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Linux on the Mac – state of the union

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Re: Linux on the Mac – state of the union

#101

Post by coredog64 »

CountSessine wrote: post #47
dispose13432 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I wouldn't necessarily blame the "WLAN, sound, or sleep" thing on linux. I'd blame that on cheap parts manufacturers that refuse to distribute open source drivers for fear of releasing company secrets and lack of profit margins to operate on. I don't understand why would anyone not open-source their drivers? What's NVIDIA's secret sauce? Being able to build great silicon. What's Intel's secret sauce? Being able to b…

What's NVIDIA's secret sauce? Being able to build great silicon. NVidia's defining characteristic has been designing good drivers. Even when they've been behind ATI/AMD in hardware, they've been ahead in driver stability and performance. Especially on Linux where they largely own the CG/post/design market (which mostly uses Linux workstations) and they are the only GPU vendor that has somehow squeezed Windows-competi…

> NVidia's defining characteristic has been designing good drivers.

This. When shopping for discrete video cards, I no longer look at AMD's offerings because I'm not willing to fight with their driver, fret over whether or not I should apply updates, etc.

Re: Linux on the Mac – state of the union

#102

Post by rev12 »

coldtea wrote: post #33
rev12 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> "Meanwhile, the audio/video-engineer types still seem to like the MBP" I can't speak to the professional video world, but that's absolutely false in the professional audio world. My experience is in the world of composition and sound design; the attitude towards using Mac for that shifted a while back, due to the lackluster and non-existent upgrades to the Mac Pro. No one in the professional audio world that I kn…

> I can't speak to the professional video world, but that's absolutely false in the professional audio world. Depends on what you mean "professional audio world". If you mean heavy old style studios, the kind Led Zeppelin might have recorded on back in the day, yes, but these are on the go (profits and usage wise) anyway, as the industry shifts. Musicians, producers, DJs, etc most carry laptops and have home studios…

I was referring to the composition and post production (sound design, engineering) world. Mostly because that is the industry I worked in for many years and still continue to work in (much more sporadically these days).

That's a world that was dominated by Mac Pros around 2010. Around 2013 I started seeing a shift, myself included, to custom built PC workstations and that trend is just increasing now. The initial switch, I believe, started with the lackluster cylinder Mac Pro, but continued due to the obvious failings in the Mac desktop market.

You speak of home based studios using MacBook pros, but anyone doing that is obviously not a professional. I will give you the fact that many DJs are using MacBooks for the mobile rigs, but at home, anyone actually doing professional audio work is likely using a massive powerful workstation or a number of PCs (master/slaves).

This notion that MacBooks (or even laptops in general) are super popular in the professional audio world is fiction made for advertising.

Re: Linux on the Mac – state of the union

#103

Post by nickjj »

ttflee wrote: post #73

Why not adopt the Windows Subsystem for Linux (i.e., Ubuntu and bash.exe) strategy?

It needs a lot more time before it's usable beyond demo use cases.

If you're interested I wrote all about it[0] when trying to change my development environment recently:

[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/i-almost-rage-bought-a-macboo...

Re: Linux on the Mac – state of the union

#104

Post by qubitcoder »

izacus wrote: post #99
josephg wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't really have any stock in whether the perception is a reality or not, so I'm willing to be persuaded. Apple said it was their best laptop launch by sales volume ever. (Although that is partially due to such a long wait from their previous model.) Honestly I'm not that surprised - despite all the hate online I know 2-3 developers who bought them on or near launch day and several others who started salivating…

The constant crashing, touchbar bugs (a few times it didn't even turn on!), graphical corruption, obvious cheapskating (no extension cable, non-data charging USB cable, bad keyboard backlight, no more cable holders on power brick and more) are the larger disappointments with this machine :/

Given those issues, I'm wondering if returning the laptop for a new one might be in order? For what it's worth, I've been using the new MacBook Pro with the touch bar for a few weeks now, and have only experienced one hard freeze.

Contrast that with the steady stream of issues I experienced with a similarly specced high-end Dell XPS 15"--power cord whine, wobbly and noisy fan on the graphics card, severe overheating to the point that the BIOS trigged shutdowns, repeated keys (an ongoing issue affecting multiple Dell models based on support forums), suspend/resume failures, laggy touchpad, and numerous issues with Wifi & sound across several distributions of linux--the new MacBook Pro has been a delight. To Dell's credit, they've released BIOS updates on a regular basis, but the laptop is still plagued with annoying issues, even on Windows.

Re: Linux on the Mac – state of the union

#105

Post by timothyb89 »

artursapek wrote: post #93
joshlemer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you taken a look at the Razer Blade? It is basically equivalent to the Macbook pro's hardware in every way, except black, an i7, a touchscreen, and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, and a bit less expensive. I just got one. I haven't put Linux on it yet, but I'm pretty blown away with the hardware.

Wow, that looks like an MBPro clone. I've never heard of this company. I wonder if its machines work well with Linux?

Their older models from 2015 or so with 970m GPUs won't boot due consistently due to the hybrid (Optimus) graphics. The situation may have improved with the newer models, though, and their Stealth line only has Intel graphics which should work fine.

Re: Linux on the Mac – state of the union

#106

Post by deadbunny »

tkxxx7 wrote: post #98
artursapek wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that looks like an MBPro clone. I've never heard of this company. I wonder if its machines work well with Linux?

There was an article last week stating they don't support Linux out of the box (or at least not Ubuntu), but I don't remember details regarding how much work is required to get it running.

The Arch wiki has a whole load of details on getting one up and running[1]. These instruction will usually translate between any other (up to date) distro with a bit of translation.

1. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/razer#2016_version_.28R...

Re: Linux on the Mac – state of the union

#107

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

ttflee wrote: post #73

Why not adopt the Windows Subsystem for Linux (i.e., Ubuntu and bash.exe) strategy?

Personally, WSL's existence temps me to touch Windows again in future if there's a particularly attractive machine.

But, well, Windows with WSL is still Windows. Much like Linux with a hypothetical flawless version of WINE would still be Linux. The desktop experience is still… poor.

Re: Linux on the Mac – state of the union

#108

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

l1k wrote: post #74
andrepd wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> E.g. as stated in the article, the four Thunderbolt ports are interesting for HPC applications as you can build a portable compute cluster with up to five fully-meshed high-speed networked nodes. If that's not professional I don't know what is. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? Are you implying a MacBook cluster is an effective HPC platform?

Let's say you're a penetration tester, you're on-site trying to break into a network, have no Internet connectivity (e.g. because you're in a shielded data center or don't want to raise suspicion) and need to crack some passwords. 5x Skylake CPU + 5x Polaris GPU would be a sufficiently beefy platform for Hashcat, and it would fit into your backpack. Or let's say you want to quickly set up a Hadoop cluster to crunch s…

There's 4 40Gbit/s ports, but their total bandwidth is not 160Gbit/s. IIRC, the ports on the right side of the machine have less total bandwidth because of how they're connected, for example.

Re: Linux on the Mac – state of the union

#109

Post by criddell »

maggit wrote: post #60
maratc wrote: post #48

The basis of this article makes no sense. What developers love about Macs is the OS and the nice integration between OS and hardware. Even if you hate the new hardware, it makes sense to continue juicing your current one and see what comes along next year; it makes zero sense to install Linux on a fringe hardware (Mac).

Macs have a good hw/sw-integration, but there are other features as well; I bought my first MBP for its trackpad, which is still unparalleled, and (as l1k puts it) its form language. I'm running Linux, which doesn't offer the same hw/sw-integration quality, but it's pretty good!

The trackpad and also the retina display. If you work with text, how could you not love a high-dpi display? After you get used to it, moving back to a standard 1080p screen feels like you are reading a laser printed page through a screen door.

Re: Linux on the Mac – state of the union

#110

Post by l1k »

navait wrote: post #90
l1k wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, macOS power manages devices too aggressively: I've noticed that if I ssh from another computer into my MacBook Pro (booted into macOS and connected to wired Ethernet), the connection becomes unresponsive after a few seconds of inactivity. I have to ping from the MacBook Pro to a machine on the LAN to make the ssh connection responsive again. It looks like macOS suspends the BCM 57765 Ethernet controller…

> Apple seems to consider macOS purely a client OS from which one ssh's to the outside world but not the other way round. I'm not knowledgeable enough, but this seems a pretty reasonable assumption for 90% of use cases. And if this assumption holds, is it fair to say. I think what you're trying to say is "First of all, macOS power manages devices too aggressively for me " > It looks like macOS suspends the BCM 57765…

For a Linux driver it wouldn't be acceptable to compromise functionality like this as it's expected to work equally well on big iron as on laptops. So we have to tweak a lot more to achieve the same level of battery life.
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