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I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

simonhartcher.com

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Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#61

As a Linux user I feel you. The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world (for power users) but the hardware is so, so good. For me it is about having a completely silent setup. It is so, so hard to go back to noisy fans. I really hope Asahi Linux keep going so I can have the best of both worlds.

> The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world I have to use Mac, Linux, and Windows desktops in my work. They all have their pros and cons, but I can’t say I’d ever argue that the Mac desktop experience is vastly inferior to the Linux desktop experience. Edit: Getting a lot of downvotes but most of the comments are about someone’s highly customized Linux desktop compared to completely vanilla Mac desktop. I…

Man just give me a way to switch between only the two most recent windows using a keyboard shortcut (without requiring some janky 3rd party program). Windows-style alt-tab. It's not a big ask and would make the macOS experience go from "barely usable" to "perfectly fine."

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#62
post #29
post #17

The complaint about power usage in suspend is especially sad because it’s pretty much a common problem for Linux on laptops. Not sure if that’s what applies here, but the numbers about match what I see with my Framework. Basically: if you want to use secure boot you usually also want kernel lockdown mode, and you cannot hibernate a lockdowned kernel. At least not without out-of-tree patches. IMHO that’s a giant issue…

> If you can’t hibernate (aka suspend to disk) you will never be able to get that power consumption low. This is cope. An Apple Silicon Macbook does not need to suspend to block devices to save energy (they only do this when the battery is empty). ChromeOS doesn't offer hibernate at all. The only reason that a Framework can't have good battery life in an operating state is that nobody is paying attention to the detai…

Thanks, I did not knew that. My understanding was that keeping the memory alive for suspend-to-idle was the main issue here. But that also might be something a vertically integrated Apple Silicon can win vs. that x86 madness there every day.

And to be sure, I do not claim that there is nothing to gain in s2idle. I bet theres still a lot of headroom to safe energy. Its just that it would be easy to safe a lot of power if s2disk "just worked".

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world I have to use Mac, Linux, and Windows desktops in my work. They all have their pros and cons, but I can’t say I’d ever argue that the Mac desktop experience is vastly inferior to the Linux desktop experience. Edit: Getting a lot of downvotes but most of the comments are about someone’s highly customized Linux desktop compared to completely vanilla Mac desktop. I…

Are you a gnome user? Linux Mint with Cinnamon is bliss. Or well anything else, you are absolutely spoiled for choice with Desktop Environments in Linux. There is the perfect one for everyone. At least if you use X11, wayland is still a turd. I found the Mac Desktop absolutely unusable for any development work as it comes out of the box. You need a metric ton of third-party extensions for simple stuff like proper alt…

> as it comes out of the box

This doesn’t seem like a fair way to evaluate MacOS given the effort involved in configuring a Linux installation

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world I have to use Mac, Linux, and Windows desktops in my work. They all have their pros and cons, but I can’t say I’d ever argue that the Mac desktop experience is vastly inferior to the Linux desktop experience. Edit: Getting a lot of downvotes but most of the comments are about someone’s highly customized Linux desktop compared to completely vanilla Mac desktop. I…

Are you a gnome user? Linux Mint with Cinnamon is bliss. Or well anything else, you are absolutely spoiled for choice with Desktop Environments in Linux. There is the perfect one for everyone. At least if you use X11, wayland is still a turd. I found the Mac Desktop absolutely unusable for any development work as it comes out of the box. You need a metric ton of third-party extensions for simple stuff like proper alt…

> Linux Mint with Cinnamon is bliss.

This is one of my go-tos when I need a VM, so I’m familiar.

> I found the Mac Desktop absolutely unusable for any development work as it comes out of the box.

But why are we comparing vanilla macOS to an extreme customized Linux setup as if they’re the same thing? Why one set of rules for one platform but those criteria are suspended for Linux, where we get to assume some specific set of perfectly configured everything?

This is the hyperbole that I can’t really take seriously. Calling it “absolutely unusable” just isn’t something I can take seriously.

I understand that some people like to customize their environments to the Nth degree and can’t live without their personal set of customizations, but that’s personal preferences. Calling other platforms “absolutely unusable” or “vastly inferior” is just an exaggeration when millions of devs use them just fine.

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often have you needed to repair a MacBook? The enhanced repairability is basically insurance in case of a fault. Compared to a MacBook, or insurance for a MacBook, this insurance is overpriced. As for the environment, the power consumption + larger design with extra parts to make it repairable + how few people ever buy parts makes this a virtue signaling wash.

I’m not the OP but for me, with my mid-2015, I had the battery replaced once. This was used almost every work day until 2023. My M2 Pro MBP I then bought, never so far (as you would expect for its age) and it still feels brand new.

That's 8 years of being used daily and the only thing you had to replace was the battery. That seems like a super reliable machine.

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#66
"I still love my Framework, despite its flaws. I will just keep it plugged in so that it’s ready to go when I want to use it."

That sounds like a plan!

I suppose that if I was distant from an outlet for a long enough time, the battery life would be great, but I'm rarely if ever. It's nice not to be tethered to a wire, but it's not bad really overall.

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often have you needed to repair a MacBook? The enhanced repairability is basically insurance in case of a fault. Compared to a MacBook, or insurance for a MacBook, this insurance is overpriced. As for the environment, the power consumption + larger design with extra parts to make it repairable + how few people ever buy parts makes this a virtue signaling wash.

In the 15 years I've known her, my wife has needed to repair each of her 3 MacBooks at least once (One of them twice). In the same time, I've had to repair one Gigabyte laptop. The second Gigabyte that needed repair, I trashed and just stopped buying Gigabyte. That's the problem with Apple. They're build quality isn't that great, but you don't have an alternative.

Were they they the butterfly era crappy Macbooks?

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#68
post #38
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I use Arch Linux with XFCE on my Intel Framework 13 and I only lose a few percent battery per day in sleep mode. I suspect you could find some software settings to make this better, maybe worth digging a bit further.

What sleep modes does that support? The 7840HS only supported the "modern standby" mentioned in another comment.

Sorry, I have no idea, it just worked this way out of the box so I never had to do any digging into it.

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#69
post #6

The ISA has nothing to do with the battery life. Battery life is the result of getting details right at every level of the software stack. Framework doesn't control every level of the stack. Arguably they don't control any of it.

Yes, it's this. I also own an M4 mbp and an AMD framework 13. With both on maximum screen brightness, side by side, doing similar workloads, battery life isn't that much better on the M4. I think the difference maker is that the mac constantly decreases screen brightness when possible, turns the backlight completely off when there isn't any activity, heavily leverages power efficient scheduling and efficiency cores,…

IIRC the low power states of M series chips generally dips down further than most x86 CPUs do, and the way both the SoC And OS are designed are for racing to idle and coalescing tasks to reduce wakeups. On the MBPs specially the screen can also drop down to 1hz so the GPU isn’t wasting cycles redrawing static content.

The result is that in more typical usage where the machine isn’t under a constant load, battery life is much better. When it’s sitting there idle displaying a web page it’s barely consuming any power at all, where most competing laptops at minimum are pulling at least 2-3x as much power between the CPU not being able to scale down that far and constantly getting woken to perform poorly scheduled tasks.

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world I have to use Mac, Linux, and Windows desktops in my work. They all have their pros and cons, but I can’t say I’d ever argue that the Mac desktop experience is vastly inferior to the Linux desktop experience. Edit: Getting a lot of downvotes but most of the comments are about someone’s highly customized Linux desktop compared to completely vanilla Mac desktop. I…

Are you a gnome user? Linux Mint with Cinnamon is bliss. Or well anything else, you are absolutely spoiled for choice with Desktop Environments in Linux. There is the perfect one for everyone. At least if you use X11, wayland is still a turd. I found the Mac Desktop absolutely unusable for any development work as it comes out of the box. You need a metric ton of third-party extensions for simple stuff like proper alt…

Other OS’s handling of “alt-tab” does not make it de facto “proper”.

You are trying to use macOS like your other favorite OS(s). This is not how macOS has ever worked, and the macOS approach is more than fine for millions of people.

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