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by c7DJTLrn 1609 days ago
The Docker/virtualisation stuff on macOS really needs fixing up. The x86 to ARM transition has made things worse but it was pitiful even before. Virtualization.framework doesn't seem to live up to the hype. Docker has an experimental mode for it - if you try enabling it you'll quickly realise why it's experimental. Your computer will go into meltdown and performance will feel a hundred times slower. M1 MacBooks are no good for Docker/VMs unless you have a Parallels license.

Apple needs to do what Microsoft did surrounding Linux on Windows. Allocate some engineers for a few years to make life easier for developers on their platform.
1 comments
musicale 1609 days ago
> Apple needs to do what Microsoft did surrounding Linux on Windows. Allocate some engineers for a few years to make life easier for developers on their platform.

Apple will most likely continue to do what it always does: make billions of dollars while largely ignoring Linux.

iOS and macOS developers will continue to use Xcode the way they always have. (And perhaps Swift Playgrounds on iOS.)

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c7DJTLrn 1609 days ago
Maybe, but that's what we all said about Microsoft ten years ago.
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pjmlp 1608 days ago
While Microsoft might have lost the server battle, those of us deploying on Azure hardly bother with which OS the type 1 hypervisors are actually running, many Azure workloads could even running directly on the hypervisors that we wouldn't really notice.

As for the desktop, regardless of all screw ups since Windows 8, GNU/Linux has hardly made any gain there.

Then we can turn into mobile space, which they did lose, however in what concerns tablets, hybrid laptops running Windows win out clusmy Android tablets every day of the week.

Finally, WSL is there to cater to the same folks that buy Macs to develop Linux instead of supporting Linux OEMs.

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musicale 1608 days ago
Who knows, maybe Apple will upgrade sandboxing to jails/containers and add a FreeBSD-style Linux compatibility layer. Or maybe they'll go full-on MS and include a Linux kernel alongside Xnu using Hypervisor.framework. (Note that in my experience the networking design of Ubuntu on WSL broke containers that worked fine on regular Ubuntu in Virtualbox/VMware/etc., but YMMV.)

Something like that is certainly possible, though they'd have to have some reason for it, and they don't appear to at the moment.

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pjmlp 1608 days ago
macOS doesn't need WSL, it is already a certified UNIX.
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musicale 1604 days ago
Precisely - macOS already is a perfectly good native BSD that (as you note) is UNIX® certified by The Open Group.

However, linux app binaries (notably docker images, which we're talking about here) need some sort of linux runtime, compatibility layer, or VM, in order to run on macOS.

The original implementation/version of WSL was an interesting POSIX-compatibility personality/layer for the NT kernel, but Microsoft seems to have decided that running a Linux kernel in a VM provided a better user experience (and probably made it much easier to track feature parity with Linux.)

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