Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

dywypi.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 334 posts

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

#101

Post by amirf »

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…

Well said. I would add that for perl instead of using homebrew one can use 'perlbrew': http://perlbrew.pl/ which is a lot like RVM.

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

#102

Post by [deleted] »

hazov wrote: post #96
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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#103

Post by jakobe »

hazov wrote: post #96
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…

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…

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.

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

#104

Post by 4ad »

jakobe wrote: post #103
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…

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 of the DTrace toolkit, you can install whatever you're missing: http://www.brendangregg.com/dtrace.html#DTraceToolkit. These tools allow a very deep understanding of performance problems.

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

#105

Post by mrich »

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.

I think the trackpads are good (I mainly use the keyboard so I prefer the smaller ones over Apple's, because the keys are reachable more easily) What is it you don't like?

(I'm judging the T510, T60 was also ok)

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

#106

Post by AlisdairO »

jsvaughan wrote: post #33
AlisdairO wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the power management? I run a linux (ubuntu) thinkpad for work, and while I find the OS pleasant to use, I have found the battery life dire compared to windows-using colleagues.

I run ubuntu 11.10 on a thinkpad and I find that battery life is on a par with Windows. You might want to investigate the ASPM power regression issue; pcie_aspm=force might work for you (or wait for ubuntu 12.04 which cw the 3.2 kernel containing the fix)

Thanks, I'll give it a try.

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

#107

Post by draegtun »

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…

>> And of course this does not support installing Python, Ruby, Perl on any other software that has its own way of distributing software.

> which is bullshit (although there's no Perl)

Last time i looked Perl could be installed via homebrew...

  $ brew install perl
Also Perl can be installed via MacPorts...

  $ port install perl5
However my preferable way is to use perlbrew (http://perlbrew.pl) which allows you to install & manage multiple versions of Perl and it then allows you to use the normal CPAN toolchain to manage/install your modules.

  # install perlbrew (normal user in ~/perl5)
  $ curl -kL http://install.perlbrew.pl | bash
  
  # install & switch to perl 5.14.2 via Perlbrew
  $ perlbrew install perl-5.14.2
  $ perlbrew switch perl-5.14.2
  $ perl -v   # (will show the perlbrew perl 5.14.2)

  #  Add cpanminus to perl-5.14.2
  $ curl -L http://cpanmin.us | perl - App::cpanminus

  # load Moose module into perl-5.14.2
  $ cpanm Moose

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

#108

Post by dlikhten »

semanticist wrote: post #97
vacri wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That being said, if debian can do it for around 30,000 packages on almost as many architectures as OSX has mere hardware models, why can't OSX do it? With all the app stores and cloud services, Apple is big on 'quite a bit of infrastructure'.

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.

while I agree, the point is moot as this talks about developers. So yes, apple did not make a package management tool. That pisses developers off. Makes no difference because you suck it up if you want to develop for mac/ios.

Its kind of like developing on windows, for windows, gota do what u gotta do.

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

#109

Post by hazov »

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…

Well, I know the basic about SystemTap, but I'm not so much familiarized with low-level stuff, I'll look for DTrace to see what's happening. Thanks for the information.

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

#110

Post by mikemcquaid »

lloeki wrote: post #34
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…

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…

Homebrew does have binary packages (we call them bottles).

I'm the guy who implemented the feature and I am realising that as I didn't shout very loudly people don't realise that it exists.

For example Qt has a bottle: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/blob/master/Library/Formula...

The reason we aren't doing this for more packages is basically people power and hosting (as I'm not sure Sourceforge would be happy we hosting the number of binaries we'd want to have).

Hope that explains a bit. Feel free to comment if you think we're taking a good/bad approach here.

Post reply on HN