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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)

#241

Post by tikhonj »

calloc wrote: post #209
jvm wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, if Apple's users aren't the sort to dive into a command line, then most developers aren't Apple users.

Also, have you seen any modern, user friendly Linux distros (e.g. Ubunutu)? You never have to dive into the command line there and yet it has nice package management that just works.

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

#242

Post by ruediger »

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…

No, I'm treating OSX as a UNIX. It is advertised as such. I know that you can use the app bundles. But they are only useful for GUI applications. I usually run applications like octave or gnuplot from the terminal or other applications (e.g., Emacs).

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

#243

Post by ww520 »

May be too late for the Inactive page discussion, Windows has this concept of Standby page. It is in an intermediate stage between working set and the Free page list. It's not in a process' working set but still has the data for the process. If it's accessed, it's brought back into the work set. If the system runs out of Free pages, the Standby pages are "freed" into the Free list, becoming available to other processes.

It is like a weak reference memory page that can be brought back to life immediately but also be readied to be freed for other purposes.

Most disk cache memory pages, terminated process pages, and others are in the Standby list. They are read-only pages that can be reused or repurposed either way.

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

#244

Post by tikhonj »

ohgodthecat wrote: post #234
rbanffy wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last time my X broke was a couple years back. Ubuntu pushed a defective update. Before that, the last time something like that happened was when I was using Debian Sid. Breaking X is something you expect with Sid. And if you are running it, you re supposed to be able to fix it and submit a patch. If you are breaking X, you are doing something wrong.

I think it probably depends on the distro, I've had quite a few systems break on Arch because I didn't read update warnings on the Arch Linux website after they had pushed a bad update. Tangentially that is why I moved to xubuntu from Arch, though I'm sure Arch is a bit nicer with regards to headaches now. Fedora likes to break frequently though I don't know if packages as big as X are likely to fall through the crac…

Both Arch and, to a lesser extent, Fedora are aimed at more advanced users who want faster updates and newer technology over stability.

I think this is a great compromise, but it does mean you may have some issues with updates. That said, I have not had any issues on Fedora that weren't my doing.

I've been using Fedora for about a year. Earlier, I used OS X for about the same amount of time and I did have problems that weren't entirely my fault, largely with Java and Eclipse. Since all I was doing during that time was simple Java development for school, there just wasn't anything else that could have gone wrong.

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

#245

Post by Craiggybear »

sounds wrote: post #232
Craiggybear wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Glad in many ways I am still using 10.5 then. I've no problem with stability. As you mention it seems quite rock solid. I had no idea that the memory requirement for 10.6 or 10.7 was so high (I've heard anecdotal comments from non-tech friends). But then I'd also heard the official Apple line that 10.6 was meant to be better at memory management and slightly faster than 10.5 because the binaries were no longe…

10.6 adds a lot of new frameworks, which get loaded by Apple's apps, so memory usage goes up. 10.6 does free up disk space (but that's not as useful as memory). Obligatory: I also went back to 10.5 after spending some time on 10.6, fwiw.

Ah. That figures. Frameworks. Geez, there must be a whole raft of new ones in there now.

Thanks for the info.

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

#246

Post by dagw »

calloc wrote: post #206
WayneDB wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

I don't understand why people purchase Mac OS X based computers then want to run GNU coreutils on top of it

Because only Apple has figured out how to make and sell great laptops running Unix at a (relatively) reasonable price and where all the hardware and drivers just works out of the box. If I could have bought a computer as good as the macbook Air in every way, but with Linux instead of OS X and guarenteed zero driver or hardware comparability issues I would have. But I couldn't so I bought a Mac.

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

#247

Post by lloeki »

sophacles wrote: post #222
chrisrhoden wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have literally never had a problem with Homebrew.

I have had a few, but largely they were easy to resolve. One thing I dislike about about homebrew over apt (and similar) is that it requires a fairly unpolished workflow to do personal mods and patches on a package, while the apt tool-chain allows for this stuff in a fairly polished (if idiosyncratic) way.

> it requires a fairly unpolished workflow

I find it quite the contrary as it summons git power upon /usr/local. So the workflow is basically just editing live in /usr/local/Library/Formula ('brew create url' scaffolds in many cases, 'brew edit formula' gets you to an existing one), committing, and handling merges on pull (which is what 'brew update' does)

If you want to contribute back, fork on github and add your repo as a remote, then push and submit a pull request.

It's really different than apt (which it is normal as Debian packaging has a massively different scope) , but IMHO much, much simpler and efficient.

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

#248

Post by sedev »

bermanoid wrote: post #200
Terretta wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I do happen to have an 8 GB machine, and almost never reboot (only reboot for OS updates). Here's what I don't understand - why would anyone in their right mind purchase a $2000 laptop and then not spend the 20 minutes and 100 bucks to max out the memory on the thing? It's the easiest thing in the world to do, and basically means you never have to worry about memory usage again.

And-or get an SSD - the heavyweight disk-space users like movies and music are trivial to move to an external drive on a Mac, and with an SSD so much disk-thrashing pain just goes away. It's pretty great.

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

#249

Post by technomancy »

calloc wrote: post #208
technomancy wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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.

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

#250

Post by SkyMarshal »

AlisdairO wrote: post #22
seclorum wrote: post #15

After 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? 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.

lesswatts.org has a bunch of things you can do to improve Linux power usage.
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