Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X) • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by chrisrhoden » Mon, Feb 13, 2012, 2:24 PM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #32

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…

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.

I have literally never had a problem with Homebrew.

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

#142

Post by batista » Mon, Feb 13, 2012, 2:34 PM UTC

Hackura wrote: post #47

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…

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.

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.

MacPorts is like FreeBSD ports and Fink is like apt-get. Brew is also dead-easy. While they're not perfect, there are some far more complicated systems in some Linux distros.

The easy'ness of a good linux-distribution is just not possibly with osx.

It is perfectly possible, as in nothing in OS X prevents it. It's just not happening/ed, because, well, not enough OS X users contribute to it, compared to the Debian/Ubuntu community.

Still, it's not that bad. I work with Ruby, Python, Node, C plus various web technologies, and use lots of unix stuff. I seldom have problems installing them with brew.

Also consider the alternative: I can install apps through the App Store or through a DMG image, that no Linux can run today (because they are native Cocoa apps). Stuff like Photoshop and Office, and Premiere, and Aperture, etc. The ease of installing industry standard proprietary apps lots of people need and a large number can't do without, is just not available in Linux.

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

#143

Post by kahawe » Mon, Feb 13, 2012, 2:35 PM UTC

Just because homebrew wasn't your thing doesn't make macs or OSX "stupid".

And I used to do Java development in eclipse/netbeans with db, ide and appserv all running on one machine that had 2GB and I never had any issues... memory hogs hello.

I have and am developing on nix, OS X and windos and I can still simply not understand what this guy is all about - basically it comes down to: for his style of work, some nix distribution where he can compile all sorts of additional packages might be the best option. But I never had any of the problems he talks about.

Also, OS X comes with python and perl on board...?

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

#144

Post by WayneDB » Mon, Feb 13, 2012, 2:37 PM UTC

batista wrote: post #135

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…

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…

So, you generally wanted a Mac in order to install large quantities of third party unix software...

Most software developers that use OS X just want a decent GUI on top of Unix. So yeah, they do generally want a Mac in order to install large quantities of third party Unix software.

Do you install Debian/Ubuntu etc and then go change the system, say, Python?

Yes. I have had no problems with it.

You're doing it wrong.

You're probably not doing enough to notice that memory usage absolutely sucks under OS X.

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

#145

Post by berkut » Mon, Feb 13, 2012, 2:41 PM UTC

4ad wrote: post #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…

But it's a real problem the "inactive" memory on OS X.

If I do a malloc of 7GB with 6 GB free and 800 MB of inactive memory on my MBP, the system starts paging before it deallocates the inactive memory.

If I ctrl-c the application, suddenly the active and inactive memory go down drastically, with inactive going to like 100 MB, so it obviously could have been given to the process wanting it before paging started.

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

#146

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 13, 2012, 2:43 PM UTC

jakobe wrote: post #119

ruediger wrote: post #116

I prefer Linux over OS X as well. The OSX userland is a strange mixture of GNU and BSD tools in sometimes ancient versions. OSX has a UNIX certification but there are some bugs in their POSIX API or even missing functions like clock_gettime. Linux seems more POSIX compliant. The OSX package managers suck. I tried fink, macports, and homebrew. A lot of packages are simply broken especially now after Apple switched to…

The problem is that you are treating Mac OS as if it was a Linux distro. If you want the Linux experience, with package managers and command line utilities and X11, then Mac OS is not a good choice. Package managers with automatic dependency resolution are a typical feature of a Linux installation. But they go against the core principles of Mac OS X. Software on Mac OS X is distributed as self-contained packages, tha…

[deleted]

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

#147

Post by timtadh » Mon, Feb 13, 2012, 2:44 PM UTC

jakobe wrote: post #119

ruediger wrote: post #116

I prefer Linux over OS X as well. The OSX userland is a strange mixture of GNU and BSD tools in sometimes ancient versions. OSX has a UNIX certification but there are some bugs in their POSIX API or even missing functions like clock_gettime. Linux seems more POSIX compliant. The OSX package managers suck. I tried fink, macports, and homebrew. A lot of packages are simply broken especially now after Apple switched to…

The problem is that you are treating Mac OS as if it was a Linux distro. If you want the Linux experience, with package managers and command line utilities and X11, then Mac OS is not a good choice. Package managers with automatic dependency resolution are a typical feature of a Linux installation. But they go against the core principles of Mac OS X. Software on Mac OS X is distributed as self-contained packages, tha…

I find this model to be gyre.

> they go against the core principles of Mac OS X. Software on Mac OS X is distributed as self-contained packages, that can either be simply dragged to the application folder or installed by the Mac OS Installer program (or with single click if the Software is available on the Mac App Store). Typical software written for the Mac has no external dependencies.

Except, they do. Many of those dependencies are built into the OS. The NS* api's and ect... Everything else they may have built their software on has to be distributed. Which means you may end up with multiple copies of the libraries, which is dumb.

The Linux package management model may be a bit cumbersome but it does solve the shared dependency problem nicely.

I don't disagree with you that the Mac OS X approach works -- it is just kludgy for developer tools (since many developer tools fall into the "shared dependency" category). It works well for non-dev users but not so well for developers. ---> Homebrew et all.

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

#148

Post by brcrth » Mon, Feb 13, 2012, 2:45 PM UTC

sirn wrote: post #95

mrich wrote: post #89

Regarding hardware quality: "...why there's no PC manufacturers that would have the same overall quality of the hardware." In my experience, business ThinkPads beat MacBooks by a mile for working (e.g. programming). I am surprised to see so many coders use MacBooks. Thinkpads have better ergonomics, are more robust and better performance/configurable hardware (e.g. RAM).

Do they still ship with unusable trackpads (that requires you to carry a mouse everywhere if you ever going to use your ThinkPad) or has that improved in recent years? It's the only pain point against ThinkPad for me.

If you're a programmer using Emacs/Vim you really don't care for trackpad or mouse for the great majority of your computer needs.

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

#149

Post by mellifluousmind » Mon, Feb 13, 2012, 2:50 PM UTC

jrmg wrote: post #69

jyrki wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm the author of the original post) You bring up good points and my article would need some clarification on some parts, I agree on that. I'll just write quick replies back to you, and try to format something on the article itself later. Purge really did free memory and quite a lot. I'm not too expert (as you probably can tell) how the OS X memory management works, but I mostly settled with solutions that seemed to…

The problem with the inactive memory is that it is not freed, it is swapped. So when hitting memory limits of my system, the computer started swapping. Just freeing the memory, in my case, would have been much quicker. Practically my machine was constantly swapping when the memory limit came up. That's just not true. If inactive memory is something that's already backed by disk (like a memory mapped file), it'll be d…

The problem with the way how OS X keeps data cached in the inactive memory is based on the assumption that you are going to re-use the same app within reasonable amount of time. With the current behavior/performance response (without knowing exactly how Apple engineers implemented it), it really feels like a giant garbage collection system that takes age to free up its own memory with no real sense of concept that if you don't use certain apps for day, chances are, it is going to take a long while before I use them again.

I am one of the devs out there running a Macbook Pro with 8Gig of memory (I wish I could have more but I have a 2010 old model). For web development, I have at least Firefox/Chrome/PhpStorm/SmartGit/Mamp/Thunderbird/Terminal/Notational Velocity/Dropbox/Alfred/Sophos AntiVirus open at all times. Now, a long the way, I may open a few other apps that I use rarely, like Photoshop/CyberDuck/VMWare Fusion/iTune/iCal/iOS Simulator/Preview/LibreOffice/Skype. Now, pretty quickly 8Gig gets used up, and the system runs to the ground shortly after.

If I then have VMWare Fusion shutdown for awhile, and relaunch later, the system really just can't take it anymore. The last resort? purge&

At least, that's my day-to-day experience with OSX. Personally, I find the memory management really lousy, worse than other other OSes I used in the past (both Windows & Ubuntu/Fedora/Gentoo).

So why the heck I use Mac still? Because of the driver support is still far better than Linux. With Mac, you are less likely in need of blacklist of some drivers because of freeze up issues.

Either way, I am definitely not a happy camper with the current memory management system in OS X

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

#150

Post by slowpoke » Mon, Feb 13, 2012, 2:50 PM UTC

RBerenguel wrote: post #98

jyrki wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm the author of the original post) You bring up good points and my article would need some clarification on some parts, I agree on that. I'll just write quick replies back to you, and try to format something on the article itself later. Purge really did free memory and quite a lot. I'm not too expert (as you probably can tell) how the OS X memory management works, but I mostly settled with solutions that seemed to…

I think the problem is that you used OS X for a year. I've been using my Mac for 4 years, and Linux for another 4. And I have Python (in fact I have at the same time Python 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 3 and 3.1 for testing purposes), I have installed so many packages I already lost the count. You only need to be sure the path is correct when doing it. And I have 2 Gigs of RAM. Mac OS can be a bit hungry, but there's an "easy" sol…

>Closing unused applications.

That's not a solution, that's a workaround. I'm sitting here with a 4GB RAM machine running Arch Linux with XMonad. I usually run the following applications in day to day usage:

    - Firefox Nightly with 50-100 tabs (largest memory hog, 
      the rest doesn't even come close)
    - Thunderbird
    - Pidgin
    - XChat
    - smplayer, which I usually keep open
    - deluge
    - mpd + ncmpcpp
    - half to one dozen of terminator instances with zsh, 
      most running some text mode applications like vim, 
      htop or the aforementioned ncmpcpp

I reboot my PC once in a blue moon, usually after kernel updates. otherwise it's running 24/7. Right now, I sit at ~35% memory (and that should include memory used for disk caching), a bit less than half of which is Firefox with ~16% (65 tabs). I usually never go over 50% unless compiling heavy stuff (like QT level heavy). I don't really know what the fuck OS X does to eat all that RAM, but it apparently does something wrong.