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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)

#201

Post by niels_olson »

munchhausen wrote: post #41
danbee wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My first distro was openSuSE 10.1, before KDE4, in 2006. The system has been upgraded to a new machine, now headless, and now lives on openSuSE factory. Running through VNC KDE is still a decent interaction. It spoiled me to all other implementations of KDE. OpenSuSE has a lot of other tidbits going for it too. YAST2 being huge!

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

#202

Post by jvm »

batista wrote: post #142
Hackura wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poss…

As someone who administers a lot of Macs and a few LInux machines, package management on Macs is simply indefensibly bad. There is no getting around it. Apple chose not to provide this as a service to their users.

I use a Mac laptop and would never have written this post. But I don't have to pretend that the package installation setup on OSX is remotely acceptable. It is horrible. Stuff breaks or won't install all the time. On mainstream Linux distros, stuff generally Just Works.

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

#203

Post by technomancy »

mellifluousmind wrote: post #149
jrmg wrote: post #69

Earlier 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…

> So why the heck I use Mac still? Because of the driver support is still far better than Linux.

I feel like this is a stereotype that just won't die.

Yes, up till a few years ago you might have to do some poking in /etc to get things working, but as long as you spend a few minutes looking up basic background info before you buy those problems just don't happen these days. I haven't had to edit a config file to get hardware working since 2007.

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

#205

Post by alwillis »

Everything is a tradeoff. There's so much more going on in Mac OS X (especially Lion) than a typical Linux distro that you are literally talking apples and oranges.

For my money, Mac OS X makes the right set of tradeoffs to give an overall good to great user experience, even at the command line. It gets enough of the right things correct that for a developer/hacker/tinkerer, they can take it from there and add whatever else they need.

For me, Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/) has been amazingly useful. I can install any of the popular Linux distros and configure them anyway I want without worrying about Mac OS X's installed apps and libraries. A killer feature: because Mac OS X and VirtualBox share folders, I can still use all of my Mac OS X tools (editors, IDEs, whatever) with Linux. And thanks to Chef, I can spin-up specialized configurations in just minutes. Having access to apt-get is cool and all, but being able to create specialized, configured environments using Chef cookbooks is faster and way less error-prone.

All of this (and more) and I still get all of the benefits of Mac OS X native applications, superb driver support, etc. And all of this on 4MB 2009 MacBook Pro.

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

#206

Post by calloc »

WayneDB wrote: post #144
batista wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I am a software developer and I use Mac OS X. I develop Unix backend server systems. I use Mac OS X as my primary build platform, then actually run on top of FreeBSD.

I use homebrew for almost all of the dependencies that I have, there are one or two that I compile by hand.

I've not had any issues. Best of all, I don't need the g* stuff to do my builds. I am perfectly happy with clang and the BSD tools available.

I don't understand why people purchase Mac OS X based computers then want to run GNU coreutils on top of it, or want to Linuxize their entire install. Off course something is going to break at that point, especially when build tools expect certain versions of certain tools to be available.

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

#207

Post by Flow »

brown9-2 wrote: post #170
Flow wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But what is your point? I never meant this to be a MacPorts vs HomeBrew discussion, I've only used HomeBrew.

Being downvoted I'm obviously missing something. Care to let me know what it is instead of just downvoting me?

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

#208

Post by calloc »

technomancy wrote: post #203
mellifluousmind wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> So why the heck I use Mac still? Because of the driver support is still far better than Linux. I feel like this is a stereotype that just won't die. Yes, up till a few years ago you might have to do some poking in /etc to get things working, but as long as you spend a few minutes looking up basic background info before you buy those problems just don't happen these days. I haven't had to edit a config file to get h…

I've had to edit configurations files to get hardware working in the last month.

On a laptop we have here at the office I had to disable a certain driver from loading before a different driver or else the two would squabble over the wifi card and it would never show up.

The other thing that is more software related than hardware is that it is a MS Windows shop, all of the local domains are machine.domainname.local. This conflicts with MDNS as you could imagine, so the Linux machines are unable to access any of the resources on the machines named machine.domainname.local because MDNS would respond with a failure. Had to modify /etc/nsswitch.conf to fix that issue.

Linux is not without its failures. Saying it just works is certainly not the case. Whereas the Mac OS X machines I deploy come out of the box, get configured and are ready to go. Drivers work, software works, don't need to go googling for hours trying to figure out why ping won't resolve a machine.domainname.local address but dig is doing just fine.

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

#209

Post by calloc »

jvm wrote: post #202
batista wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poss…

As someone who administers a lot of Macs and a few LInux machines, package management on Macs is simply indefensibly bad. There is no getting around it. Apple chose not to provide this as a service to their users. I use a Mac laptop and would never have written this post. But I don't have to pretend that the package installation setup on OSX is remotely acceptable. It is horrible. Stuff breaks or won't install all th…

Apple's users are not people that dive into the command line. Apple's users are people that open the App Store and have their "package management" solution.

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

#210

Post by 4ad »

Terretta wrote: post #114
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 do happen to have an 8 GB machine, and almost never reboot (only reboot for OS updates). I run half a menu-bar full of resident helper apps, like Dropbox (a big one), Fantastical, ScanSnap, Xmarks (another big one), Transmit (another big one), Evernote, and more. I also keep Apple Mail running, mapped to a half dozen Gmail IMAP accounts. I have "geek tool" updating my desktop with iCal appointments and various ps o…

You add the individual RSS of every process, but processes share physical pages, so that doesn't make any sense. You're counting physical pages more than once. For example on my 4GB laptop you're command yields 5.6GB, and I don't even have a swap partition.
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