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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)

#181

Post by omerta »

beloch wrote: post #3

Last July I bought one of the new Macbook Air's. The price for the hardware you got was unbeatable, and that was ignoring build quality! While previous Air's were anemic tarted up netbooks, the 2011 Air's were (and are) powerful enough for everyday use. There was just one problem with the Air however. Horrible Linux support. I'd been using Kubuntu happily for years. After looking at all the ugly dirty hacks people we…

All Linux distros I have seen look tacky and gaudy compared to OSX. I guess that's just your style, though.

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

#182

Post by jebblue »

After years of DOS then Windows (various versions but not Vista or later), various RPM based Linux distributions with all the weird corruptible state RPM distros can get into this statement rings true to me:

"Most notably I get the ultimate software installation tool, apt-get. A tool that installs binary packages with their dependencies. A tool, that's universally supported by Google et al., so I don't even have any problems installing newest Chrome, for example."

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

#183

Post by billpatrianakos »

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…

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 because it doesn't slow down" but that's not fair. They each have their own pros and cons and I don't see one as being better than the other, it's all a matter of preference.

When the slowdowns bother me I look at usage. On the Mac I always have 4 spaces open (the dashboard is not set as a space on my Mac), and at all times I have the following apps open: Mail.app, Terminal.app, Chrome w/>=5 tabs at a time, MAMP, CodeKit, iTunes, and Sublime Text. Then Photoshop is open a lot in a addition to a lot of others that get opened at times. On the netbook I've got a terminal session, Chrome, and Sublime Text. That's it. It's no wonder the Mac slows down. So I'd say look how you use the thing. No machine has unlimited performance and when it comes to memory usage it's a lot like money in that the more you have the more you tend to spend and you never seem to be able to have enough.

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

#185

Post by zbuc »

brown9-2 wrote: post #168
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…

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.

I've had it fail to install packages for me before, forcing me to grab them from source, modify the source with patches, and compile by hand.

I've been using Homebrew for about a year and haven't ever had an issue like that.

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

#186

Post by jakobe »

4ad wrote: post #171
jakobe wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the point. The idea is not to determine exactly what's going on, because that doesn't matter. You mentioned the casual user before, but all these details are only important to specialists trying to debug an issue with a specific application. When you run out of RAM, it is completely irrelevant which application is thrashing, because the problem is that you run out of RAM . It doesn't matter if the rea…

Fantastic argument, user is having a problem, but it doesn't matter what's going on, let the user try arbitrary things which I already explained that are folklore and why they make no sense, maybe it works. If that's you advocate, let's stop here with this discussion, as there's no common ground. When you're having a problem, first you try to understand it in order to try to solve the root cause. Applying rules of th…

1) Nowhere have I suggested to "kill top RSS process". 2) If you start Activity Monitor, you immediately see if memory pressure could be the problem (well, after 30 seconds, because it takes time to start Activity monitor if you ran out of memory) 3) If you ran out of memory, looking at which apps use much RAM is useful. And it's not as unpredictable as you make it seem. Quitting an app, you'll free at least the private memory, and you might free some of the shared memory, and other processes (e.g. Window server) might also free some more memory as a consequence. This might not be a precise prediction, but it's not quite "impossible to assess".

I do not know how prevalent memory pressure is for other users. It's been the primary reason of "sluggish computer" for me. If you know more about this topic, I'd be thrilled to hear other possible explanations beyond "it's more complicated than that".

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

#187

Post by zbuc »

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.

As someone who uses both Linux(most familiar with Fedora and Ubuntu) and OS X regularly I have to say I completely disagree with you.

My Linux systems are always a headache. Last week I pulled a recommended patch from the system updater and it broke Xorg. I had to remove it by hand and reinstall it.

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

#188

Post by surrealize »

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…

Part of the rationale for package management with dependencies in linux is so that libraries are shared (only loaded into memory once) between different executables. If OS X is giving up some of that sharing in exchange for simpler installation, I wonder how much that has to do with the memory usage complaints in the comments here.

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

#189

Post by scott_s »

4ad wrote: post #131
jakobe wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your problem is that you are running out of RAM, Activity monitor will tell you precisely what app is the culprit. Nothing "blunt" there. If you want to know why a specific app is frozen (beachballing), you can click the "Sample Process" button in Activity monitor to perform a time profile. Yes, if you want more details, you have to use Instruments or write your own DTrace scripts. But I doubt that even a time pro…

Sorry, but no, you're just illustrating the problem I've mentioned. In a virtual memory system with on-demand paging, memory mapped I/O, shared libraries and copy on write pages even measuring and interpreting memory stats is very difficult and subtle. The "real memory" column is resident set size, a completely useless metric for the problem at hand because of many reasons. One reason is that much of the physical pag…

I do understand how memory works on modern systems, and I agree that Activity Monitor can still be used as a blunt tool.

My system (MBP, 4 GB of RAM) works beautifully most of the time, but I noticed that sometimes when I went to a new tab in Chrome, there was a multi-second delay. I opened up Activity Monitor, went to a new tab, and noticed that my disk activity had spiked. I figured that the memory system was swapping in/out a lot of pages, so I looked at rough memory usage, and saw that the Shockwave Flash plugin had close to 1 GB in RSS. I then realized that using YouTube as a music player is probably not a good idea - Flash was designed to run as the main thing you're doing, not in the background while you're doing other things. I killed the tab, and I had no more problems.

Blunt tools can still be useful. The problem isn't the tool, it's the knowledge that people have when they use it. For example, I know that RSS overcounts, but I also suspect that the Flash plugin isn't sharing enough to make a big dent in 1 GB. And, it turns out I was right.

You wrote an excellent explanation above about modern memory systems, I find it strange that you're harping on this particular point so much.

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

#190

Post by taylorbuley »

mackal wrote: post #8
beloch wrote: post #3

Last July I bought one of the new Macbook Air's. The price for the hardware you got was unbeatable, and that was ignoring build quality! While previous Air's were anemic tarted up netbooks, the 2011 Air's were (and are) powerful enough for everyday use. There was just one problem with the Air however. Horrible Linux support. I'd been using Kubuntu happily for years. After looking at all the ugly dirty hacks people we…

Kubuntu isn't on death watch, there was one person being paid to work on it, the rest was community support. The last version he didn't even work on (he was off working on bazaar or something) If Kubuntu does die it will be at least like 3 releases out.

Canonical recently stopped funding Kubuntu: http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/canonical-to-stop-funding...
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