Your Mac is slowing you down. Moving to Linux has exponentially improved performance for my agents, in particular on the file system side.

Nah, I don't have time to fix my BT/WiFi/audio/keyboard/screen/fingerprint sensor drivers every week. Thanks! 😉

maybe, but I can run blender, freecad, 100 browser tabs, Zed with agents, Codex, and an emulator all at the same time on my Mac without it crashing... can you say the same for linux??

FASCINATING video. Old retired storage/filesystem guy here. Agent assisted dev is the very first time I’m starting to feel like I’m losing my ability to keep up. I made it through NAND flash storage and (to me insane) front-end toolkits and package management tool chains by the skin of my teeth, but fear I’m retired for real now. My one comment is that cleans, pnpm installs, etc. are very metadata intensive, and compression layers create interesting quirks when coupled with the disparity between read/writes to an SSD. One takeaway from an entire career is that there are LOTS of different I/O patterns out there. A front end dev has different needs than, say, someone doing visualization dev on massive datasets.

Mostly agree. I think that “best fs for writing code” is somewhat universal, but “best fs for running a given application” has much more range

Been thinking about this. I think you’ve nailed it. But what percentage of Linux desktop users will be writing code in another year or three?

My guess: graphic design, video editing, audio recording/mixing, and CAD (all AI assisted) will soon be more common than coding. Probably browsers (web apps) generate the most common io seen on any desktop even today (wonder if there’s a fs tuned for browser caches?)

@theo Watched the video and remembered something I saw from @Linus__Torvalds, linked to part of video. Having someone like Linus obsessing over optimizations like this make things spin faster or at least sets a president!✌️

sigh

I'm sorry, it hurt me too

Where was everyone at 2 years ago, is everyone on the hype train now? Wheres my OG's??

I know it's the right move... but I don't have the strength to do it

For the last 15 or so years that I've been using a mac desktop i've always connected to a Linux server, either local network or remote to do dev work. Why would this change? Why do you need to run these tools on your local machine? Not ditching mac desktop anytime soon.

I’ve been saying this for so long! My OpenClaw and Hermes agents live on a beelink Linux mini pc running Ubuntu server and they work flawlessly, been using it for months. Never understood why people were shilling for Mac minis

The final form of a Mac developer: using a $3,000 MacBook as a terminal for a Linux box.

My AMD Strix Halo system should arrive next week 😌 And my next MacBook will probably be an Air that I can remote into other, beefier computers from (just waiting for cellular to make the upgrade worth it) This is the way.

We got theo to the other side!!!

So are people using "exponentially" to just mean "a lot" these days?

I find Mac only convenient for battery, weight and screen. If possible, I tend to do real development on Linux.

fixed with an ssh

we are so back

My file watcher crashed twice today just indexing node_modules. Linux is looking real tempting right now.

You do understand that you're comparing encrypted macos storage bench to unencrypted linux version?

“Your Mac is slowing you down” Brother my agents are coding while Linux users are still choosing a window manager. 💀

The exact benchmark you are showing here takes ~3 seconds if you repeat the same test inside a small VM trough apple virtualization framework, I made a cmux inspired terminal that let’s you easily move projects in fast provisioned VMs if you want to take a look

Not surprised at all. macOS just chokes once agents start hammering thousands of small file ops — ext4 doesn't even flinch.

@suavecito585 @tony426000 @GregoryNimensky

Linux is where I started, with windows too on the side.. but the DX on mac is hard to beat

@grok can you summarize this video and focus on the high impact points that someone with a Mac should know. Especially if they are measuring how big of a deal this is and want a max performance machine.

I LOVE running agents on my Linux VM. Always on, safely locked down via Tailscale, easy to access anywhere (including from my Mac of course), and 100% focused on agentic work. Frees up my Mac to work on a lot of other things.

There's several IO and fs improvements in the upcoming Golden Gate release. It would be nice to test with the public beta. There's also a new virtual file system that's much faster.

interesting gotta try this on weekend😅

@theo have you tried this:

Linux filesystems handle small file operations better than macOS but the agent performance bottleneck is usually raw tool output. Reducing the noise of bash command returns is worth more than moving the kernel. Compression of tool output is the real multiplier.

Hasn't everyone been running with a Mac/Windows desktop and a separate Linux dev PC for the past (checks notes), 15+ years? We have had 100s of devs doing exactly that. A decent percentage have always worked directly on Linux.

This is very interesting. So tl;dr for mac person: - get a Linux machine (or use the old one found at home) - if you stuck on MacOS use rift? Btw, what would be good value-for-money spec for Linux?

Have you turned on FileVault on Mac, but nothing like that on the Linux machine? AFPS is still slower than any other filesystem, but FileVault slowers down even more

LOL, I was always blaming our Enterprise jamf tool on my Mac for making it so slow, so it's actually apfs.

I'm preparing my macbook pro to install Omarchy as we speak. I've been using Omarchy on my z13 strix halo and love it.

Why wouldn't you use OpenZFS on your macOS installation with a ZFS partition for such usecase?