I really wouldn’t touch secondhand Ms. No upgrades, no repairs, horrible components (CPU is ok, everything else is straight from the dumpster in order to cover costs).
So when something dies on your device from a company that has a long history of terrible design and QA (I’m betting on storage) you have to pay another $1000+ to replace the whole motherboard. On top of that, I’m guessing that they’re also ripping off customers when selling those replacement boards, as having usable ram and storage costs an extra $1000+ when buying new.
I would never buy something new from Apple as I don’t like them, but I have to admit that their hardware feels great to use. I’m not tech savvy enough to know where that would be coming from, but it makes me wonder how people could say that the components are so bad.
My girlfriend has a 2012 MacBook Pro and I put Fedora on it and it feels like such a great machine. The ram and the hard drive have been upgraded, but it feels incredible for an old machine.
If in 10 years you can get an old MacBook Pro for 200$, I might jump on it even if upgradeability has been lowered.
I tried using a friend’s m1 MacBook pro, and it’s the worst laptop I’ve touched in a while. Like my oldest budget core2duo laptop has a better keyboard than a brand new $2000+ device. There’s a very good reason it’s permanently docked.
it makes me wonder how people could say that the components are so bad.
I’ve mentioned a few reasons in this thread. They basically used subpar components to offset the cost of developing their own CPU.
If in 10 years you can get an old MacBook Pro for 200$, I might jump on it even if upgradeability has been lowered.
It’s not lowered, it’s absolutely removed, unless you count replacing the entire motherboard as upgradeability.
It was a joke. But you can see why I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out true in the end.
I know for a fact they’re making it impossible to make small repairs like changing the screen closed sensor. It requires a proprietary calibration tool they won’t sell, and so MacBooks can’t go to sleep when closing the screen.
On top of changing it from a sub $ hall sensor to some proprietary bs that’s far more expensive.
Haven’t dug into it yet, but if that’s right then not great. Then again if something doesn’t break quickly in electronics it usually works fine for years, except maybe overheated GPUs, random RAM and HDDs.
I’m still unsure if I want to replace my 2016 Asus zenbook. Other than the aged CPU/AGPU from Intel, and unusable from the start touchpad it’s fine.
When m1 came out, some tech guy on twitter did a review of MacBook Pro and studio storage. Apple literally used components that are so bad they had to disable data safety protocols to go above HDD speeds. The end result was that losing power is likely to corrupt your data.
Besides that apple was cutting out “unnecessary” parts of the arm specification in order to cut costs. The result is that the first 2(?) generations have hardware level exploit “m1racles” on top of others like “pacman”.
Legitimate repairability and pricing concerns aside, what parts exactly are you accusing of being straight from the dumpster? The GPU is insane for a low-power laptop, screen, speakers, trackpad are best in class. Keyboard is a matter of preference but by any objective measure it’s not bad, much improved from butterfly switches.
I would if the particular hardware had no inherent or user caused issues and the price was reasonable compared to other purchase candidates, but it rarely is. It would also need to be Linux compatible too because the os has always been insufferable and praised by insufferable people that need something to feel superior about with zero justification.
The PowerPC days were pretty crap though even though the hardware was visually pleasing. Nobody made PowerPC compatible software. This time I guess apple is paying fees to arm and at least has arm compatibility. x86 is irritating in its own right too. Man, tech has gone in all sorts of shitty directions.
they are downvoting you, but you’re absolutely right.
they can’t hardly be repaired and it’s impossible to upgrade them at all, even something as basic as swapping the SSD needs desoldering. They are still sold with 8 GB of RAM as the base and they can’t be upgraded.
Just don’t buy an 8gb model, easy fix) But seriously when you get a laptop which allows you to work 8 hours straight from battery and then have 30% capacity left at the end of a day, there is no chance you would get back to the Intel system and plug it in every 2 hours.
there is no chance you would get back to the Intel system and plug it in every 2 hours.
don’t be irrealistic. most laptops in the Macbook price range will have 8 hours of usage in low consumption mode or around 6 or 5 if you need more power.
and at that price point they come with at least 32 GB of RAM which can be upgraded, swappable SSDs with more capacity than the macbook’s, far better keyboard and more ports.
the Macbooks do have some extra performance per battery usage? yeah I guess. But after 2 years that the battery life is gone, you’ll probably be buying the newer model or wishing that you bought a laptop with a replaceable battery.
there is no chance you would get back to the Intel system and plug it in every 2 hours.
don’t be irrealistic. most laptops in the Macbook price range will have 8 hours of usage in low consumption mode or around 6 or 5 if you need more power.
While I completely agree on the repairability front, which is really quite unfortunate and quite frankly a shame (at least iPhones have been getting more repairable, silver lining I guess? damned need for neverending profits), it’s just… non unrealistic.
That being said, unified memory kind of sucks but it’s still understandable due to the advantages it brings, and fixed-in-place main storage that also stores the OS is just plain shitty. It’ll render all these devices unusable once that SSD gives out.
Anyhow, off the tangent again: I have Stats installed for general system monitoring, as well as AlDente to limit charge to 80% of maximum battery capacity. All that to say, by now after around 1.5 years of owning the M2 MacBook Air (which I’ve been waiting for to buy/to release since late 2019, btw), I know pretty well which wattages to expect and can gauge its power usage pretty well.
I’ll try to give a generalized rundown:
High-intensity workloads (mostly in shorter bursts for me): typically around 10W. I’ve installed Minecraft before once just to test it, and I get reasonable frames (both modded and unmodded), where it seemed to draw maybe 15W, thus still being able to charge (!) the battery off a 30W power supply. It doesn’t ever really go above 20W as a rule of thumb, and the CPU/GPU will be capable enough for easily 80-90% of the general population.
Idle/suspended: unnoticeable. I use my machine every day with maybe an exception or three per month, but from what I’ve read from others, battery will dip slightly after a month of standby, but that’s mostly due to battery chemistry I’d assume, not actually background usage.
Idle/running, light usage (yes it’s the same category*): It actually depends on the screen size edit: whoops, brightness. Energy consumption due to CPU usage is by far the minority portion. I’d say 2-4W, maybe. Screen usage when really bright makes it jump to 8-9W, darker-but-not-minimum screen brightnesses leave it at… 5W maybe.
Given the spec sheet’s 52 Wh battery, you can draw your own conclusions about the actual runtime of this thing by simple division. I leave it mostly plugged in to preserve the battery for when it becomes a couch laptop in around 5-8 years, so I can’t actually testify on that yet, I just know the numbers.
I didn’t mean for this to come off as fanboi-y as it did now. I also really want to support Framework, but recommending it universally from my great-aunt to my colleagues is not as easy as it is with the MacBook. Given they’re a company probably 1,000 times smaller than Apple, what they’re doing is still tremendously impressive, but in all honesty, I don’t see myself leaving ARM architecture anytime soon. It’s just too damn efficient.
*At least for my typical usage, which will be browser with far too many tabs and windows open + a few shell sessions + a (may or may not be shell) text editor, sometimes full-fledged IDE, but mostly just text editors with plugins.
The thermals and battery life of my Apple silicon MacBooks are unlike any other laptop I’ve owned. When I first got one, I started thinking of recharging it not in hours, but in days. 3-4 days between charges was normal for typical use. Mind you that was not full workdays, but the standby time was so good that I didn’t have to consider that the battery would decrease overnight or in my bag. I’ve used multiple Dell, Thinkpad, and Intel Mac laptops over the past decade as well and none of them come within spitting distance on battery life and thermals. I really hope that Qualcomm can do for other manufacturers what Apple silicon has done for MacBooks.
I did some actual measurements just to confirm it, here is minecraft in default configuration running @ 100fps and the cpu+gpu consumption is around 6w in total. If you add about 5w for display backlight and other components the total would be 9-10 hours of play time on my 100wh battery.
I have a 1½-year-old laptop AMD Ryzen 6860Z processor & get 9 hours on the regular running NixOS doing programming/browsing/chat. That’s not quite 8 hours with 30% to spare, but good enough that I don’t worry about carrying my charger (but being lightweight GaN, normally keep it in my bag just in case). Apple folks have this tendency to think all their hardware is massively better, but even if it’s ‘better’, it’s often just by a small margin that doesn’t make a big difference–especially when you factor in cost.
I did some actual measurements just to confirm it, here is minecraft in default configuration running @ 100fps and the cpu+gpu consumption is around 6w in total. If you add about 5w for display backlight and other components the total would be 9-10 hours of play time on my 100wh battery.
I don’t own Minecraft (nope to Microsoft-owned software) nor would I have a reason to do 3D gaming on a battery… are you gaming at a café, the library, or something?
no, it’s just an easy sustained load that can be measured accurately. If you have some other application that provides sustained load but doesn’t spin all the cores to 100% please suggest it, I will try.
For example when watching 1080p youtube video in Safari the power consumption is only 0.1watt because it’s using hardware decoders. (not including display backlight, I can’t measure it). But when I play the same video in firefox which is using software decoding the consumption is around 0.7w which is not as good as hw decoders, but still less than a watt
The 8GB models are manufactured e-waste but the usable lineup are great machines. They’re practically unrepairable, but they’re built not to need repairs.
If you care about swapping out the SSD or replacing the RAM, you shouldn’t buy Apple. I promise you, though, that 99% of laptop users don’t, and that includes a significant part of Linux users.
Macs are expensive as balls but there simply aren’t any competitors for them. They’re the “overkill everything” segment that’s too small to target for other manufacturers. There are maybe one or two series of laptops that come close in speaker quality, and one of those consists of gaming laptops designed after 80s scifi spaceships, and the other comes with terrible battery and even worse Linux support, and both of them lack the battery life+performance quality Apple managed to squeeze out of their CPU.
I wish someone would produce Macbooks other than Apple. It’s an awful company that produces great hardware for a competitive price, it you care about all the Macbook has to offer. And to be honest, that’s not because Apple is such an amazing manufacturer, it’s because AMD and Intel are behind the curve (Qualcom even more), and the laptop manufacturers that try to compete with Apple always try to squeeze just that little bit of extra cost cutting out of their models so their shit doesn’t cost more, and preload their top of the line hardware with Windows 11 Home (the one with candy crush pinned to the start menu) and their stupid GAMER software suite that works on three models and stops being maintained after two updates.
Current apple systems are objectively superior. The display image quality is better than competition, the touchpad hardware is better, CPU is top 1 in the world in single thread performance and the battery life is unrivaled.
If you talk about the repairability it only matters in case it breaks and it only happens to a small % of the owners. Most people won’t need to repair it. However you do use your device every day, so why would you give up the better user experience? Because of a small chance you would need to pay for repairs later, or even at all? It doesn’t make sense.
The same argument applies to upgrades as well. If you think you’ll need an upgrade just buy a bigger version from the start. It may be more expensive but once again you get a better experience overall.
Exactly the drivel they want you to believe. I’m sorry but even if 8gb of ram performs like 16gb on other computers, which is a load of hot shit, it shouldn’t cost more than 32gb on other computers. The markup on parts for basic specs config is utterly insane. I highly doubt the average apple used actually benefits from the top single thread performance, and all of humanity’s battery tech is still awful at it’s best both in capability and environmental impact, not to mention capability per dollar.
I have used apple hardware and software from the beige plastic days until the first laptops, and tried out Mac os and ios every major update, and found it to be entirely unenjoyable even when ignoring what is essentially DRM for hardware components on the phones forcing you to pay for repairs when it’s an easy diy otherwise.
Really the apple elitism is bizarre beyond belief. You get to be in the cool dude club for getting scammed into paying 3-5 times the cost of each individual component you can choose higher version of in there config before buying. It’s like the million dollar gold bar app on early app store, except apple wants to be the only one making that kind of easy money off of their users.
I wouldn’t say hated, but definitely possessing of many ui/UX choices that were about as well thought out as how windows had old/new control panel plus the new new settings app and yet everything was still counterintuitive. I merely gave it a chance repeatedly because I ran a computer business up until covid hit and needed basic familiarity, and people kept telling me it was better than everything else and really if you don’t game it mostly is for many workloads, but I still found things to be rather clunky especially system navigation on iOS. Not saying android is better or anything either because while it suits me more, there is so much infuriating dumb shit.
Basically because of every other offering feeling like it’s ripping me off, Linux being free and having tons of customization beyond simply cosmetic and several people making different solutions to each problem most of the time and also free, coming back to anything else with any combination of hardware, software, and money entry barriers just feels like the worst value proposition possible. Maybe if I was born into wealth and a social media addict I would have been an apple fanboy.
You talk about high prices however there is no actual competition. High end systems like Dell XPS and others cost the same as M3. You do get some benefits like touch screen or whatever but you get shitty touchpad and 3 hours of battery life.
In regards to the software I agree macOS is not the best, but maybe you noticed the topic is about Fedora Linux so you do have options now.
Their prices for RAM and storage upgrades are dogshit, but Macbooks do have objectively superior audio quality, and some of the best screens available. You just need to pretend the 256GB/8GB models don’t exist and the lineup suddenly makes a lot of sense.
Apple Silicon showed up to wipe the floor with Intel and AMD. Both now have CPUs that beat the M1/2/3, at the cost of huge power consumption and heat generation. With every non-Apple Macbook competitor, you can pick two out of “screen quality, audio quality, battery life, CPU performance” that perform well, and the rest plain doesn’t compete.
You won’t see me buy one of those things, the price is just soo goddamn high, but if you have the money to waste on these things, they’re excellent products. Especially when you’re a normal consumer and don’t plan on running Linux anyway; macOS may be janky as hell (“what’s window snapping?”) but your alternatives are Windows 11 and ChromeOS.
This is in contrast to the Intel Macbooks, which still had great screens and speakers, but were gimped by awful CPUs, comically insufficient cooling, self destructing keyboards, and so many other design flaws.
I would have liked for Linus to maintain his angry-man-finger-thrusting self against evil corporates like Nvidia. I suppose I’m asking for too much, but his mild-mannerisms towards developers is a welcome change. Towards such corporates though, not so much. I would have liked some more motivated cursing against Intel and Nvidia and IBM. Oh well.
Other than that (which is a minor gripe from me at the most), touching message from Linus. Indeed, the maintainers are graying, and the current generation isn’t that interested in kernel programming. I’m sure there will be talent around (as long as the big companies need Linux to run their servers, I’m sure someone will turn up), but someone to rise to the helm with a fiery approach to openness is very important to my heart. I don’t think we will ever see another Linus in our lifetime, and I will personally grieve the day Linus and his core set of maintainers pass away.
I am not a programmer, and the best I can do is provide some funding to people who can/would engage directly with the kernel. But if the situation becomes so dire, I too will get my hands dirty, if nothing but to help the cause. Long live FOSS!
Linus was himself a major contributor to making people steer well clear of wanting to work on the Linux kernel. I didn’t need that kind of abuse in my life.
So while he is identifying a problem, it’s a bit like a recovering arsonist homeowner bemoaning the scorch marks on his house.
As I said, his change in behaviour towards fellow developers is a welcome change. There’s no doubt about that.
I just wish he would continue to rage against companies up to no good, especially for FOSS. I never want him to get mild with Nvidia, and I want him to praise AMD a bit (they deserve it, and his opinion holds value).
Hell will freeze over before he accepts a pull request on GitHub or uses Issues for discussions. I believe his behaviour serves only to scare away contributors and embolden elitists.
Wait, isn’t a lower frame time better? Why does their screenshot show windows having the lowest and say that it scored last?
Looking at the source article, windows did have generally better 1% lows except for Starfield, so I think this article has it backwards. They also cherry picked 2 results where windows was worse lol.
I’m all for pro-linux stuff but articles like this just reek of making shit up so it looks better.
They probably didn’t label their axes properly. FPS is a clearly defined metric, and there, more is better. This indicates that the conclusion (Linux is faster) holds. Since frame times have an entry with value “100” and all other values are lower, I assume that’s in percent, i.e. Arch Linux is the fastest and picked as comparison point, and the others are shown with relative performance to Arch.
I think FPS was actually selected, not frametimes. 1% low frametimes of 89 does not make sense.
There is an issue with the image in the article, but not the one that you might think it was. The FPS should have been more clearly indicated that it was the selected tab and then it probably would have been fine.
edit: I went to the base website www.computerbase.de/2023-12/…/2/ it’s in German, but, it seems like the frametimes and frame rates are nearly the exact same values - which doesn’t even seem to make sense to me?
So X.Org fully dies on the 31st May 2035 with the end of Extended Life Cycle Support for RHEL 9. We have XOrg’s death day. Even if it will likely be on it’s death bed taking its final breaths for years before that.
I thought this as well but the more I think about it, the less true this seems. From an engineering point of view, it could last longer.
Xwayland is really just Xorg and Xwayland continues to be supported in RHEL10 and beyond.
Xorg and Wayland compositors have grown together in some ways. Both now use libinput, libdrm, and KMS for example. Those are not going away.
Xwayland is really just Xorg adapted to talk to Wayland instead of KMS and libinput. It is mostly the same code. So, Xorg will continue to benefit from the care and attention that Xwayland gets. Perhaps there may not be many new features but the code is not going to bit rot and security will continue to be addressed. While Xwayland does not use libinput or KMS, the Wayland compositor itself will, so those pieces are also going to be maintained including new features and new hardware support. Mesa is a common component as well.
So, while Red Hat may stop coordinating releases of Xorg at some point, a surprising amount of the code will still be actively maintained and current. It may not take a lot of work for somebody else to take over and bundle it up as a release.
What will probably kill Xorg is lack of demand.
Despite the anti-Wayland chatter, the migration to Wayland looks like it will gain substantial momentum this year and next and not only on Linux. Three to five years from now, the number of people that still care about Xorg ( as the primary display server - not as Xwayland ) may be very small indeed. Obviously it will be running on older systems for a long, long time but, ten years from now, installing Xorg on a new system is likely to be very rare ( like CP/M now rare ).
Red Hat may end up being one of the very last players that cares about Xorg after 2030. My guess is that most of the current never-Wayland crowd will have moved to it long before then.
Yeah, thank you for doing such a good explanation of it. I completely agree. Truth be told, the features I missed with Qtile on Wayland (some bugs that took a while to iron out, and are only fixed in qtile-git, as well as rounded corners, which are a work-in-progress, leaving me with only 1 issue with Qtile, that being how difficult Qtile Wayland is to install and set up, if only there was a working guide for doing so via pip, but pywayland and/or pywlroots via pip are usually broken), were all fixed by Hyprland, so I’m on Hyprland full time now, and I love it! There is only one minor issue I have (drop downs from Waybar’s systray are kinda broken on Hyprland, rendering weirdly, with strange black gaps between sections and rendering under, rather than over, windows).
Yes and they implement EVERYTHING in house. In case you haven’t heard they also started implementing a browser engine from scratch ladybird.dev just for fun. It kinda took off and they even got some nice donations, just to keep it going and see where it leads.
The “founders” youtube channel is quit interesting. Especially the monthly update videos if you want to keep up to date with the latest developments. inv.tux.pizza/channel/UC3ts8coMP645hZw9JSD3pqQ
The browser was at first only available in serentyOS itself but lately is available as a stand alone program running on other OSs as well. It’s still pretty early days, I am exited to see where all this leads tho!
It’s a work in progress. Most sites won’t work but some do. Check out this latest development update video: inv.tux.pizza/watch?v=giq5iXJntgQ&t=911 That link leads directly to the “demo segment” where he opens some sites.
I’d advise against using Brave, but that’s a different topic.
Just use the Flatpak. Do not care if it’s official, most packages in traditional package managers are not packaged officially, yet we use them all the time. Check the Flatpak repo instead to see if there’s something wrong.
Maybe check ungoogled chromium too while you’re at it.
most packages in traditional package managers are not packaged officially, yet we use them all the time.
While there’s definitely truth in this, aren’t we already trusting the repos of traditional package manager by choosing to use the associated distro? So, by e.g. choosing to use Debian , you’ve already (somehow) accepted their packages to be ‘thrustworthy’. We already trust the developers of the apps/binaries we use. Therefore, we have two sets of parties we trust by default. I would rather not increase the amount of people I have to trust for software, but I can understand why others might differ on this.
Thank you for making your comment licensed under creative common. I’ll now steal it, repackage it and sell for 9.99$ without even acknowledging your existence
But… it’s a Non-commercial Attribution license. /s/ns
I’m joking, but on a more serious note for those that don’t know, not all Creative Commons licenses allow you to monetize, and be sure to actually read which version of license is used if you plan to use a CC work for anything other than personal use.
I don’t think linking to a licence that increases the rights of third parties to do things with your words (over the default all rights reserved) will do very much for you there.
I think you’re missing my point. You are giving people more rights to use your comments by putting them under CC licence than not putting them under any.
No, how was I supposed to infer that you were fine with non-commercial AI from your two letter response to why you were licencing your comment?
I think its fairly naive to think that linking to a licence will do anything to stop commercial AI but not open ones, but you go for it if you think it’s worthwhile.
You joke but when “media” outlets boldly steal 90% of their content directly from reddit posts and comments without attribution for commercial use, maybe including a license isnt crazy anymore?
I’m replacing a couple of really old PCs at work with slightly less old PCs and I know they don’t meet Windows 11 specs without workarounds. I’m thinking about taking the leap but I need printer support to work. Otherwise something like open office and a web browser will do what I need. What distro should I start with? I don’t have time to find a perfect fit.
I’d say keep it basic with Ubuntu. It’s not exciting, but it ‘just works’ out of the box and there’s TONs of support if you can’t figure something out.
2nd. Ubuntu is the place to be if you want your best chances for immediate compatibility, and search results will favor your popular configuration if you have issues.
3rd, but I recommend getting the kde variety (used to be called kubuntu). This will give you the most windows like experience. Regular Ubuntu ships with gnome and has a different feel to it.
I’ve been on slackware almost exclusively for 2 decades-ish. I’m team kde. I always liked it, but I had shitty hardware from like 2010 - 2020, so I was on xfce because it’s a lot lighter. But I always had kde installed so I could use some of their native apps.
Probably linux mint. Everything tends to work out of the box and function the way you’d expect. If you’re used to windows then cinnamon will have a familiar feel to it. I like xfce myself, but I move things around to make it feel like windows 95.
Please, don’t use Open Office. Dev essentially halted on it years ago when it was forked o LibreOffice. Use LibreOffice instead. The Open Office project seems to still exist to trick people into using old software.
I’m loving KDE’s Neon distro that’s based off Ubuntu. I’ve not had to do much faffing around to get it the way I want it and anyone that has used Windows should be comfortable using it. KDE Plasma feels very polished and streamlined.
Debian is solid and will come ready with office and web apps. You might want to check out if drivers are available for your printers though. You can always try it out on a live USB.
It needs testing to ensure you get what you need, but I found printer support worked better on Linux for my obscure printer. If you setup a CUPS server then distros will automatically find the networked printers. SUSE/OpenSUSE also has a very good GUI printer admin with lots of automatic setup and auto driver downloads…makes it so easy.
I just have a single network printer I need to access from all of our computers. A Sharp mx-4071’if memory serves. I figured it out on Linux Mint in about 10 minutes so I’m pretty happy with that.
I’m thinking about taking the leap but I need printer support to work.
In my experience printer support in Linux is generally pretty good. Even when it doesn’t “just work” you usually need only a simple profile file from the manufacturers website that you install.
In general drivers on Linux have been way less painful for me than on Windows; most importantly you don’t need an always-running application for every crappy piece of hardware.
But you still might want to check your printer manufacturer’s website and/or make one prototype Linux PC and try everything out.
With that being said be prepared for users complaining about some workflow changes (that will be bigger with a switch to something like LibreOffice from MSO) and blaming every issue of theirs on Linux and you.
It’s amazing that Linux gaming is becoming a thing that’s better sometimes than Windows gaming (minus the getting banned part in some games). I also like that AMD is making some big pushes on open source drivers, plus their ROCm open-source alternative to CUDA.
I just ROCm was built in to mesa. Because either you use the proprietary drivers that have some issues, or use mesa and fight with everything (amf, ROCm) to try and get it working.
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