31–40 of 169 posts
Battery life would be the big thing, I think. There's not a single person I know who wouldn't like having Linux on their M1/M2 Macbooks--they're beautiful devices--but if you're not getting something approaching MacOS's battery life, then there's not that much separating it from another similarly-specced ultrabook.
Battery life would be the big thing, I think. There's not a single person I know who wouldn't like having Linux on their M1/M2 Macbooks--they're beautiful devices--but if you're not getting something approaching MacOS's battery life, then there's not that much separating it from another similarly-specced ultrabook.
Why would battery life be impacted? The main reason for bad battery life is hardware acceleration for certain tasks. Once that's settled, the computer shouldn't start producing more heat out of the blue.
For example: I bought a Dell XPS 9 months ago. With the earlier Fedora 37 kernels, it didn't put the Nvidia card into power saving mode, causing battery life to be less than an hour. Now it seems to work correctly and battery life is 3-4 hours for me.
This is awesome news. I have been trying to tinker with getting Ubuntu working on both an older Intel Mac and my M1, but it’s an almighty pain in the ass hardware-wise. And I ran across more than one person who felt it necessary to point out that me buying an Apple computer was what the problem was. Like, really? That’s a real effective way to win people over.
But generally, if you pointed that out to me I'd say the same, picking that hardware puts you in a harder path. Also, I'm not sure if Linux users in general have any interest in winning people over.
I used to hate on Macs until I was given one by my employer. Then I realized that despite how awful macOS is, the laptop itself is completely unrivalled. There is no Lenovo/xps/framework/tuxbook/tongfang/clevo/whatever that comes close to the overall package of a MacBook. It has the stiffest body, the quietest fans, the biggest battery, the best screen and trackpad, etc. Even worse is the fact that a framework 16 is…
> how awful macOS is just curious, but what parts are awful? customization? or just generally bugs?
There are a ton of background services that periodically spin up for no obvious reason, consuming a ton of CPU for a few minutes at a time, then go back to idle. I don't know what they're doing or why. Luckily since they're background services, they're bound to the efficiency cores on Apple Silicon, so they don't hurt battery life or thermals too much most of the time.
And as far as bugs go, the worst part is that bug reports through the Feedback app go largely ignored and bugs seem to keep accumulating. Even for bugs with clear and well-documented repro cases, Apple doesn't seem to pay any attention.
I'm a game developer, so the majority of my bug reports come from issues I've experienced with the graphics drivers or with Xcode. Here's a few examples:
- On macOS devices with > 60Hz displays, there is some awful stuttering with Metal apps in full screen mode. For some reason, CAMetalLayer nextDrawable sometimes just takes a very long time whenever it uses direct-to-display mode for presentation. That mode is implicitly enabled for full screen Metal apps, in order to bypass the display compositor and theoretically reduce latency. This bug also applies to MacBooks with the built in "ProMotion" (120Hz) displays. I'd be perfectly happy if there was just some flag to say "don't use direct-to-display", but if there is one, it's not documented anywhere. I haven't found a workaround yet. I originally reported this in August 2022. Apple replied once in October 2022 to say "we can't reproduce this, please provide a demo app". I provided the app that reliably reproduces the problem within an hour of their reply, but they've been silent since.
- Metal and OpenGL (the latter is emulated via Metal on Apple Silicon Macs) both exhibit a bug with triangle merging that causes partial derivatives to go very wrong along primitive edges. There's a usable workaround for this on the Metal side (just enable a [[sample_mask]] even if you're not doing multisampling). There's no such workaround for the OpenGL side, unfortunately. I was able to work with Asahi Lina to fix this for Mesa on Asahi Linux, and the fix itself was actually really trivial and didn't require a sample mask hack (it took a lot of debugging to figure out, though -- but that's how reverse engineering goes). To solve it, Apple would simply need to set a particular bit to disable triangle merging whenever the fragment shader uses derivatives. I reported this issue in December 2022, and Apple hasn't replied.
- This one is not as egregious as some of the bugs I've reported, and the Xcode team has responded reliably in the past. This is the first Xcode bug report I've had where they didn't acknowledge the report within ~14 days or so. In the current Xcode beta, using the graphics debugger will suspend the app but hitting "resume" leaves the app stuck suspended. The normal application debugger path does not do this, just the graphics debugger. I reported this in mid-June 2023, but haven't heard anything yet.
Battery life would be the big thing, I think. There's not a single person I know who wouldn't like having Linux on their M1/M2 Macbooks--they're beautiful devices--but if you're not getting something approaching MacOS's battery life, then there's not that much separating it from another similarly-specced ultrabook.
I've been running Asahi for a full year on my m2 air. The battery life is quite good. Yes, I think macOS has batter battery optimizations than linux, but compared to other laptops running linux it really is quite good.
Battery life would be the big thing, I think. There's not a single person I know who wouldn't like having Linux on their M1/M2 Macbooks--they're beautiful devices--but if you're not getting something approaching MacOS's battery life, then there's not that much separating it from another similarly-specced ultrabook.
Have to hand it Apple OS team, they know how to squeeze a lot out of there hardware.
A while back I was trying to get an old G5 running and looking at the various OS options, many said just go with MacOS 10.4 - it was the most optimized OS for the system even today. When software and hardware work together, it can be pretty cool.
This is awesome news. I have been trying to tinker with getting Ubuntu working on both an older Intel Mac and my M1, but it’s an almighty pain in the ass hardware-wise. And I ran across more than one person who felt it necessary to point out that me buying an Apple computer was what the problem was. Like, really? That’s a real effective way to win people over.
Well, it's understandable. If you talk about it with other linux-on-MacBook tinkerers I'm sure they'll be more sensible to your cause. But generally, if you pointed that out to me I'd say the same, picking that hardware puts you in a harder path. Also, I'm not sure if Linux users in general have any interest in winning people over.
Ironically enough, then, I figured out on my own that the biggest obstacle I was encountering with my Intel MPB was Ubuntu’s distribution of firmware, where they officially pretend not to know about certain non-free device drivers, even though they vaguely gesture at the process of acquiring them in their respective official docs. Whereas Debian straight-up distributes them in their ISOs.
Can’t say I’m a big fan of Ubuntu’s wink-wink, nudge-nudge approach to “standing up for free software,” where they get you started down a path then steadfastly refuse to help because VIRTUE! Debian’s approach is saner. And so I’ll be tinkering with Debian, I guess.