Comment by marssaxman

1 day ago

I did the same a decade ago, and I've been fully content with my Linux-only life - but a new MacBook recently arrived along with a new job, so now I'm using Tahoe whether I like it or not. It's generally difficult to vote with someone else's wallet.

Happened to me many times. As my other colleagues, I ran a Linux VM inside macOS. The overhead is not that large and is totally worth the sanity. Of course I had to use a few corporate-managed macOS apps, like Zoom, or Outlook, but this is not a very big deal.

  • The IT department must hate you. I’m not in IT but I think it’s hard to be compliant with some kinds of regulations if you allow end users to run VMs.

    • It's literally impossible to run docker containers on mac without virtualization. An IT dept that forbade developers with macs from virtualizing would be facing a lack of developement in any company using docker/k8s

  • I’m in the same situation, have to use Mac for SOC2 reasons after having used Linux for 10 years. The apps are fine, it’s the KDE window management I miss the most, and a VM won’t really help there.

    • Why, running KDE in VirtualBox in full-screen mode must be fine :) At least, I did it breathlessly with Xfce, on much older Apple hardware, and it was... just fine.

      (OTOH running text-mode Emacs from a headless VM in a full-screen built-in Terminal may suddenly feel sluggish. Kitty or WezTerm solves this.)

      1 reply →

Well, be glad you're working for a company that is still willing to stump up properly for hardware.

Too many companies are balking at spending money on hardware right now. While I would love to think that this will drive Linux adoption, it probably won't. Microsoft is going to cave on TPM 2.0 for Windows 11 or extend Windows 10 support much further.

  • It will be interesting to see how RAM prices affect the behavior of all companies.

    I wouldn't mind if this finally lights a fire under certain software companies to also actually optimize their shit for memory use, but... I'm not that optimistic.

    • Don't worry, Microsoft has your cloud desktops all ready to go! Very little RAM needed.

  • I can't speak for all companies, but the feeling I get from mine is that the issue is more about the maintenance and support for Mac rather than the little extra spend to get a MacBook pro instead of the standard windows box.