Source: JetBrains’ “The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2023” survey
Not a surprise for those with containerised workloads. Mac is a nightmare for that. Every single dev team with mac that I’ve been on has struggled with it. Heard all these things and more:
- We can’t use Docker Desktop due to licensing!
- podman doesn’t work, but colima does
npm installtakes forever!- Why can’t it find the docker socket?
- This only works on x86
- The port-forwarding didn’t work
- XYZ works in the dev-container but not when deployed
Recreating a problem you encountered with your container in a x86 linux VM in the cloud on a mac with apple silicon is no fun either.
And good luck with custom hardware on a mac. Working from home with stuff that was plug and play on linux simply refused to work on mac. Ergonomic mice, keyboards, USB-C docks, high-quality webcams, USB headsets… Either you’re in the Apple ecosystem or you’re gonna have a bad time.
If an employer doesn’t allow me to install linux on my dev machine, then I move on.
That’s kinda weird, I develop on a M2 Mac and use docker all day, I haven’t tried podman on my m2 but I used it on my previous i7 MBP without any issue for a project I was on.
I use my own mouse and keyboard and the same monitor setup I use for my personal computer.
This just doesn’t track at all.
mind you I literally have tux tattooed on my body
This just doesn’t track at all.
Agreed. The bit about peripherals, in particular, seems strange. I’ve never had a problem with a fucking keyboard or mouse. None of the rest, either, but seriously, keyboard or mouse? Suggesting that they don’t work makes the whole post sound like an exaggeration.
I’m not a Mac guy so I can’t comment on the hardware side of things but I can comment on the Docker side of things.
Docker runs in a VM on Mac, and in a VM or WSL on Windows. On Windows the experience is awful, doesn’t matter if its WSL or VM. On Mac the experience is okish but there are enough differences that it makes Docker less effective as a platform.
The whole selling point of Docker is reproducibility, on Mac and Windows there are issues that do not occur on the platform that all the servers we deploy to run. I constantly have to help my coworkers with issues on Mac and Windows that simply do not exist on native Docker on Linux. It has gotten so bad that I simply refuse any help for anyone running Docker on Windows. I try my best on Mac but if I can’t solve it quickly or reproduce it on a Linux machine I dismiss it.
The devil is in the detail, minor differences are enough to throw off a system that is made to be run in a container and expects identical environments between instances.
There’s enough issues with Docker for Mac that they have separate tabs on the Docker known issues page: https://docs.docker.com/desktop/troubleshoot/known-issues/
There’s also 426 open issues just for the Mac port of Docker: https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues
Huh, I mean you’re saying a lot but still.
There are 200 open issues for docker compose, nearly 600 for docker cli.
The number of open issues means nothing without context.
Again, I’d love to hear about actual peculiarities you run into because as of yet in the last 5 years I’ve developed on a MBP (work provided, I previously “hated” Apple) I haven’t had these issues you’re claiming are all over.
I agree with everything but the “This only works on x86”. I’m not saying that everything runs smoothly on arm, but I think it really is the future. Either that, or risc-v. I doubt riscv will garner a mainstream adoption anytime soon though, but one could only dream.
My dev env doesn’t really change much over the OSes I use because I tend to stick with VSC which just works everywhere.
I’ve found that WSL covers more and more of my use cases when it comes to wanting to do something in Linux.
I have a ThinkPad with Fedora Silverblue on it but I’d never use it for work.
Most of the time I just stick to Windows because it covers everything I need it to and it works on every single device I own flawlessly. I’m still tinkering with this laptop, and since it’s a T80s, there are no working drivers for the fingerprint sensor that I can find. Windows Hello just works, I don’t have to worry about what I plugged in or what laptop I picked up.
I would love to finally switch to Linux, but it’s basically unusable for any kind of gamedev…
From my experience, just getting Unity to run on Linux has a plethora of issues. When I tried running our project we’ve been developing on Windows for the past few years, I couldn’t even compile it. Apparently, Unity on Linux doesn’t support some kind of media file formats we use for cutscenes. While I was trying to resolve it, Unity crashed few times.
And then there’s the hug problem with “works on my machines”. We’re targeting Windows, Windows is still major market share for gaming, and me being the lead programmer, I can’t afford not being able to build and test a build on the OS we’re targeting.
Even if the differences between build targets are minor, there’s still a posibility that something will just work differently on Linux than in does on Windows. And then you have the whole DirectX issue - IIRC, you can’t use DirectX on Linux, so we would have to develop the game for Vulkan or something else, which adds another problems to deal with for other programmers in our team, who don’t use Linux.
And then you have consoles. Do the SDKs for Sony, Switch or XDK even support running on Linux?
You said: (Linux) “unusable for any kind of gamedev…”.
That’s nonsense.
You raise valid points, but they do not support your conclusion that: (Linux) “unusable for ANY kind of gamedev…”.
You know that, though. You were hyperbolic, I know that, too.
By the way, you should try Godot. You’ll be surprised.
Ah how come? I’ve had to build simple stuff in unity for university, I’ve not run into issues.
I’ve tried switching to Fedora several times, but I never managed to get it to working conditions. Unity Hub was regularly crashing, I got a bazillion of errors related to unsupported type of media files we’re using for ingame videos, and only during the time I was trying to troubleshoot the issue, Unity has crashed several times.
I suppose that if I was starting a new project, I would just go with Godot and on Linux, but a project that has been build for the last few years on Windows, and is planned to only be build for Windows for now, it adds unneccessary risk to the whole development. Just the fact that I would have to dualboot just to test whether builds work as expected is additional bother, and I suppose you will eventually run into issues with something not working the same on Windows as it did on Linux.
Also, isn’t there the whole issue of DirectX not being supported on Linux?
And since gamedev is usually a lot more resource-intensive compared to other development, you can’t really containerize it.
I cannot imagine doing this for my work. I need a machine I do not need to worry about breaking or suddenly becoming incompatible with the next update.
My bad, it was meant to be a response to the comment about people switching from macOS to Linux.
getting a developer account with redhat you can have up to 10(?) instances of RedHat Linux LTS. super stable, is run on servers for many critical serves. Or just use rocky linux (bug for bug compatible with red hat) and establish a roll back procedure. There are rollback options at the filesystem level so you can snapshot before an update.
I use fedora and I don’t typically have any issues and that is considered bleeding edge.
Macs have too many guardrails that get in the way which can be as disruptive as something breaking bc you need to work around it. But I am acknowledging that it is use case dependant.
