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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)

#251

Post by geoffpado »

ajross wrote: post #193
semanticist wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Apple don't provide these package management tools, volunteering third-parties do. Apple are never going to provide Linux-style package management tools because the market for them is minuscule compared to Apple's real market: normal people. For normal people, there's the App Store.

Developers aren't "normal people" then? If that's seriously the attitude Apple takes towards its developer community ("no, we won't give you the software you need, get it from the crappy community projects") then why do you put up with it? It seems like the OP's point is pretty valid to me. I use an OS that gives me what I need to do my job.

> Developers aren't "normal people" then?

No. They aren't. Developers have needs far greater than that of your average everyday user. Apple sells a machine that is the best possible for the greatest number of users, and doesn't really cater to niche markets. I don't get what's surprising about this.

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

#252

Post by nailer »

technomancy wrote: post #249
calloc wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…

> Saying it just works is certainly not the case. I said if you spend a little time scoping these kinds of things out up-front, it's very easy to get a machine on which it will work without issues. Obviously if you found a machine lying around the office and tried to load an OS on it, your chances of it working well are not going to be as good. You can't just load OS X on random hardware and expect it to work either.

After 10 years of Linux desktops, including purchasing a laptop with low-performance hardware just because it used entirely OSS drivers, I still has issues with basic things like multiple monitor support (it worked, but only when I disabled compositing, which makes redraw suck).

Sorry, from my personal experience that still isn't true, as much as I wish it were.

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

#253

Post by bwarp »

agumonkey wrote: post #219
bwarp wrote: post #11

I've had a few Apple machines over the years (mainly as test machines and toys). I've had two MacBooks, one MacBook Pro, an iMac and a couple of Mac Minis. I have nothing now other than a cheap second hand desktop PC (and some cash in pocket!): I agree with the build quality - they are good quality as in good materials and good fit. However, with my EE cap on, the designs themselves are bad and are quite dangerous. W…

Funny they did a development comparison (sparcstation 2 could run sunos4 but i'm not sure) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGBoJjfMuAk Did you use a different way under SunOS4 ? it seems a lot of boilerplate on the video (apple bias I guess)

That video is a fallacy. I see where Apple's marketing started now.

As per everyone else back then, we wrote pretty much everything in Perl and occasionally C when Perl hit a bottleneck. GUIs were built in Tk, not in OpenLook. Still far easier and quicker than IB on XCode.

TBH it took as long as it takes in Visual Studio now, which says exactly what little progress the world has made in the last 15 years.

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

#254

Post by calloc »

technomancy wrote: post #249
calloc wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…

> Saying it just works is certainly not the case. I said if you spend a little time scoping these kinds of things out up-front, it's very easy to get a machine on which it will work without issues. Obviously if you found a machine lying around the office and tried to load an OS on it, your chances of it working well are not going to be as good. You can't just load OS X on random hardware and expect it to work either.

You just claimed that Linux hadn't been that way in a while... I just provided a counter-point.

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

#255

Post by Zev »

4ad wrote: post #104
jakobe wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open activity monitor, and check which applications use a lot of memory. (Look at the "Real Mem" column). If your computer frequently freezes, the problem is mostly a specific application (Virtualbox comes to mind), not just Mac OS X itself. 4GB are more than enough for casual browsing.

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…

The casual user doesn't know what any of the words in your post means.

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

#256

Post by hazov »

billpatrianakos wrote: post #183
hazov wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I really think you know much more about memory management than the writer of the original post, the question for me is using chrome with a few tabs (8 for example) and Dropbox besides the default applications I face huge slowdowns (the system becomes unresponsible for a few minutes), the same happens with Safari, for a system that was described for me as "it just works" this really sucks. This with 4GB of RAM i…

I can't directly answer the question but I get the feeling most memory issues have to do with an individual's use of their system, and not the system itself. I have a 2009 iMac and a little netbook running Xubuntu. The iMac has 4gb RAM and the netbook just a single gig RAM and not even 2ghz processor. The netbook doesn't slow down on me while the Mac is prone to freeze ups. I Could say "Linux is better than my Mac be…

I thought about that some time ago but I use the laptop mainly to browse the web, never more than 10 tabs, and login via ssh in a Linux desktop. Maybe it is slow because of that, but the main problem I have with this is that I get no slowdowns running Linux and FreeBSD in the same computer and with the same use case.

This computer stays up for several days[1], and I suspect the main cause is because of Chrome leaking memory.

[1] Now: 20:16 up 43 days, 23:41, 2 users, load averages: 0.38 0.31 0.26

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

#257

Post by hazov »

calloc wrote: post #212
hazov wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I really think you know much more about memory management than the writer of the original post, the question for me is using chrome with a few tabs (8 for example) and Dropbox besides the default applications I face huge slowdowns (the system becomes unresponsible for a few minutes), the same happens with Safari, for a system that was described for me as "it just works" this really sucks. This with 4GB of RAM i…

I've never had this happen, and I run Mac OS X on a MacBook Pro 5,5 with 4 GB's of RAM (core2duo at 2.33 Ghz). This laptop is from the mid-2009's. My default set of apps that I run: 1. Safari 2. Mail.app 3. Terminal.app 4. Adium 5. Twitter 6. iCal 7. X11 8. MacVim 9. GitX 10. Activity Monitor I have no slow-downs and I regularly compile the entire companies code-base on this little machine. Sure it isn't fast compare…

Besides of that OS X works really fine for me, although I do not use it to serious work, which is programming in C++, Python and R since I work as a statistician, I will upgrade the memory to 8GB and see if things become better for me.

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

#259

Post by ghz »

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 am sure things are simpler if you pay to stay on the latest version of MacOS, but pick up a laptop that has an old version of MacOS (as I did last week) and try to install a modern version of python on it without reaching for your credit card and/or signing up for all sorts of accounts/development programmes. Is it too much to ask to be able to install gcc on a machine that someone has paid > $1000 for? Search for Xcode asks you to install macshop (or whatever it is called) which in turn asks you to first upgrade your OS, which in turn asks you to install macshop.. etc. Terrible experience, made me pine for Windows. I got things working, with a lot of googling, but still have no idea how and where things are installed and how to uninstall them.

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

#260

Post by wilmoore »

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…

Can't say I love the symlinks; however, I use homebrew for convenience, but in most cases it's ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local ...

This rarely fails. When it does, it's user error.

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