this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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We use windows PCs at work as software engineers now, but when I was training I used a MacBook Pro M1 with 16GB of RAM and that thing was incredibly performant.
I know it in vogue to shit in Apple, but they build the hardware and the software and they’re incredibly efficient at what they do and I don’t think I ever saw the beachball loading icon thing.
Now the prices they charge to upgrade the RAM is something I can get behind shitting on.
I used Windows, Mac and Linux in the past year.
It's not Mac that's fast, it's Windows that sucks hard.
Same.
it’s almost like people make choices to suit their needs and there isn’t a single solution for everybody.
I wonder what the industry standard is for developers? Genuinely. I’ve heard it’s Max, but my company is all in on Microsoft, not really heard of companies developing on Linux. Which isn’t to say Linux doesn’t have its place, but I’m aware this place is insanely biased towards Linux.
Every place I've been at had developers using windows machines and then ssh into a linux environment
Makes sense for sysadmin or something but little sense for developers and engineers writing code to build enterprise software.
As a developer writing code who used windows to ssh to linux servers I would disagree. But of course it depends on the company and the nature of the work, just offering my experience
What are you writing code for?
I literally can’t think of an example where ssh’ing into a terminal is going to give good workflow. Just using Nano or Vi?
Like no IDE.
Piping VSCode Server through SSH is pretty nifty.
Well enterprise software is either going to run on windows or Linux servers, so sounds like windows and Linux make good dev workstations.
My current work gives devs macs but we build everything for Linux so it's a bit of a nuisance. And Apple moving to arm made running vms basically impossible for a while, it's a bit better now.
Still a giant pain in the butt to have your dev environment not match the build environment architecture.
The Stack Overflow developer survey (which has it's bias towards people who use Stack Overflow)... says 47% use Windows, 32% use Mac, and uh, Linux is split up by distro so it's hard to make sense of the numbers but Ubuntu alone is at 27%. (each developer can use multiple platforms so they don't add up to 100%)
Thanks for this.
Funny that you chose two games that run natively on Linux.
Minecraft runs great, I dont know about factorio.
but I know some native versions suck absolute ass and force you to use the windows version via proton regardless. ETS/ATS and Cities Skylines 1 being my immediate personal examples.
My current Linux machine needed exactly zero config post install, and even stuff like the fingerprint reader is working, I'm using it instead of passwords in a terminal.
I can also play games pretty well, it's usually smoother and less buggy than on Windows.
I feel Linux is not a compromise for me anymore, Windows is fast becoming one though.
What distro would you recommend, I’m prepared to try over the weekend.
How does it work with GPU drivers for a GeForce RTX 4080?
Anything else I need to be aware of
I'm running Fedora KDE on a Framework laptop and a custom built machine, but they are all AMD so IDK about Nvidia cards.
As I've heard Nvidia nowadays releases Linux drivers.
TBH I haven't had any problems installing and using Linux for years now, I think just go for it and see what happens.
Thanks. I will do.
So I actually did it and wiped my Windows PC, nothing on there I needed to keep.
Set up Fedora and added the Nvidia Drivers.
Shut down for a few days and in my next boot I downloaded CoolerControl. Then my networking died and I’m at a loss as to what happened.
And people said it was just the same as using windows, yet me a massive nerd, software developer was stuck without ever having attempted to play games.
I almost never use Windows, but aren't commands and variables in PowerShell case insensitive?
Maybe it’s just the Package Manager Console inside Visual Studio Professional as “add-migration” or “update-database” don’t work unless capitalised.
The chip and OS won't do shit when your ram is saturated by electron apps taking 800MB each. Maybe MacOS behaves better under very high memory pressure than windows does, but it doesn't mean it's okay to rip off consumers. That whole 8GB on mac = 16GB on windows has been bullshit all along, and is mostly based on people looking at the task manager and seeing high ram usage on windows (which is a good thing)
Haha no MacOs is not better performing under very high memory pressure. Rip me working on a macbook air.
I have to make sure not to run too many things at once...
Now that I think of it yeah, my work mac simply shows a popup telling me to kill an app. It just doesn't deal with high mem pressure lol
You can use Linux with RAM compression to have the same kind of economy that MacOS does.
Just nobody bothers.
Apple does have a lot of vertical integration which allows first party stuff to function well and they work closely with a lot of their premium 3rd party software partners, but you try running an actual RAM hungry process like a local LLM model, for example, and all but the highest end latest edition MacBook Pro WILL shit the bed.