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mferHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

The Linux built in package manager is only ok

… The Linux built in package manager is only ok. It often lags behind in versions of things I need. I ended up using Homebrew on both Mac and Linux. For the cases the Linux built-in package manager is too out of date I use Homebrew. It's not perfect on either system. > - Having (relative) parity between production and development For certain classes of development this is a big deal. For my container work it doesn't really matter. I'm running Rancher Desktop and doing container based dev in the VM. Windows, Linux, or Mac doesn't matter as the host. > - No nagware (no Apple Music pop-ups, advertisements for safari, login nag in settings, et. al) I must have learned to ignore this as I've had Macs for a couple decades now. On the flip side, a lot of business software I must use for work isn't available on Linux. I think this is the biggest problem for GNU/Linux as a general OS. There's some biz software that just doesn't run there.

Original discussionApple Unveils MacBook Pro Featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max1,036 source comments · at import
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SM
smoldesuHN

For me: - No nagware (no Apple Music pop-ups, advertisements for safari, login nag in settings, et. al) - Built-in package manager - Having (relative) parity between production and development Between those three, you probably couldn't pay me to go back to MacOS. Adding my own package manager, disabling ads and making my Mac into a Linux-equivalent machine is possible, but it's a lot of work to maintain and set up. If I was a creative and used Adobe/Microsoft tools, I might be a little nicer to MacOS. As a programmer though? I haven't felt the desire to use a Mac since Mojave existed.

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SM
smoldesuHN

I have a 13" Macbook Pro and a Thinkpad model I forget the name of. Homebrew is down-right bad. There are certainly worse Linux package managers (pacman... looking at you), but if you're using MacOS I'd highly recommend giving Nix a try. Less muss-and-fuss, and stopped me from sending my Macbook on a swim in the local river. > For my container work it doesn't really matter. That's fine, it doesn't really for me either. The nice part (for me) is the native Docker and fantastic filesystem support. Whereas MacOS feels like a product I'm turning into a tool, Linux systems tend to feel like a tool out-of-box. Different strokes for different folks though, it really just depends on what you want out of a computer. > I must have learned to ignore this I must have learned to appreciate living without it, then. It's pretty jarring returning to a monetized OS like Windows 11 or Monterey for me. > a…

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counttheforksHN

> The Linux built in package manager is only ok. It often lags behind in versions of things I need No such thing. What distributions did you have experience with? And what distributions are you running on your production systems?

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5e92cb50239222bHN

There's no such thing as "the Linux package manager". If you want something traditional, dnf runs circles around anything available on macOS, and nixpkg is from another universe altogether.

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kitsunesobaHN

The thing that gets me about Linux package managers is how easily they can wreck your desktop. Granted mac package managers aren’t perfect here either but I think it would make a lot of sense for there to be some way to designate things like audio systems or your DE as “system” packages and as such be protected and very difficult to accidentally screw up with e.g. dependency resolution gone awry. I’d also not be opposed to a package manager more geared towards making sure things work without fuss than trying to reduce redundancy. I don’t really mind if there’s multiple versions of whatever lib installed if that’s what it takes. Storage is cheap, my patience isn’t. In theory flatpak and such should meet that need, but the implementation is so much more quirky and troublesome compared to e.g. Mac application bundles.

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