Linux To Mac?
An unintended experiment.
This year has been terrible for old hardware.
Ebay purchased Dell Precision 7730 died.
HP Z420 desktop died.
iPhone8 got too flaky to use away from home.
Dell R430 from Ebay proved bad, still a good deal due to ram.
Disinfodrome’s #2 Dell R420 just started erroring this month.
On the positive side all this was donated:
Pinky & Brain are great.
Hardware Fairy Strikes Again with a replacement iPhone.
An Enormous 12.9” iPad Pro showed up.
And I’ve not said anything about it previously, but the backup HP Z420 that took over for my long serving desktop is doing the same thing its predecessor did, namely USB ports got flaky, then failed entirely. I’m leaving it on, not doing so was part of what killed the other one, but even so it IS twelve years old.
Pinky, the pink MacAir, gets used every time I go out for a meeting. Brain, on the other hand, has received OS updates but other than that it’s been a pretty gray paperweight, until this week. I’ve had the cabling for a while and on Sunday I started rearranging things. I’m going through the teething pain portion of the conversion now - nothing is where I left it, had to get a third party hotkeys utility, and the free UTM virutalization software was just pitiful, so I am again a Parallels customer after a twelve year hiatus.
There are some things that might chase me back to an intel machine.
16GB isn’t much for virtualization work.
ARM64 desktop mismatch with Proxmox hosting hardware.
1TB SSD is fast but unprotected.
Additional storage must be external.
And the absolute bitter end … life without ZFS is not worth living.
No, seriously, once you adapt to having a proper volume manager, losing it feels like trading a Range Rover for a golf cart. There’s NO ROOM. You have to carefully maneuver around obstacles you wouldn’t even notice with a workstation. If you get stuck, say by upgrading a VM and then discovering you’ve got something unworkable, and there’s no native rollback procedure … NIGHTMARE.
A big part of the reason I do all the different things I do is that with ZFS I can …
Never worry about hard drive loss, because native software raid.
Snapshots and restores of datasets take less than a second.
Virtual machines can be rolled forward/backward using snapshots.
Virtual block devices permit experiments w/o needing new hardware.
10TB of storage in my desktop feels like SSD thanks to two stage cache.
There are things I’ve done since the reboot of this Substack in August of 2023 that I would not dream of attempting on a machine with a single physical drive with no volume manager. Stuff takes forever when you have to make a full copy of something to checkpoint progress. There’s the constant worry of data loss.
The one huge advantage an M1 Mac has over my existing desktop is in AI applications - the desktop’s 6GB Nvidia GPU is a weakling compared to the 16GB of unified memory and GPU performance of the M1 chip.
Changing Course:
So what do I do here?
Replacing the desktop with a newer Z440 would be around $350. I don’t need the speed, this would be for the sake of stability. They weigh around forty pounds with the drives I’m using now.
A Dell Precision 7540 with an E-2286M Xeon would bring eight FAST cores, maxing at 64GB of ram, and a comparable GPU, in a luggable form factor. It would have ZFS, but they’re $700 and that’s before adding a datacenter grade NVMe for boot/root and a pair of large NVMe for protected storage. $1500 when it’s all done and no spare.
And the most frugal solution? This 1x PCIe USB card so I’m not dealing with the nutty onboard interfaces, then just grit my teeth and be ready for the day I have no choice but to shell out $350 for a new workstation.
Conclusion:
There are a lot of things up in the air right now. I’ve proven to myself that I can do my day to day stuff with the Mac, with Maltego having been the potential stumbling block. There are a quartet of 2.5” drives headed my way - a pair of 1TB and a pair of 5TB, all leftovers from a retired Dell R610 hosting machine. That’s enough disk that I could fully provision a Z440 and put the Z420 back into storage.
I can switch between the Mac and Linux by crawling under my desk and plugging/unplugging the desktop graphics card. I think I’m going to try switch hitting - desktop during the day, Mac in the evenings, and see how that goes. If the Mac is a tolerable backup for the desktop, then I wouldn’t even have an outage the day that the HP finally fails for the last time.
This was not at all clear to me when I started writing this post … thanks for listening while I talked my way through this.