problem with the Air however. Horrible Linux support. I'd been using Kubuntu happily for years. After looking at all the ugly dirty hacks people we…

I've read that OpenSUSE is one of the best KDE distro's around.

openSUSE is the best KDE distro around, not the least because the vast majority of SUSE developers use KDE. Dogfooding really works in this case.

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

#42
I can relate to the OP: I like OSX for general work, but prefer Linux for programming workflow and tooling (mainly because of the debian package system). My solution from now on is to do my dev work inside a Linux VM (through Virtualbox). Seems to work well. Would love to see others experiences with similar setups, anyone else going a similar route?

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

#43
I was considering going the other way - but after reading this, maybe I'll stick where I am.

--

One thing that does seem a bit odd:

>"I'm a long time Ubuntu user, but this time I decided to go with Debian. Why? Mostly because our servers are Debian and because latest updates of Ubuntu have mostly focused on breaking the desktop environment."

vs.

> "Do I miss something? Sure. Even though Linux in modern times mostly works out of the box, there's still slight issues with external displays, for example I can't set the 30" Dell monitor at work to be the only display without doing some xrand magic. I guess that's really the only thing I'm missing from OS X, a sane and automatic way of handling external displays."

I'm a bit sick of hearing this meme perpetuated. Give Unity a chance ... in fact, the author's main gripe about Debian is resolved in a really fluid way by Ubuntu + Unity. I think Unity's multi-monitor support is one reason why it's worth sticking with.

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

#44
What an uninformed rant.

When someone rants about memory usage it is usually a sign he knows nothing what he is talking about. On virtual memory systems with on-demand paging that use shared libraries and where all file system I/O is mmap(2) based, memory is managed in a very different way than what most people expect. It's understandable, most people don't know and don't have to know what virtual memory is, even if they have a superficial understanding of swapping. Most people, even most technical people, don't know about the implications of shared libraries in memory measurement.

The users are presented with data they don't understand. Everybody talks about things like "this app is using 300MB of RAM", when such statements don't make any sense in the modern world. The way file systems, file system caches, virtual memory, and shared libraries in the context of virtual memory interact is architecturally identical on all major operating systems today, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, and the BSDs. There are various differences in implementation making each system optimized for particular workloads, but understanding the differences between the system is out of reach of most people who complain on their blogs, and it only affect out-of-reach workloads anyway. It's funny how much can one advocate for something when all alternatives are the same.

But all memory management rants are nothing compared to mentioning Mac OS X' repair disk permissions feature. Of course, this feature doesn't magically repair anything, but it's sold as a panacea. I read the first paragraph about memory management and decided to give it one more chance, but then repair permissions was mentioned as a solution. Sorry, this is no HN worthy.

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

#45
I think we should vote for the linuxbook pro: http://instablogg.com/3kIvTM

The truth is macbooks are not good as linux machines, and it's a shame no other company makes similarly solid hardware. OSX has zero appeal to me as it's very limited but the hardware just feels so sturdy, and as someone who tends to mistreat my laptops a lot i would really like to have a small unibody laptop that does not need 3 adapters everywhere.

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

#46
post #8
post #3

Last July I bought one of the new Macbook Air's. The price for the hardware you got was unbeatable, and that was ignoring build quality! While previous Air's were anemic tarted up netbooks, the 2011 Air's were (and are) powerful enough for everyday use. There was just one problem with the Air however. Horrible Linux support. I'd been using Kubuntu happily for years. After looking at all the ugly dirty hacks people we…

Kubuntu isn't on death watch, there was one person being paid to work on it, the rest was community support. The last version he didn't even work on (he was off working on bazaar or something) If Kubuntu does die it will be at least like 3 releases out.

I dont find that encouraging - 4.8 was the first update that badly broke my system in a long time ... since the original 4 upgrade IIRC.

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

#47
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…

You're not really fair. Yes, it's true that osx has 3rd-party-package-manager. But it's also true that they can be very complicated, or simply broken. The easy'ness of a good linux-distribution is just not possibly with osx. The days where you need to hack yourself something togehter, just to get some basic applications, are gone...at least on linux.

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

#48

I can relate to the OP: I like OSX for general work, but prefer Linux for programming workflow and tooling (mainly because of the debian package system). My solution from now on is to do my dev work inside a Linux VM (through Virtualbox). Seems to work well. Would love to see others experiences with similar setups, anyone else going a similar route?

Yeah. It runs well enough for me to get work done, and I still have OSX around for handling the hardware (external monitor management and sleep/resume) and running some software. What is your setup, and do you use the 3D hardware support? I'm on an '11 Air, and I find the 3D usage introduces instability in my setup.

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

#49

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…

This is pretty similar to my story except I was using Macs before OS X came out. I grew up using Macs (my first computer was an SE/30) but I started playing around with Linux around the end of the 90s. When Apple released OS X I was really excited and thought I'd be able to have the best of both systems but I'm really uninterested in OS X at this point. I'm currently using a Santa Rosa MacBook Pro from 2007 and despite having absolutely wretched touchpad support in Linux (the cursor doesn't like to move in diagonals...) I'm much happier running it than I was with Mac OS.

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

#50
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…

The purge command is pretty much the worst thing you can do to OS X, essentially blowing away the filesystem cache. Back when I worked at Apple, I would use it to debug seek-incurred race conditions in various files.

So much bunk in that article.

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