• 10 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 1st, 2023

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  • That may be, but buying a Mac Mini is like buying a device made from the ground up for Windows, where any other operating system has to reverse engineer 100% of the things to work well, or you have to emulate another OS on it (which comes with its own pitfalls), and it’s 200+€ more expensive than its nearest equivalent.

    Every single company I’ve worked at which introduced Apple Silicon to its developers has had headaches with compatibility. The worst I’ve seen was it taking a developer a month to get up and running because the specific component we used didn’t have a build for the specific ARM architecture. Multipass, UTM, podman, docker desktop, all didn’t work until colima and forcing the VM to emulate x86 + forcing docker in the VM to use the x86 image worked. There was a persistent problem with disk IO since it used 9p or whatever. Installing dependencies from scratch meant waiting 30 minutes on the M2.

    Why pay a premium for less compatibility and worse specs? Just get yourself something that works, which is cheaper, maybe even supports a company that invests in Linux and its ecosystem, and be able to ask an existing developer community instead of asking the subsection of linux users that run your specific app on however you’re running linux on Appe hardware.

    Anti Commercial-AI license


  • The problem with Mac hardware is that it’s ARM and vertically integrated with everything Apple. Not all hardware is supported by Linux because Apple won’t write any linux drivers and everything is reverse engineered. You’re better off buying something non-Apple which linux properly supports.

    If power consumption is an issue for you get, a R9 7950X consumes as much and at times less power than an M1/M2 (I think even M3). Check out GamerNexus’s charts. IINM AMD in W/Ghz performs better than Intel across the board.

    No idea where you are, but you can get a small factor PC from one of the vendors that preload linux, or configure a small form factor PC of your liking for cheap and put linux on it. You’ll get more out of your money for the same or better performance with about the same energy consumption (or a bit more).
    Somebody I know who happens to live in Hungary got himself this cheap beauty. They deliver all over Europe, but if you live elsewhere on this planet, there probably is something similar like this out there.

    Anti Commercial-AI license