Hi marto,

What's the advantage of a Mac in terms of hardware/software if you're just spinning up a Linux VM to work?

There is none any longer. It used to be that the hardware advantage was the Retina monitor, but now there are plenty of vendors that provide nice 4K screens on 13" or 14" laptops.

Now, on the contrary, the Macbooks have fallen behind in hardware, offering less RAM and disk space and slower chips and disks than competitor systems.

My latest machine is a Lenovo Yoga 910 which I bought with Windows 10 but never booted before wiping and installing Ubuntu. It has 16GB Ram and a 1Tb SSD drive, as well as 4K screen. It flipping screams.

Many devs working at a $company choose to use a Mac with Linux VM because the IT dept insists on having a bunch of spyware, errr, corporate security tools, on the machine, so it's a choice between Windows or Mac.

(In a week from today I'll be getting a new laptop from $newjob -- the manager strongly suggests Macbook with VMs, having himself just switched from native Linux, lol. I don't prefer it as the VirtualBox app on the Macbook always seems to get too hot eventually (consuming all system RAM) and you wind up having to reboot the entire thing or at least the VM platform. I don't have this problem running desktop Ubuntu on the Lenovo (always did used to have problems with a Linux GUI, things have improved). So, I plan to try to get a Linux machine, maybe they will offer the Dell. If not, I plan to bork a Windows machine and install Ubuntu, if I can get a client for the VPN. Will report back.)

Thanks, this is the conclusion I had drawn, but you're the first to admit it :P

I develop on Mac. It never remotely occurred to me that I might need a Linux VM on it. Never installed one. OS X is Unix.

There are two reasons I always have a Linux VM on Mac.

First, to replicate the production build environment I'm developing for.

Second, because Apple are always screwing around with things, e.g. the issue at the root of this thread (Berkeley DB must be installed manually on the lastest MacOS release prior to installing Perl); changing system perms in OS X El Capitan so the root user is unable to write to certain areas of the file system (hard to say "MacOS is UNIX" when root is not root ...), etc.

Then there is the issue you mentioned below, namely the ease of installing applications and libraries on Linux versus a laborious, convoluted or even frustrating procedure on the Mac.



The way forward always starts with a minimal test.

"OS X is Unix."

Hence my confusion as to why so many people I've seen using a Mac need a Linux VM to get things done :P

Me too. First I've heard of it being a thing. Though I can imagine why it might be so. The package managers in Linux tend to be very comprehensive. It can be a chore to get some packages installed on OS X whereas apt-get or yum or whatever tends to be pretty easy.