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

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

#131

Post by 4ad »

jakobe wrote: post #111
4ad wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Activity Monitor is a tool too blunt for these kind of scenarios. It pains me, Mac OS X has DTrace which makes it a breeze to find out what really happens, however, the only GUI tools built on top of DTrace are profiler for programmers, nothing for the casual user. Activity Monitor presents data that's not really useful and does so in an intrusive manner and in a confusing display. Mac OS X already comes with parts o…

If your problem is that you are running out of RAM, Activity monitor will tell you precisely what app is the culprit. Nothing "blunt" there. If you want to know why a specific app is frozen (beachballing), you can click the "Sample Process" button in Activity monitor to perform a time profile. Yes, if you want more details, you have to use Instruments or write your own DTrace scripts. But I doubt that even a time pro…

Sorry, but no, you're just illustrating the problem I've mentioned. In a virtual memory system with on-demand paging, memory mapped I/O, shared libraries and copy on write pages even measuring and interpreting memory stats is very difficult and subtle.

The "real memory" column is resident set size, a completely useless metric for the problem at hand because of many reasons. One reason is that much of the physical pages can be shared, indeed most of them usually are, on my system a chrome process has a 120MB RSS, but after closer inspection 110MB is shared, and after even closer inspection 90MB is shared with non-chrome processes. Closing the process with top RSS usage might do very little for decreasing memory pressure. Another reason is that physical memory usage is very misleading, if the system is swapping, a process has less resident physical pages than the virtual pages it uses, that's the reason the system is swapping in the first place! A process can thrash memory and have a relatively small RSS.

You also simply assume what the problem is without actually testing for it. You need to look why the system spends time in kernel mode, maybe it's not swapping, most likely is not swapping in this particular case, it's more likely to be the random I/O caused on-demand paging of memory mapped things or something more subtle, like copy-on-write pages being written to. It also could be a million other things.

Even if the problem is caused by memory pressure, memory pressure is a remarkably generic term, the VM system has many components and different components are affected by different workloads. A simple metric like RSS can't tell much.

Yes, Activity Monitor is very blunt tool.

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

#133

Post by mgcross »

nsomaru wrote: post #80
CJefferson wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Any advice on how to acheive this? I have a slight edge-case, where I would like to install Debian Mint onto a 32GB flash drive, and boot from that. I have a Macbook Air and disk space is at a premium. Googling around has been to no avail. If it's possible (though absolutely not necessary) – my OSX and Debian files could be shared when booted into either – that would be great!

You might need an external optical drive to install to the flash drive. But booting from USB may be difficult. You could try reFit http://refit.sourceforge.net/

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

#134

Post by stoolpigeon »

gst wrote: post #4
beloch wrote: 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…

Why can't you just take a standard Ubuntu and install the KDE packages? As far as I understand Kubuntu it's exactly the same as vanilla Ubuntu, but just uses different default packages.

This is what I do with Fedora. I started using RedHat in 2000 or so and it's been my OS of choice since. People often assume I'm a gnome user - but I jumped to KDE in the first few months, and never switched back. I do install both though, as disk space is cheap and I like having the ability to run some Gnome applications.

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

#135

Post by batista »

CJefferson wrote: post #25
lloeki wrote: 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'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.

Yeah, you could. Also, why install both? Anyway, welcome to software. It ain't perfect. You think it'll be better with Linux? I've had happen to me on Debian a few times, and lotsa times with RPMs. But even if it does not happen, there are several other software you cannot install on Linux, like, all Mac Cocoa Apps, from iWork to Photoshop. If you don't care about having access to those, then you don't need OS X in the first place.

I found 'brew install coreutils' broke some build scripts , which expected proper mac tools, if I put them all in path.

So, you generally wanted a Mac in order to install large quantities of third party unix software in the core system on top of same regular binaries???? Do you go install FreeBSD and then add a Linux userland? Do you install Debian/Ubuntu etc and then go change the system, say, Python? Because people that tried it also found it's a world of pain.

I can't comment on the memory, except that I find my 4GB of RAM seems to go much further when I dual-boot my macbook into Linux. It might happen to be the programs that I run.

You're doing it wrong.

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

#136

Post by tluyben2 »

Is there anyone who got Linux to work full on a Macbook or MB Pro? I get most flavors of Linux to boot and get a nice X running, however, things I cannot miss like the touchpad control, screen backlight controls and keyboard backlight are completely not working. Also the battery is falling faster than my Android under Linux.

Is there any Linux working well? I have no problem with tweaking (I hacked on device drivers on previous laptops when they didn't work), but even with tweaking I never managed to get it working well. Otherwise I can have nice Apple hardware with my favorite OS....

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

#137

Post by stoolpigeon »

rplnt wrote: post #26
sho_hn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I'm fond of Fedora's KDE offering as I explained the other day: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3561927 Again, not that there is any reason to leave Kubuntu if you're presently happy with what it offers you.

I've been using Fedora with KDE as my primary system for a year now. And after switching from f14 to f16 2 months ago I decided to leave KDE and try the gnome3 again (perhaps Unity on ubuntu). Why? Because KDE sucks. Ok, I should explain. KDE is great. So much better than gnome2 that people love for some very strange reason (but I guess some /same?:)/ people loved win95). I love its customizability. I like its unifie…

KDE on Fedora is my primary environment and has been for years, even through the rough times when 4 came out. Ugly is subjective but I'm not sure what you mean by 'works bad'. Unless you don't like design choices. My F16 machines have been rock solid and I've had no major problems with KDE.

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

#138

Post by batista »

bad_user wrote: post #59
lloeki wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usin…

3) g++? that's not in homebrew... He probably meant GCC, which does have recipes in Homebrew. Homebrew started taking off, and in my case Just Works This is the first time I ever heard anyone saying it. In general Homebrew did a good job for me, but it did break on me a couple of times. And when it did, fixing it caused me a lot of stress, because in the end it's really not much better than " ./configure && make && s…

This is the first time I ever heard anyone saying it.

What do you mean? People are saying that about homebrew all the time. Have you read on blog posts on it?

It just worked for me too, and I have around 20-25 packages installed.

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

#139

Post by desireco42 »

I can only applaud the author for switching to Linux. Developers using Linux will develop for Linux and we will all be better off. What exactly reasons are, are of less importance.

I really tried several times to switch completely and it's not easy. My bigest gripe is that even with graphics acceleration firefox and chrome are still sluggish in certain aspects and also productivity shortcuts are missing on linux. I tried different flavors and just couldn't make things work. It can't be my everyday machine yet.

If someone would make distribution focused on developers, that would be the best things that happened to linux. Do I really need to install git as package and get stupid office packaged? Zsh and gvim and emacs out of the box.

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