Go with macOS or stay with Windows 11 + wsl2 (or VM)

[JeremyMignolet]

Hello,

To give a bit of context: I'm a freelancer and free to choose which device I want to use, so the company does not provide me with a work laptop.

I wanted to pick your brain on the following:
A year ago I bought a Surface laptop with a Snapdragon X-elite (12 core, 32GB RAM) because I wasn't allowed to run anything else for a customer. They only approved Windows-laptops. I wanted to mimick, atleast that's what I tried, the Apple Sillicon chips by using a ARM based system which would hopefully give me good battery life and a snappy experience. Well it did and still does, I mean it's fine. Let's put it that way.

But a few months ago they started to allow MacOS (I was a bit pissed off because that happened 4 months after I joined) but anyway, ignored it and continued with the Surface laptop. But lately, the lack of support for arm64 on some of the tools I have to use is becoming frustrating. One example is the github actions migration cli tool where I simply get an error stating "is not supported for linux-arm64" when running in WSL2. Fine, I'll go to Powershell and do it there: "is not supported for windows-arm64". Okay, what now? This is just an example where I have to go ask a colleague or run a VM to do it for me. I had a look at that specific tool (if you're curious: this one), and there you go: all x86-64 and arm64 for Apple Sillicon.

The benefit of using macOS would be that alot of these tools are supported on macOs given the amount of developers using it. And it got me thinking of swapping the Surface laptop to a Macbook.

I'm mainly a Linux user at home with personal devices, but if I had to choose between macOS or Windows 11.. I choose macOS anyday. Unless I create a NixOS VM (which supports ARM) and start using that but I got annoyed very quickly with the delay in typing and stuff, even with enhanced mode enabled. So running a native Unix environment would make me much more comfortable. I pretty much do that in WSL2, I live in the terminal and only use tools like Teams and Edge natively on Windows. But even in WSL2, since it's running Fedora aarch64, I bump into some tools not being available for my architecture.

I'm open for suggestions and your thoughts.

 

[Alameda]

It sounds as though, no matter what system you use, there will be an incompatibility sometime, somewhere.

Of course the MacOS has a direct Unix command line interface. And there are numerous free development environments, particularly Apple's own tools. And there are implementations of all of the various compilers and interpreters. There is also Docker for Mac, which lets you create virtualized containers for all sorts of Unix and Linux environments.

In my opinion, it helps to have a lot of memory, because VM's gobble up RAM. It is not strictly necessary; in a 16 GB system you can create a quite large VM and run it fine as long as you don't have a lot of memory-hogging Mac software running at the same time. A downside of Apple's architecture is that memory is non-upgradeable. You can easily add external storage but you cannot increase memory, because it is packaged with the CPU die in order to make it more efficient and to boost performance.

Docker is not the only VM tool but probably the best for you. It sounds as though, sooner or later, you will need it. Or, you will want it so that you can keep a project bundled up exactly right for its eventual deployment environment.

There are also Linux boot loaders which let you fully boot into Linux, but then of course you lose the benefits of MacOS.

 

[maflynn]

I'm open for suggestions and your thoughts.

Why not get a x86 laptop? Personally, I've found the surface laptops to be lacking, I've owned a number of them over the years, and while I've not had an ARM based one, from the reviews.

The snapdragron processor isn't on par with Apple silicon while Intel's Panther Lake processors largely hold their own against Apple silicon in a number of categories.