[gryf]

Yeah if only. Our ops people are too uneducated to be able to deploy anything Apple. Literally there are armies of factory pressed Windows monkeys but nothing in the Apple space.

Note to apple: please start concentrating on the enterprise sector. We're dying over here. My Dell weighs 3x my personal M1 MBP, has a shitty keyboard with keys designed for Borrowers, the battery lasts 8 minutes and it reduces my sperm count if I put it on my lap. It feels like I have a ball and chain around my ankle 24/7. My only escape is WSL2 which is broken as fuck as well (can't run services, cron jobs, X problems etc) and we can't install a simple non-WSL VM on the node because Device Guard requires hyper-v to be enabled excluding sensible and pure VM options like VirtualBox. Docker for windows is a comedy of errors too.

[sbarre]

For what it's worth, I work in a large 30,000 employee company. Everyone gets a Windows machine by default.

6 years ago our department of 200 people "went rogue" and started provisioning Macs, because it was the only way we could hire developers and provide a good developer experience for the work we were doing.

This took some convincing, but it was possible. We agreed to be unsupported by the in-house help desk, but we had 2 people in IT that supported us for provisioning and fixing machines, and sorting out a small amount of required enterprise software like a Cisco VPN client and some fleet management background agents.

Otherwise, we self-organized support over Slack and in-office and also made use of Apple's business support directly.

As of earlier this year, our department is now over 600 people, and we've given our internal IT enough incentive to officially support Macs, which they now do, alongside Windows.

They use some kind of MDM software to manage and update and monitor our Macs the same as they do Windows.

There are also now additional much larger teams in the organization exploring Mac adoption where it makes sense for their developers too, and we could soon have thousands of Macs in use.

So it's definitely possible, even if you have to start small.

[gryf]

Unfortunately we're in a regulated industry so getting a PO signed off for one Mac is nigh on impossible without involving the entire corporate machinery.

[sbarre]

We are also a highly regulated industry. Not finance but pretty close.

I sympathize with you though, it sounds like there's no will to do it, which sucks :(

[lostmsu]

Are your developers forced to use laptops?

[sbarre]

Our company issues laptops yes, because everyone can choose to either work at home or in the office.

That said, we also supply external monitors, keyboards and mice for anyone who wants one, and every worker has a discretionary budget to spend on home office accommodations (chair, standing desk, etc).

I also suspect if a developer specifically asked for a desktop computer and could (lightly) justify the need for it, we would get them a desktop, and a laptop.

[gryf]

Unfortunately yes. I would rather a desktop but they don't know how to pay half as much for the same specification. The desks in the office are all equipped with docks and expensive WiFi mesh driven by COVID mentality so that is the status quo.

Just send me a fucking workstation. Nope too hard.

[scarface74]

Who wants to be in an office in 2022 unless necessary (specialized hardware, etc.)

[gryf]

Exactly that. I don't and I won't do it again.

[scarface74]

Do you propose they carry desktops back and forth from their office and to conference rooms?

[lostmsu]

Every conference room could have a device to facilitate presentation.

[scarface74]

What device is going to have my PowerPoint slides, my IDE, my logged in AWS account, etc and everything else I need for demos?

Where I work, every conference room in every corporate office has a TV and a dongle that you can plug in via either HDMI or USB C.

[lostmsu]

Any thin client would do.

[scarface74]

> Note to apple: please start concentrating on the enterprise sector. We're dying over here.

Enterprise sales are where the customer is not the user. Apple does best when the user is the purchaser.

Also, I know for a fact that Macs are well supported at scale by many large tech companies including my own.

[vetinari]

FYI, with WSL2 1.0, you can finally enable systemd, so you can run services and cron jobs.

[gryf]

Thanks for the tip off. I will look into this tomorrow. This is why I'm here. The distributed consciousness of HN is a wonderful problem solving engine :)

[dserodio]

Never user Docker for Windows, but Docker for Mac has not been great lately either.

Granted, macOS changes a lot between each release but our company is paying for Docker Desktop licenses and the experience has really been disappointing.

[throwaway821909]

Can you use a plain Hyper-V VM? i.e. with Hyper-V Manager

[gryf]

Tried that but unfortunately there are some painful addressing and routing issues when you are subjected to when dealign with a corporate always on VPN. Ergo you can't actually contact clusters which you have to admin via kubectl.

[xenophonf]

What's stopping you from running kubectl.exe or Cygwin? Frankly, I still think Cygwin's better than WSL in many ways.