Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice • Hacker News Board

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#111

Post by Joeri » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 5:04 PM UTC

skohan wrote: post #104

GeekyBear wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It is 30% to 50% slower than a 1050ti according to https://ikarios.wordpress.com/2021/01/09/comparing-a-macbook...

That dovetails with my own experiences. I installed tomb raider on my m1 air, and while it was playable i was not impressed with its graphical abilities. The m1 is great for integrated graphics, but not on par with dedicated graphics. CPU-wise it is the fastest computer I have though, noticeably faster than the i5 9600K in my desktop.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#112

Post by selectodude » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

nathell wrote: post #87

mark_l_watson wrote: post #70

I like the attitude of author of this gist. Just make it work. My own practical practice is to use both a very fine System76 Linux laptop and also a super fast, if constrained, M1 MacBook Pro. Depends on what I am doing, or sometimes just what I feel like using. To be perfectly open though, I had considered switching to just using Linux until the M1 was released. The thing that held me back was spending $3500 on a co…

Out of curiosity, which commercial CL implementation would that be? LispWorks? Allegro?

Must be LispWorks. Nothing else is anywhere near as expensive.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#113

Post by mekpro » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

skohan wrote: post #104

GeekyBear wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A bit slower than GTX 1050 mobile

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#114

Post by foldr » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

macNchz wrote: post #78

skohan wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m just asking what would be a use case where you would actually need this

I find it easy to sneak up on 16gb of memory when running basic apps (editor, bunch of browser tabs, zoom, spotify) plus a complete environment for a mid sized web app (multiple services, dbs, message queue, caches, js bundler, workers etc), especially if I’m running tests and have mobile device VMs up. Pretty cheap insurance over the life of a machine to get 32gb of RAM and never have to think about it.

Right, but that’s what swap is for. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need more than 16GB.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#115

Post by anthk » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

stjohnswarts wrote: post #106

anthk wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe these people never heard of ccache.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#116

Post by skohan » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

Joeri wrote: post #111

skohan wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is 30% to 50% slower than a 1050ti according to https://ikarios.wordpress.com/2021/01/09/comparing-a-macbook... That dovetails with my own experiences. I installed tomb raider on my m1 air, and while it was playable i was not impressed with its graphical abilities. The m1 is great for integrated graphics, but not on par with dedicated graphics. CPU-wise it is the fastest computer I have though, noticeably faster t…

Thanks - so it sounds like a 100% speedup would put it into "decent" territory

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#117

Post by emilecantin » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 5:21 PM UTC

stjohnswarts wrote: post #100

emilecantin wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never close Chrome tabs.

That's fine, it's not like it keeps them all open, i've had a couple hundred tabs open in Firefox while researching a project using tree style tab to organize them. Modern browsers cache pages to disk after a certain high water mark. People actually seem to think all those tabs stay in memory.

It was meant slightly in jest; but looking at Activity Monitor on my 32GB RAM Macbook Pro, it looks like I'm currently using ~28GB. I have Docker & a few Node.js processes (webpack builds, typescript compiler, language server, etc) taking about ~10GB between them, and then a sea of "Google Chrome Helper (Renderer)" processes each taking between 100 and 900MB. There are at least 20 of these, and then also the usual suspects with Slack, Skype (yes), Finder, etc.

Honestly, I could probably do with 16GB right now, but I'm planning on keeping this machine for at least 5 years; it was worth the few hundred bucks extra to future-proof it.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#118

Post by foldr » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 5:28 PM UTC

emilecantin wrote: post #117

stjohnswarts wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine, it's not like it keeps them all open, i've had a couple hundred tabs open in Firefox while researching a project using tree style tab to organize them. Modern browsers cache pages to disk after a certain high water mark. People actually seem to think all those tabs stay in memory.

It was meant slightly in jest; but looking at Activity Monitor on my 32GB RAM Macbook Pro, it looks like I'm currently using ~28GB. I have Docker & a few Node.js processes (webpack builds, typescript compiler, language server, etc) taking about ~10GB between them, and then a sea of "Google Chrome Helper (Renderer)" processes each taking between 100 and 900MB. There are at least 20 of these, and then also the usual su…

Browsers will quickly eat up all of your available RAM if you open enough tabs. The thing is, if you had less RAM, they'd be keeping fewer tabs alive in RAM. So you can't really infer from "I'm using X amount of RAM now" to "I need at least X amount of RAM". If you upgraded to 64GB you'd probably end up 'using' a lot more than 28GB for the exact same workflow.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#119

Post by emilecantin » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

foldr wrote: post #118

emilecantin wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was meant slightly in jest; but looking at Activity Monitor on my 32GB RAM Macbook Pro, it looks like I'm currently using ~28GB. I have Docker & a few Node.js processes (webpack builds, typescript compiler, language server, etc) taking about ~10GB between them, and then a sea of "Google Chrome Helper (Renderer)" processes each taking between 100 and 900MB. There are at least 20 of these, and then also the usual su…

Browsers will quickly eat up all of your available RAM if you open enough tabs. The thing is, if you had less RAM, they'd be keeping fewer tabs alive in RAM. So you can't really infer from "I'm using X amount of RAM now" to "I need at least X amount of RAM". If you upgraded to 64GB you'd probably end up 'using' a lot more than 28GB for the exact same workflow.

Oh yeah, definitely! I was just RAM-constrained on my previous machine (8GB) when running Docker workloads, so I made sure to future-proof this one.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#120

Post by LawnGnome » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 5:44 PM UTC

skohan wrote: post #57

_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.

What do you need 32GB for? Video editing? ML training on CPU? I have to imagine this is a minority.

I work on a medium-to-large sized project that has a Go backend and a React/TypeScript frontend. Having our full development environment running (a handful of Go processes, Webpack, PostgreSQL, Redis, an indexing server, and probably other stuff I'm forgetting) and trying to edit code in both simultaneously (so having LSP servers running for both Go and TypeScript) is usually enough to cause my 16 GB laptop to swap heavily. It's not a pleasant experience: think multi-second UI lockups, music skipping, that kind of thing.

So, realistically, at this point I need a 32 GB machine to effectively do my job. Minority? Sure. But I think there are enough people in my boat that it's a legitimate market to have an option for.