Every time I code with the MBP from work I dream of using my home desktop computer instead. There's just no comparison. I have just the 3700X CPU but already that on Linux runs circles around my work laptop.

Keep in mind that Docker for Mac runs in a virtual machine, so it is much heavier than running it on Linux.

Good point.

I have yet to take the dive into buying or building a Linux workstation for development. Probably very worth it, but I have found the endless fiddling you can do with Linux to really distract me from doing the actual work I turned on the computer to do.

Debian stable has been my solution to the endless fiddling for over a decade. But it won't work for you if there's some very specific difficult-to-use-with-Linux thingamajig you need.

It’s not only endless fiddling you can do but occasinally you have to do as well.

This may not be true at all, depending on the distribution you use. You should ask a Linux user who does work similar to yours. I haven't had to "fiddle" for years, though I probably subconsciously avoid using software/hardware which I suspect may cause trouble.

Hyperbole, meant that I never had any issues with how many containers I was running haha I think I ran like 15 at most on my desktop

Mac these days is a fashion statement rather than a serious tool, plus company shady practices e.g. making devices difficult to repair, questionable design decisions e.g. running high voltage rails right next to low voltage signals to increase the likelihood of failure and then making it difficult to recover data and forcing you to use their cloud so they can analyse your data. No thanks.

Well if you look at the ancestry and lineage, they evolved from the class of single button tools .. more related to a toaster than a two button or three button work machine ;)

Which macbook do you use? Thinking about replacing my thinkpad e590 with macbook pro 16

I had (before switching jobs) the 2018 MBP with all the options maxed out.

Was running a Docker stack of about 8 containers, plus PyCharm. It worked okay-ish, but everything was maxed out all the time and the fans were always spinning. Battery was being drained even when on the charger. Pycharm would lag for a second or two here and there.

Now switched jobs and was issued a 2018 MBP with only 16GB RAM and the 2.2GHz i7. I have gone to the trouble to run everything locally (A single 200MB Python repo + Spark). I don't see the same power drain but Pycharm lags VERY hard on its indexing and code insight... sometimes 5-10 seconds.

There is a high chance you tried it, but have you adjusted memory heap?

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/increasing-memory-hea...

Using pycharm (although with a couple of the smaller projects and the number of containers) just fine on i5-8265U (1.6 GHz base) and 16 GB of RAM. There are always tons of tabs opened in Firefox at the same time and 3440x1440 monitor. No discrete GPU.

It was painful to use Pycharm with default values.

Yeah, I gave it 8 GB and I watch the memory indicator and it rarely uses a full 2 GB.

Makes it seem like it's not a memory limitation, which I didn't really expect it to be.