Linux: The Next Big Thing
This week after 9 years I will be replacing my personal macbook pro which I love dearly. The joy I felt when I first bought it was crazy for an inanimate object, but it has served me well and worth the investment many times over. The step to mac from windows was a leap forward in my productivity.
I have been the Apple fanboy for the last 15 or so years and I do not regret parting with a bucket full of cash for the array of iPhones / iPads / iWatches and groundbreaking hardware I have owned.
The cost of a new Apple device is ludicrous, but the unboxing and smooth experience you get when using a device from minute one is second to none.
There is always a however… this last year as a software engineer I was forced to use a Linux machine as my (a lot more modern) work macbook could not handle the pressure that running multiple Docker containers put upon it, it simply ground to a halt when running my project and a handful of chrome tabs. A low level architecture called Hypervisor is the issue here and there is nothing that Mac OS can do about it as far as I have read.
This made me sad and added to the innumerable number of things that i needed to learn as a new engineer, I was sad for the three days it took to setup my new 16g i7 Dell machine and install all the passwords and packages i needed, but since my smile has returned and my work machine has been faster and more reliable than my colleagues mac’s who regularly comment on my low build times.
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In my opinion Apple has stagnated for over 10 years, the hardware has got thinner and thinner and this has somehow become better. When did it become better to have smaller batteries, a phone you had to charge every day, less sockets and more dongles to carry around or focus on form over functionality, 720p webcam in 2021? Jony Ive has a lot to answer for.
Mac OS is buttery smooth, but so is Ubuntu. Linux is daunting for most people to switch to / install but once you start using it you will realise that it is just as fast as a Mac and comes in distros that you can make look just like Mac if you choose.
M1 and future chips are lightning fast, but in beta testing the new OS from Apple Monterey still has the same Docker issues when writing to disc which makes it unusable for me when working with Docker and i feel that is the case for many other people as well — but we put up with it as most people compare mac to windows, which is not the comparison that should be happening.
Apple is one company, with moats and a motivation to reduce costs and increase income. It is not motivated to produce the best software, it is shipping hardware which deteriorates with time (not as badly as windows, but still it does). Linux however gives us an option to not install bloatware and allows you to reinstall your OS with a few clicks of a button if you make mistakes in your setup. 2% of people use Linux, if this number was 50% and open source was mainstream imagine the quality of the OS and number of contributors.
The potential of Linux is awesome and it’s free, buy into Linux. I seriously don’t know my more people are not, most companies have it running their servers (including Apple), android is built on it and that’s doing quite well.
In one talk I heard Linus Torvolds give, he said that Linux would never be successful on desktop until it came preinstalled. It is companies that are preventing Linux from going mainstream by selling subscriptions to Windows and offering Mac OS as an limited alternative. Dell and Lenovo are now offering Linux preinstalled on some machines and certifying compatibility on others — let’s see how it does in the coming years.
I’m off to buy a 2021 Dell XPS and install Ubuntu.
