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by pdimitar 103 days ago
It's also quite amazing how macOS doesn't support containerization which is hugely important for a hefty chunk of all devs out there. So, Docker Desktop, Colima, OrbStack. VMs. Deal with it.

Not to mention the amazing amount of services running in the background, at least 80% of which I haven't needed in the 6.5 years I have my Mac, but can't stop / remove / disable.

My Linux laptop is supposedly 40% weaker than my desktop Mac, so the online sheets say at least. It runs my work's integration test suite 15% faster.

A lot of us have given Macs a very honest chance. It's okay and it's very workable, that much is a fact -- but if one is willing to pimp their machine and OS -- nowadays made even easier by LLMs -- then the experience and everyday ergonomics and actual dev-enhancing abilities quickly outpace a Mac.

And I wish that wasn't true because I wasn't looking forward to changing my main machine. But the annoyances and slowness and closeness just compound until they start literally reducing your everyday productivity.

1 comments

I’m running Docker Desktop as I write this. What did you mean by “doesn’t support containerization”?

And really, who cares if it had 10,000 background services if 9,999 are idle at any given time? Run `ps auxwww` on a Linux box sometime and it’ll look similar.

Does not support it _natively_ and is measurably slower than a supposedly much weaker Linux machine was my point, which I believe I expressed quite clearly.

> And really, who cares if it had 10,000 background services if 9,999 are idle at any given time?

Normally I don't. I have an okay idea on how modern OS-es work; temporary swaps, compressing RAM for rarely used background processes etc. -- they work amazing, macOS included.

I suppose my problem is more the services that _do_ interfere, like the one that feels it has to scan every CLI command I launch, to the point that it became noticeable, especially side by side with the "weaker" Linux laptop and hell, even with a VM-ed Linux inside my gaming PC as well.

So OK, I accept the correction: does not much matter how many are they in general. Those that interfere though, and I can't stop them -- this is where I drew the line and gradually started my migration away from macOS.

And this:

> Run `ps auxwww` on a Linux box sometime and it’ll look similar

...is objectively false. I just tried it; even my home server that's doing plenty of stuff I get 244 items. On the Mac I am writing this? 840.

Maybe the laptop with KDE will have a touch more than 244, but I doubt they'd be 840.

Call me a purist, I like to know what my background services are doing, though I'll admit I care less and less with age.

> Does not support it _natively_

I’m not trying to be pedantic here, but I genuinely don’t know what you mean here. Macs have built-in virtualization and containerization. Docker and podman etc are wrappers around it, but the internals are built in.

Did you mean they have to emulate x86 code if you download an x86 image instead of a native one?

I mostly meant they don't support cgroups and other Docker-required machinery and have to emulate them.

OrbStack bridges a good chunk of the Linux performance gap however. I was using Colima before and then the Linux laptop was running the integration test suite ~60% faster. OrbStack reduced that to 15%.