how_gauche
Joined 18 years ago
Joined 18 years ago
We provision them with ~200 lines of shell script, which we get away with because they are not running a "prod" workload. Don't forget to run "docker system prune" on a timer! Overall these machines have been mostly unobtrusive and reliable, and the engineers greatly appreciate the order of magnitude reduction in github actions time. I've also noticed that they are writing more automation tooling now since budget anxiety is no longer a factor and the infrastructure is so much faster.
I've been using Linux since Slackware installed from a pile of floppy disks. I'm extremely happy with systemd (desktop and server) and view it as one of the most important UX advancements ever made in the Linux sysadmin space. It replaced a smorgasbord of broken nonsense with a unified and thoughtful system that is objectively superior to what it replaced. I suspect a lot of the extreme reaction to systemd is not just resistance to change, but based on an emotional attachment to the rag-tag heterogeneity it made obsolete.
My verdict is: the hardware is usually GREAT but MacOS isn't. It bothered me when I quit the platform ages ago, and it is still bothering me now: little I care about has changed or improved. New annoyances though!
In aggregate I'd say I've spent ca. 15 hours staring at the beachball. Intrusive admin software has been a problem in the past for sure -- especially at Google -- but I've bought dozens of these for home use as well. Either 90% of their units are defective or we're using our computers very differently.
Terrible keyboards are another thing entirely, Lenovo went through a bout of that with the X1. My gripes about Macs are almost entirely about OSX performance/reliability and command-line habitability: version over version, it almost never improves. For my workflows
I see people in this thread complaining that Linux distros are unreliable, but my Linux machines don't do things like beachball for 20s at a time or have complete audio system crashes requiring reboot twice a week. (Always right before a videoconference! I missed fifteen minutes of a call last week scrambling to fetch another device because the audio subsystem died and the Mac decided it had to install updates for a half hour when it rebooted.)
It's not uncommon to see uptimes on my ThinkPads measured in months. The Mac? At least it boots fast. I have to restart it once or twice a week.
Reliability aside -- and I realize that everyone values ergonomic factors differently -- Linux is just a better choice in every regard for me and the kind of work that I do. Interactive performance is much better, the docker-based workflows everyone's using are so much faster when they're native, and there's no mismatch between Darwin's BSD userland and the Ubuntu/CentOS you're probably using in prod.