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by xyst 822 days ago
Apple and macOS is slowly becoming another Windows in terms of stability.

There was a HN post about a hashicorp founder using Linux within a vm on their mbp. Might adopt that same approach, if I can find the og post.

5 comments

This is what I do when my job forced me to use a mac. I think the only thing I installed on the mac outside of it was Firefox.

Worked great for years before I changed jobs that let me bring my own hardware finally.

What is your preferred hardware and flavor of Linux for this? I'm trying to do the same
Rancher Desktop used Lima + QEMU behind the scenes: https://lima-vm.io/
Tbh no one matches the hardware quality of MacBooks. But I refuse to use them on principle. Thinkpad t14 been serving me well (using fedora).
To be fair, this is the kind of breakage I'd expect from macOS, but never from Windows
Here’s the YouTube link from Mitchell. I was thinking about doing something similar lately too.

https://youtu.be/ubDMLoWz76U?si=ipmho73-r9FzZpBp

Windows, as a kernel itself and by extension as a server, is very resilient stable to a point that there is a Windows NT 4 machine of a certain railroad control system still running continuously for 14 years without any restarts. It even still reboots back without problem in disastrous cases such as power loss due to hurricane or earthquake. Trust me, it is made by Dave Culter, it, just, works.

It is really the client facing side of Windows that really sucks, (warning: explicitly strong language) such as having really shitty software known as Office, like god why Word and not Latex, and why spreadsheet when we have database that we can query efficiently? Or not being able to have multi-user RDP session due to Microsoft having licensing dispute with Citrix about 20-ish years ago (fuck you Citrix, you asshole!). Or why do I have to do a lot of hoops and install a lot of "C++ redistributable" for running some antique software? Or why do I have to jump through a lot of group policy simply to enable WinRM and get remote powershell management?

Either way, I'm typing this on a Windows 11 desktop with WSL2 on. The hybrid experience is incredible, unless you need some performance critical app (WSL2 is in general slower than bare metal Windows and bare metal Linux itself, of course, except in machine learning).

Things like 9P to cross the Window file system access also introduced a lot of pain such as permission control because Windows does not have a POSIX-like permission system, like instead of having a simple 2 bytes that split into 3 octal number (there is a reason it is maxed out at 777), you have an incredibly sophisticated, capability and token-based access control system dated almost 30 years ago that Linux doesn't even have back in the day! But that pile of shit is now full of bugs and exploits such as token/handle duplication. (oh yes I'm talking about black hat territory as I also do some red team CTF regarding these stuff)

When's the last time you had a BSOD on Windows? I honestly can't recall.
A long time in fact. But macOS 14.3 kernel paniced on me last week.
Depends on what you're doing.

It happens fairly often for me with more exotic hardware e.g. Infiniband or when I push the hardware too hard i.e. parallel Rust builds.