If I were in the OP's position, I would just run my preferred Linux dev environment inside a VM.
Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)
161–170 of 334 posts
Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)
#162Just 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 d…
> 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.
This matches my own experience pretty well. I have a MBP with 8GB of RAM and a Linux box with 16GB of RAM at work for Java development, but that's because our Java web app at work requires 7GB+ (!) to get off the ground.
Most of my own personal development, be it Java (IntelliJ) or Python (ditto) or C++ (XCode or Eclipse) or C# (MonoDevelop), is done on a MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM with no problems. I'm getting a MBP (yes, with 8GB of RAM, the horror!) largely because I want to be able to replace the optical with a second SSD so I can dual-boot Windows (and because 1680x1050 in a 15" laptop is kind of really friggin' nice, 1366x768 is kind of cramped).
Plus, even if the writer of this post was on point--8GB of RAM is dirt cheap in 2012.
Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)
#163Interesting. I am using OS X 10.5.8 with only 2G memory and when programming with Python, PHP, gcc and Apache this is actually OK. Not brilliant, but not slow either. The machine tends to be on all day. I have noticed that Linux does seem to page more than it used to in recent years, this varies with the kernel. There is more Linux disk activity these days than in previous versions, regardless of what swappiness I te…
It's because you're using 10.5, last of the great OS-X's. Performance requirements went up in 10.6 and WAY up in 10.7. I have an old MBPro running 10.5 and it consistently feels faster (and is provably far more stable) than my new model work machine running 10.7
Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)
#164Earlier 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!
> my OSX and Debian files could be shared when booted into either
You can but you'll have to share data on a non-journaled HFS+ partition for it to be writable from Linux. Watch out for UIDs/GIDs: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBook#Home_Sharing
ArchLinux has their img booting from usb, so I don't see why not.
Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The inactive count is a misleading figure in many ways. It includes both 'dirty' and 'clean' (i.e. identical to what's on disk, and hasn't been altered) memory that's not been used for a long time. Purging 'clean' memory is instantaneous. The only cost you'll see is writing 'dirty' memory out to disk.
Your explicit purging is changing the cost of writing dirty data out from an ongoing cost to a single, longer, upfront cost. Instead of writing only when more RAM is required, you're forcing it all to happen at once.
Incidentally, the OS does try to keep an area of free RAM so that some memory can be allocated instantly, it's not only swapping things out when RAM is absolutely full. It's possible though to outrun this process if an app tries to allocate huge amounts of RAM at once though (i.e. more than is kept free for this purpose).
For your specific case, presuming apps are behaving well (see below) you would be better off quitting apps and relaunching them when you need them later. This will free up app the dirty RAM they've allocated (just like when you purge), but the 'clean' inactive RAM will not be purged (because that's not necessary - as I said, it's free to purge that kind of memory when it's needed for something else).
You also want to run Activity Monitor when your system is in it's bad state and see if it's one of the apps you're using in particular that's allocating lots of memory (check out the "Real Mem" column). The OS can't do anything if it's an app that's really allocating and writing to memory, it's obviously not able to just discard this written-to memory.
Really though, if you want to do all those things at once, more RAM might be required. Remember, with VMWare and the iOS Simulator running, you've got two whole other OSes running at the same time, it's reasonable they'd require lots of memory to work well!).
By the way, the purge command was written to simulate /worst case/ conditions when performance testing. It's designed to flush out caches so that the system has to e.g. load all an app's code from disk when launching.
[Source: I worked analysing this kind of thing at Apple until a couple of years ago].
Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)
#166After 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 of Ubuntu on the Macbook and does close-lid-to-sleep work flawlessly?
Those are the two non-starters for me with linux on a laptop. OSX just does an awesome job with both of these.
Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)
#167Had an iMac for 2 years, loved it for the first few months, and then, over time I grew less and less enamoured with the OS.
1) Finder just plain sucks 2) Window manager is complete azz I guess I prefer Compiz keystroke-snap-to-grid style window management vs dragging windows to desired positions and generally having a cluster-fuch of windows all over the place 3) Spinning beach balls, fun, OSX, the new Windows 4) Overall a McDonald's Linux for the masses
Yes, hardware support is excellent, out of the box works fine, blah, blah; in fact, for those suffering in Windows, I always suggest they buy a Mac; however, saying that, if you are comfortable outside of the GUI, why waste another moment on OSX?
Absolutely stoked here on Fedora 14/Gnome/Compiz ;-)
Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)
#168Earlier 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…
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…
I'm curious, what are some of the pains you've had with MacPorts? I've been using it for about 8 months with no real issues, but then again I'm not a C/C++/native developer.
Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)
#169Earlier 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…
Why are solutions like Homebrew and MacPorts insisting on compiling the packages locally?
So that an OS upgrade, in which Apple tends to include arbitrary upgrades to system libraries (or the Ruby/Python etc version), doesn't break whatever you installed with Homebrew/MacPorts.
Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)
#170HomeBrew and MacPort do screwed up lots geeks' Mac, seriously.
I thought that HomeBrew didn't even install things as root, so how can it fuck things up?
And since MacPorts installs everything in a separate directory from system tools/libraries, how could it screw anything up? Like Homebrew it never installs anything outside of it's home.