Curious on how Docker runs on M1, it's well known for being an horrendously slow piece of software on Apple computers, draining battery life like crazy. Any feedback on M1 Docker so far?
And the M1 still amazes me every day. I code all day long, watch youtube, listen music, do zoom and slack calls and so on and don't charge my MBP even once during the day. I once forgot to plug in my laptop in the evening and the next day I was surprised that by mid day my battery was down to 10% after working on it for 1.5 days without charging. That's when I realised how long it lasts and that I got used to not charge it like my iPads or phone.
Also never gets hot and no fan noise yet.
Until now, my laptop would be plugged in per default and every now and then I would run on battery. Where as now, my laptop needs to charge now and then, but most of the time it runs on battery.
Now I almost never use my M1 laptop on wall power. I use it on battery power all day long, even when sitting right next to a power outlet. I charge it every few days when I go to bed or won't be working on my computer for a while. This is similar to how you use tablets and phones. You usually charge them up and always use them on battery power. Only in an emergency do you use it while plugged in. The laptop now actually fits into that category now and is used like a true go-anywhere laptop, not a portable computer.
I swear by 13 inch but I know I'm in a minority. I don't need a huge screen for my work. I like to look at code without bending my neck left and right all day long and if I need to multi task I four finger swipe left or right and feel extremely productive this way for many years now :)
EDIT:
I shall say I had an 8GB intel MBP before and 8GB was just about enough for everything including Docker.
I have fallen in love with the 13" size. I still have my 16" computer and I pulled it out the other day and it looked comically large on my lap. It seriously felt ridiculous. I couldn't believe that was my standard for so long. The 13" is still good enough to do most anything, but small enough to really be portable. My mom has an 11" air and it feels like a kids toy in my lap, too small for my liking. But the 13" MBP is right in that Goldilocks zone.
I will admit I turn down screen scaling down to minimum to get more stuff on the screen. The default screen scaling state makes things quite large out of the box.
You can't see all of a 15" screen without bending your neck?
You think 15" is a "huge" screen?
If it is a personal Mac, I would still go for the 16GB version, but purely for longevity. With 16GB you can probably use the MacBook longer. Also, less swapping means less SSD wear.
(16GB should really have been the default, at least on the MacBook Pro.)
Also, 8GB additional memory is not expensive at cost price. They could use the different amounts of baseline memory as a differentiator between the Air and Pro, especially now that the delta between the Air and Pro is so small (same SoC plus one more GPU core, Touch Bar that a lot of people hate, better screen).
I originally bought the 13" MBP on M1 because I was in desperate need of a new laptop. I previously had a maxed out 16" MBP that cost me around $3,500. I had used it for about 5 years and was looking to replace it. But Apple's systems were in flux and I didn't want to drop $3,500 again on an intel macbook right as they were going out of production. So when I saw the new M1 macs released, I decided to buy the $1,200 13" MBP with 8Gb of RAM and a 256HDD. Just the base model. The idea was that I would use this computer for a year, until Apple released the 16 inch "big boy" models. Then I would sell the 13 inch and get the real 16 inch that I was waiting for.
But when I got my new mac in November, I started using it and was just so amazed by the performance that I realized it could do what I was asking it to do, plus I loved the size, the epic battery life, and the no fan noise. I essentially fell in love with that computer. When I went back to my 16" macbook it felt so large and heavy, I wanted nothing to do with it. Even if Apple fixes the fan noise (that the 16" is horrible with) and the battery life, I still hate the size. I had truly fallen in love with the 13 inch computer I already had. And it was less than half the price I had planned on spending during my computer upgrade.
I originally bought the 13 inch macbook pro as a stop-gap until the 16 inch models were available on M1. But after using it, I decided that this was going to be my new long term computer. So at the end of the return window I had about 6-8 weeks using the computer. I had never had any trouble with the 8Gb of RAM. BUt my mind just kept telling me that 8Gb wasn't enough.
Since I was already upgrading the computer for more SSD storage, I really went back and forth on whether to upgrade the RAM as well.
The reason it was such a hard decision is that I couldn't pinpoint a single time when I felt that the 8Gb held me back.
But I kept going back to the idea that if I keep this computer for even 3 years, the $200 becomes insignificant (to me at least, I recognize I am very fortunate). So I couldn't really identify a good reason to upgrade to 16Gb, but because I decided to do it anyway because for $200, it was worth future proofing it. So I ended up returning my base model 13 inch macbook pro and upgrading it to a 1Tb SSD, with 16Gb of RAM. It is now my daily driver computer. Even fully loaded it is still a fraction of the cost of my old macbook pro. I couldn't be more happy with my computer right now.
The performance is just incredible. No fan noise ever. Epic length battery life. Perfect size. I just really love this thing.
So do you need 16Gb of RAM. No. Not at all. I have not yet identified a time when the 16Gb has helped me or made a noticable difference. When I had the 8Gb, I never felt like it was slowing me down. But with all that being said, if your budget allows for $200 extra, I would get it just to future proof your purchase. But if you are already penny pinching, then don't worry about the 8gb. You probably won't ever notice it holding you back.
I'm holding out for the next gen to release for my personal machine and will go with 16GB and whatever the next CPU is. Mostly, as you suggest future proofing, but there are a few spots in my workflow where it does hang a bit which I think extra memory would help with.
Suprisingly I have no problem with docker. I just download the docker preview and it works flawlessly. One minior issue is that if I build a Docker image that support multi arch, then push to docker hub, then that image is arm64 by default. I have to do `docker build --platform amd64`.
I document that process here: https://axcoto.com/notes/2021-03-13-docker-apple-m-nginx-and... I think that's the only gotcha I got so far.
Haven't been able to run a php 5.3 container yet though for this one project that is pretty much on life support.
Battery life was still better than my i7 2015 mbp
No, it's not. Perhaps that's an old wives tale from the era (2-3 years ago) when it had bad fs performance and didn't use the native hypervisor directly?
But then, M1 MBP is 25W part and not 180W, it is also silent, unlike the TR. So pick your poison.
I don't know about "Vastly", but it is better and will likely always be better because of the structure of Docker. Docker is by definition, a container that runs atop Linux. Since Linux is already Linux and the Mac has to run Linux in a hypervisor, bare metal Linux is almost always going to be faster.
But, Docker is just a part of the workflow. Dealing with the limits of the Linux Desktop to get better Docker isn't worth it a lot of the time.
That's just your personal preference; I'm using all three (macOS/Linux/Windows 10) and all three are fine for desktop.
> horrendously slow piece of software on Apple computers, draining battery life like crazy
Exactly.
Thankfully there is Docker on Mac: how would my colleagues with shiny laptops get work done otherwise?
This "shiny/for the clueless" Linux-edgelord meme must die. Might as well write "MS" with a dollar sign in 2021.
Go to any programming conference and check the speakers. Over 50% use an Apple laptop. Check major developers people follow, from old Unix hands like Rob Pike, to every major JS cat, to admins, all the way to the creator of Gnome, Gnumeric and Mono, and their preferences, and you'll find they use a Mac laptop with macOS.
(And hardware wise, even Linus Torvalds had an Apple G5 tower as his main driver, and later an Intel Macbook Air he praised as the best machine he had used (though he used Linux on those).
In any case, there are benefits and tradeoffs, but "lol, Mac is teh suck" is inane.
To correct you: no, Docker is not used because "you need to". It's used (also on Linux) for reproducability, isolation, the ability to write code with different dependencies with the whole system at your disposal, and to not mix your driver machine with your development environment.
It is the same use if you run Linux distro X and deployed on another version of it, or on the same version with some tweeks/different libs, or to whole other distro.
And no, it hasn't been a "horrendously slow piece of software on Apple computers, draining battery life like crazy" for ages, and when it was it wasn't because of some macOS limitation, but because the company had done a half-arsed job with the fs layer.
And as far as "needing to use Docker", macOS is not any different than any Linux/FreeBSD distro on that front. If you prefer a local, mix-everything-in, not discliplined approach, unlike what Docker offers, you can install anything you like, from Brew, MacPorts, Fink and so on. You can even have Nix for reproducible builds under that scheme.
Exactly.
And I know Mac reigns in dev land. Just the moment Docker comes around (and it does quite a bit lately) all those shiny (and that's a compliment) pieces of hardware become heated vacuum cleaners.
I'm not saying "lol, Mac is teh suck" (what you apparently want to read). I'm saying: here's something that my Linux laptop wins at. Docker.
You come across rather angry, even saying that Linus uses Apple hardware without running the macOS... How does that work as an argument against my experience?
Nah, just replying to the rather snarky? "Thankfully there is Docker on Mac: how would my colleagues with shiny laptops get work done otherwise?"
>I'm not saying "lol, Mac is teh suck" (what you apparently want to read). I'm saying: here's something that my Linux laptop wins at. Docker.
Well, sure. There are other things a Linux laptop wins at. Tinkerability for example, part replacements, etc.
>even saying that Linus uses Apple hardware without running the macOS... How does that work as an argument against my experience?
It works as an argument that it's not something merely "shiny", but a good piece of hardware for a par excellence technical user.
Nope. I replied to someone saying Docker on Mac is a joke, and I agreed saying: one of the last points where using Linux compared to Mac is advantageous.
Saying Macs are shiny is a compliment. You took it as snarky, but it wasn't (before the new keyboards I preferred --and owned-- Macs).
> I'm not saying "lol, Mac is teh suck"
Biggest eye-roll post of the day. Literally one sentence after the other you suggest Macs are worthless and that you aren't saying they suck.
No shit. It’s running the same kernel. Docker on MacOS requires full virtualisation, which is a lot more overhead.
In the US. Not in Europe. The iPhone is barely testimonial there, while in the US, the iPHone has a good market chunk, and thus, more developers.
The old Unix hats mainly use Acme and MacOS as a dumb client against a 9front cpu(4) with Drawterm or with Plan9port.
The could use whatever it has a GUI to run drawterm on, as they did with Windows 2000 back in the day.
Also, OSX still has HFS as case insensitive by default. On modern Unix environments, OSX is useless. Period.
It works both ways; it will live as long, as "linux is useless, because I had a problem with wifi in 2002".
Having a 15.6" 1080p screen basically means i need to choose between using my glasses all day or using Windows.
On the other hand, I'm have no perfect eyesight, but in Linux, 1080p at 14" is as usable as Windows 10 at 125%. Here, the design choices made by Gnome are hitting its strong points, it is perfect resolution for @1X scale.
And OFC choose whatever theme, icon and font you like in order to match your resolutions.
Windows 10 is useless without scaling.
I have to unplug/replug my mouse every time I boot into Ubuntu because it's not recognised otherwise. Another wired mouse I have is not recognised at all (was working just fine during install).
As somebody who works 8+ hours a day, I don't have time for this shit.
In your experience - that's not uniformly true - I'm a counter example - I installed Fedora on this machine when I built it a few years ago (and have upgraded to each release) and have had zero hardware issues and that's running an RTX2080 with the binary driver (historically a pain point on Linux).
As someone who also uses a recent generation work issued mac the different for me is stark.
My point is, that an inconsistent experience is not something I have time to debug anymore. I ran Arch 10+ years ago when I had more time than sense, but those days are long gone. I'd rather spend my non-work time AFK.
I also purchased a ThinkPad T14 AMD. It works fine with Linux and all the hardware works out of the box (including the fingerprint reader, WiFi and webcam). Additional benefit: upgraded it from 16GB to 32GB for under 100 Euro.
I used Macs from 2007 until 2020. But in my daily work, I have experienced far more issues with macOS than with Linux in recent years (I was a very happy Mac user from 2007 to ~2015).
I was so impressed by it that it has replaced my Mac laptop as a development machine at home.
I run 3-5 rails servers, redis, postgreql, mysql, jetbrains ides, slack, meet, spotify, vscode, and probably two or three other apps I forget now. I do all this on either my 2014 15” MBP i7 or my 2019 13” MBP i5. The only thing I lack is drive space.
I have reinstalled my 2014 OS never, and I have a truckload of usb devices (mostly music production) attached.
You simply cannot match that with a Linux laptop. I love Linux, but not for desktop use.
So do you always run the same server distribution with exactly the same package versions on your laptop? Otherwise, you miss the point of Docker.
You'd be surprised.
Container isolation is still OS-level virtualization. It just doesn't use a hypervisor.
No, I don't use WSL, and still get work done.