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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)

#51

Post by jyrki »

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'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 help my problem. Maybe there was some third party software that messed things up.

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. As you said, repair disk permissions caused all this to happen due to filling memory with disk cache. So that was a nice solution to my problem; a way to force swapping on inactive memory.

Python point is bit wrong, I was indeed trying to argue that installing python packages is impossible through homebrew. However, I did use a lot pip+virtualenv, so that's at best a bit vague argument on the OS X side. However, in production I always rely on the packages provided by the OS, not pip + venv, unless really necessary. This is mostly because it makes it easier to keep system up-to-date.

I'm sorry if this showed up as uninformed rant, but I just wanted to share how I felt using OS X and Macbook for a year as my primary computer.

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

#52

Post by erkin_unlu »

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…

another uninformed rant (this is also an uninformed rant)

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

#54

Post by codetonowhere »

thomanil wrote: post #42

I can relate to the OP: I like OSX for general work, but prefer Linux for programming workflow and tooling (mainly because of the debian package system). My solution from now on is to do my dev work inside a Linux VM (through Virtualbox). Seems to work well. Would love to see others experiences with similar setups, anyone else going a similar route?

I use a similar setup and it seems like the obvious choice to me - all the benefits of a sane dev environment and you still get the build quality and prettiness of os x for everything else.

Vagrant is a really nice tool for maintaining your development environment via chef or puppet

http://vagrantup.com/

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

#55

Post by gaius »

lrvick wrote: post #39

This is fairly spot on. Apple makes really nice laptop/desktop hardware, but though OSX as been getting a lot better, it is still a terrible playschool excuse for a unix-based operating systems go when compared to *BSD or Linux. OSX is certainly a better choice for the pointy-pointy-clicky-clicky masses than windows by far, but we have chromeos and ubuntu for them now. Lets face it, OSX is made to suit the needs of p…

serious hackers or sysadmins that actually care how things work at a low level, like to choose their own window manager

I think your definitions of "serious" and "low level" may differ from mine.

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

#56

Post by thomanil »

wwwtyro wrote: post #48
thomanil wrote: post #42

I can relate to the OP: I like OSX for general work, but prefer Linux for programming workflow and tooling (mainly because of the debian package system). My solution from now on is to do my dev work inside a Linux VM (through Virtualbox). Seems to work well. Would love to see others experiences with similar setups, anyone else going a similar route?

Yeah. It runs well enough for me to get work done, and I still have OSX around for handling the hardware (external monitor management and sleep/resume) and running some software. What is your setup, and do you use the 3D hardware support? I'm on an '11 Air, and I find the 3D usage introduces instability in my setup.

I was on a 11" Air until last week, transitioned to a 13" Macbook Pro this weekend. Performance was a bit sluggish when running a full Ubuntu desktop inside a VM on the Air, but feels snappy and great on the MBP.

My setup is just a basic Ubuntu desktop install inside VirtualBox (with Vbox guest additions installed). Haven't noticed any particular problems with the gfx support, but then my Ubuntu desktop is fairly basic - I only need an Emacs frame, Chrome and few terminals panes to do most of my day to day work.

I also use Vagrant to create, suspend, resume and destroy VMs when I just need something headless to deploy and test our product to.

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

#57

Post by cturner »

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…

Did you find a way to get a second mouse button? I saw several howtos that said that a keyboard key could be mapped to it but none worked for me last time I tried (four years ago?)

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

#58

Post by thomanil »

codetonowhere wrote: post #54
thomanil wrote: post #42

I can relate to the OP: I like OSX for general work, but prefer Linux for programming workflow and tooling (mainly because of the debian package system). My solution from now on is to do my dev work inside a Linux VM (through Virtualbox). Seems to work well. Would love to see others experiences with similar setups, anyone else going a similar route?

I use a similar setup and it seems like the obvious choice to me - all the benefits of a sane dev environment and you still get the build quality and prettiness of os x for everything else. Vagrant is a really nice tool for maintaining your development environment via chef or puppet http://vagrantup.com/

Agree on Vagrant, great for headless deployment/testing workflows.

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

#59

Post by bad_user »

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…

    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 && sudo make install".

What I don't understand is how come we can't have binary repositories, like Debian's. Certainly Debian has to handle much more architectures and the number of packages contained is really huge. So how come there isn't such an alternative for Mac OS X? Why are solutions like Homebrew and MacPorts insisting on compiling the packages locally?

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

#60

Post by eyko »

bwarp wrote: post #30
AlisdairO wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I had a large glass of wine spilled all over my macbook with no long-term ill effects after the drying period.

Good for you. You must have been a lucky one.

I spilled soda, still works, although the keyboard is a bit sticky. Also a lucky one?
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