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Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

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Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#101

Post by stjohnswarts »

tapia wrote: post #49
_gqhf wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good for you and I'm glad you're happy but for some of us, considering the work with are doing, sometimes even 32GB is not really enough. Different people, different needs.

Too many electron apps? :P

Boy isn't that the truth. I actively avoid them but sometimes you just can't like with signal-desktop. I actually have to keep it running because I don't want to reach for my phone every 10 minutes. Something as simple as that interface doesn't need electron but oh well. Maybe a lite version with just text and contacts would be acceptable. I don't need stickers, gifs and emojis.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#102

Post by stjohnswarts »

vetinari wrote: post #28
aodaki wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, it is. 16GB is too constrained even for native Linux desktop environment.

Linux desktop environment runs fine with 4GB.

Yeah but throw in firefox or chrome and some electron apps and your processor will be crying and your memory starting to overflow.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#103

Post by stjohnswarts »

gspr wrote: post #42
vetinari wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux desktop environment runs fine with 4GB.

I think the people who claim that 16 GB isn't enough are insane, but it should be said: at 4 GB it does become a bit problematic to both keep browsers with a bunch of tabs open and do other things smoothly. If we keep modern website hogs out of the picture, I completely agree with you. I tally about 500-1000 MB doing my job – if I can close the browsers that I do admittedly need to read documentation.

tab discard extensions go a long way toward keeping browsers under control, just pin the tabs that you absolutely can't wait 3 seconds for them to reload or because you need notifications from them.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#104

Post by skohan »

GeekyBear wrote: post #96
cozzyd wrote: post #3

I imagine memory will be quite constrained here for a lot of M1 systems.

The M1x benchmarks that recently leaked show that it supports 32 Gigs of RAM, has twice the number of big CPU cores, and twice the GPU cores. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/macbook-pro-m1x-benchmarks-ju... It should be adequate for a non-entry level laptop. One of the fairly accurate Apple leakers, Jon Prosser, has said that one of his proven sources has informed him that the leak is legit.

How does the current M1's graphics performance compare to, say, a mid-range NVIDIA laptop GPU?

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#105

Post by stjohnswarts »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #76
gspr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder when the pendulum will swing back and people will stop this insanity. I can already picture the buzzwords people will invent to describe "apps running on the OS itself ".

That would require people to clean up. Sometimes I squint at the installation requirements and then head over to hub.docker.com. I think it will get worse (i.e. more layers on top) before it gets better.

Yeah when you see "install this docker" OR "follow this 10,000 line install and compile guide" and then have to explain to your boss what you've been up to today.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#106

Post by stjohnswarts »

anthk wrote: post #66
ekianjo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck compiling large sources on 4gb

2GB of RAM user here, done that with clang as it uses far less memory than GCC.

I mean really how many people are recompiling their entire code base every single day? Is their make/build environment so bad that they can't trust incremental compiles? I'm getting along just fine on my 8GB laptop. I know some people work with big datasets and video and such but holy cow. Most of us are probably just writing code for a browser/backend/library/test and not pushing around terabytes of data.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#107

Post by aodaki »

flohofwoe wrote: post #51
blinkingled wrote: post #47

What's the story with OpenGL on macOS? I know it is abandonware in favor of Metal but are there reasons Apple will at least keep it in the OS / drivers for foreseeable future? Do any of the ANGLE type things help when they finally take it away?

It still works and at least somebody still seems to work on it going by the somewhat random GL-related fixes and regressions in macOS Betas since GL was declared deprecated. AFAIK ANGLE (and MoltenGL) only provide GLES2.x and GLES3.x over Metal, so out of the box those wouldn't be very useful for providing desktop-GL compatibility. Apparently Zink on top of MoltenVk on top of Metal works, but that looks like a Jenga…

Virgil 3D renderer provides some desktop GL emulation, so it is still somewhat usable. But a serious application expecting desktop GL would see glitches.

My recommendation is to use Wayland, and to play serious games on macOS (although such games are not available on Linux AArch64 anyway...)

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#108

Post by stjohnswarts »

turbinerneiter wrote: post #26
aodaki wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, it is. 16GB is too constrained even for native Linux desktop environment.

Running Fedora/GNOME on an i5/8gb laptop, never ever felt memory constrained.

You won't but I think some HN people have to push around a lot data and the fastest way to do that is to get as much of it in memory as possible. Others love their electron apps and docker suites and VMs.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#110

Post by ogre_codes »

matwood wrote: post #43
gspr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the people who claim that 16 GB isn't enough are insane, but it should be said: at 4 GB it does become a bit problematic to both keep browsers with a bunch of tabs open and do other things smoothly. If we keep modern website hogs out of the picture, I completely agree with you. I tally about 500-1000 MB doing my job – if I can close the browsers that I do admittedly need to read documentation.

> I think the people who claim that 16 GB isn't enough are insane The problem is containers. Some development workflows appear to require running a container for every piece of software needed, and that adds up (and feels incredibly wasteful). None of my development workflow requires containers locally, so I get by just fine with 16gb.

> The problem is containers.

Even this makes little sense unless your containers are really poorly sized. I used to run a mini Kubernetes cluster on my desktop with 6 nodes. Some of them running big Java projects, Postgres, Elastisearch, and Ruby. And I still had enough memory to run Rubymine or IntelliJ along with Slack and whatever other local stuff I needed.

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