[gavanwoolery]

I respectfully disagree -- something that is 10 times more efficient costs 10 times less energy (theoretically). When the end user suffers a server outage due to load, when they run out of battery ten times quicker, all of these things matter. When you have to pay for ten servers to run your product instead of one, this cost gets passed on to the end user.

I was forced to use a monitor at 30 fps for a few days due to a bad display setup. It made me realize how important 60 fps is. Even worse, try using an OS running in a VM for an extended period of time...

There are plenty of things that are 'good enough', but once users get used to something better they will never go back (if they have the choice, at least).

[ratww]

Another problem is that the inefficiency of multiple products tends to compound.

- Opening multiple tabs in a browser will kill your battery, and it's not the fault of a single page, but of all of them. Developers tend to blame the end user for opening too many tabs.

- Running a single Electron app is fast enough in a newer machine but if you need multiple instances or multiple apps you're fucked.

- Some of my teammates can't use their laptops without the charger because they have to run 20+ docker containers just to have our main website load. The machines are also noisy because the fan is always on.

- Having complex build pipelines that take minutes or hours to run is something that slows dow developers, which are expensive. It's not the fault of a single software (except maybe of the chosen programming language), but of multiple inefficient libraries and packages.

[jlokier]

> "Even worse, try using an OS running in a VM for an extended period of time..."

I actually do this for development and it works really well.

Ubuntu Linux VM in VMware Fusion on a Macbook Pro with MacOS.

Power consumption was found to be better than running Linux natively. (I'm guessing something about switching between the two GPUs, but who knows.)

GPU acceleration works fine; the Linux desktop animations, window fading and movement animations etc are just as I'd expect.

Performance seems to be fine generally, and I do care about performance.

(But I don't measure graphics performance, perhaps that's not as good as native. And when doing I/O intensive work, that's on servers.)

Being able to do a four-finger swipe on the trackpad to switch between MacOS desktops and Linux desktops (full screen) is really nice. It feels as if the two OSes are running side by side, rather than one inside another.

I've been doing Linux-in-a-VM for about 6 years, and wouldn't switch back to native on my laptop if I had a choice. The side-by-side illusion is too good.

Before that I ran various Linux desktops (or Linux consoles :-) for about 20 years natively on all my development machines and all my personal laptops, so it's not like don't know what that's like. In general, I notice more graphics driver bugs in the native version...

(The one thing that stands out as buggy is VMware's host-to-guest file sharing is extremely buggy, to the point of corrupting files, even crashing Git. MacOS's own SMB client is also atrocious in numerous ways, to the point of even deleting random files, but does it less often so you don't notice until later what's gone. I've had to work hard to find good workarounds to have reliable files! I mention this as a warning to anyone thinking of trying the same setup.)

[q-base]

What year MBP is this? I tried running Ubuntu on Virtual Box on my mid 2014 MBP with 16GB ram, but that was anything but smooth. I ended up dual booting my T460s instead.

But perhaps the answer is VMware Fusion instead then.

[jlokier]

It's a late 2013 MBP, 16GB RAM.

I've only given Linux 6GB RAM at the moment, and it's working out fine. Currently running Ubuntu 19.10.

I picked VMware Fusion originally because it was reported to have good-ish support for GPU emulation that was compatible with Linux desktops at the time. Without it, graphics can be a bit clunky. With it, it feels smooth enough for me, as a desktop.

My browser is Firefox on the Mac side, but dev web servers all on the Linux side.

The VM networking is fine, but I use a separate "private" network (for dev networking) from the "NAT" network (outgoing connections from Linux to internet), so Wifi IP address changes in the latter don't disrupt active connections of the former.

My editor is Emacs GUI on the Mac side (so it integrates with the native Mac GUI - Cmd-CV cut and paste etc, better scrolling), although I can call up Emacs sessions from Linux easily, and for TypeScript, dev language servers etc., Emacs is able to run them remotely as appropriate.

Smoothness over SSH from iTerm is a different thing from graphical desktop smoothness.

When doing graphics work (e.g. Inkscape/GIMP/ImageMagick), or remote access to Windows servers using Remmina for VNC/RDP, I use the Linux desktop.

But mostly I do dev work in Linux over SSH from iTerm. I don't think I've ever noticed any smoothness issues with that, except when VMware networking crashes due to SMB/NFS loops that I shouldn't let happen :-)

[q-base]

Thanks a lot for the long through reply. It sounds like I might want to give VMware Fusion a go if I want to play around with Linux on my MBP again.

[vetinari]

The answer is I/O latency.

Having your VM stored inside a file on a slow filesystem is bad. Having a separate lvm volume (on linux)/zvols (with zfs)/partition/disk is much more performant.

[jlokier]

I store my Linux VM disk inside a file on a Mac filesystem (HFS+, the old one), and I haven't noticed any significant human-noticable I/O latency issues when using it. The Linux VM disk is formatted as ext4.

That's about human-scale experience, rather than measured latency. It won't be as fast as native, but it seems adequate for my use, even when grepping thousands of files, unpacking archives, etc, and I haven't noticed any significant stalling or pauses. It's encrypted too (by MacOS).

(That's in contrast to host-guest file access over the virtual network, which definitely has performance issues. But ext4 on the VM disk seems to work well.)

The VM is my main daily work "machine", and I'm a heavy user, so I'd notice if I/O latency was affecting use.

I'm sure it helps that the Mac has a fast SSD though.

(In contrast, on servers I use LVM a lot, in conjunction with MD-RAID and LUKS encryption.)

[kinkrtyavimoodh]

Yes, but it's not just relative quantities that matter, absolute values matter too, just as the post you replied to was saying.

Optimizing for microseconds when bad UI steals seconds is being penny-wise and pound foolish. Business might not understand tech but they do generally understand how it ends up on the balance sheet.

[TeMPOraL]

But the balance sheets encompass more than delivering value to end-users; business can and do trade off that value for some money elsewhere (see e.g. pretty much everything that has anything to do with ads).

Note also the potential deadlock here. Optimizing core calculations at μs level is bad because UI is slow, but optimizing UI to have μs responsiveness is bad, because core calculations are slow. Or the database is slow. This way, every part of the program can use every other part of the program as a justification to not do the necessary work. Reverse tragedy of the commons perhaps?

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

> Even worse, try using an OS running in a VM for an extended period of time...

I do that for most of my hobbyist Linux dev work. It's fine. It can do 4k and everything. It's surely not optimal but it's better than managing dual boot.

[voltagex_]

Any hints? How are you getting any kind of graphics acceleration? What's your host/guest/hypervisor setup?

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

Host is Windows, guest is Ubuntu. Hypervisor is VMWare Workstation 12 Player. There is a very straightforward process to get graphics acceleration in the VM. The shell has a "mount install CD" option that causes a CD containing drivers to be loaded in the guest (Player > Manage > Reinstall VMWare Tools). You install those, and also enable acceleration in the VMWare settings (https://imgur.com/a/PUaE38u). Again, it's not perfect, but I can e.g. play fullscreen 1080p YouTube videos. Not sure how it would like playing 4k videos, but my desktop doesn't like that so much even in the host OS.

[contactlight11]

I do this the other way around, Ubuntu host and a KVM virtual machine controlled by virt-manager with PCIe passthrough for its own GPU and NVMe boot drive. I enjoy Linux too much for daily use (and rely on it for bulk storage with internal drives mergerfs fused together and backed up with snapraid), but I do a lot of photography and media work so I also rely on Windows. This way, I can use a KVM frame relay like looking-glass to get a latency free almost native performance windows VM inside a Ubuntu host, without the need to dual boot (but since the NVMe drive is just windows, I can always boot into windows if I please)