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From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

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Re: From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

#131

Post by reactordev »

apfsx wrote: post #127
ozgrakkurt wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screens are not really that good. My 600$ lenovo has a way better screen than my m1 pro 16”

What Lenovo model + screen option do you have that is better than the M1 Pro 16 inch screen? I've yet to see anything better.

He doesn’t have nano texture, I can guarantee that. His screen probably has fingerprints and glare and all sorts of issues like visible pixels.

I’ve owned a hell of a lot of laptops and MacBooks are the best, not because of Mac, but because of the build quality. The touchpad is perfect, the aluminum body is rugged, the screen is amazing, and the audio truly is sorcery thanks to Apple acquiring Beat’s audionet.

The worst laptop for build quality were those HP Chromebooks.

ThinkPad’s are mid tier but still made of plastic.

Yoga foldable or a MS Surface is better.

MSI or Razor if you don’t feel like ever touching your laptop (:fire:)

Re: From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

#132

Post by poink »

gbalduzzi wrote: post #81
cycomanic wrote: post #76

> But the quality of MacBooks is just another level. I had 3 or 4 so far since 2010, and each of them held at least 5 years. Crazy good. When I read things like this it really sounds like there is some reality distortion field in the mac world. How is that anywhere special? I'm running a thinkpad X1 as my 2 main laptops (it was my only work machine until 2 years ago) and I never felt the need to replace it. It gave m…

I believe there is a similar situation in the mobile space with iphones, at least here is Europe where they are not ubiquitous. Most people use cheaper android phones, that are slower and with a much shorted timespan. then they try a 1k€ iPhone and it is great and conclude they prefer the iPhone to Android: it is not an apple to apple comparison, you should compare it to a 1k€ android lol. Same things happens on lapt…

My experience in the mobile space from having a personal lab with all the flagship phones paid for by my employer was that the hardware on the Android phones was at least as good as Apple but everyone other than Google made the software side feel janky

It wasn’t bad, and I’m sure I’d just get used to it if I picked one and lived with it, the same way I’ve gotten used to Apple’s dumb photo app

Using them side by side made it really obvious tho

Re: From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

#133

Post by ozgrakkurt »

apfsx wrote: post #127
ozgrakkurt wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screens are not really that good. My 600$ lenovo has a way better screen than my m1 pro 16”

What Lenovo model + screen option do you have that is better than the M1 Pro 16 inch screen? I've yet to see anything better.

It has an OLED screen so image quality isn’t even comparable. It is worse in terms of glare but not unusable and I don’t use it outside much

Re: From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

#134

Post by poink »

poink wrote: post #132
gbalduzzi wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe there is a similar situation in the mobile space with iphones, at least here is Europe where they are not ubiquitous. Most people use cheaper android phones, that are slower and with a much shorted timespan. then they try a 1k€ iPhone and it is great and conclude they prefer the iPhone to Android: it is not an apple to apple comparison, you should compare it to a 1k€ android lol. Same things happens on lapt…

My experience in the mobile space from having a personal lab with all the flagship phones paid for by my employer was that the hardware on the Android phones was at least as good as Apple but everyone other than Google made the software side feel janky It wasn’t bad, and I’m sure I’d just get used to it if I picked one and lived with it, the same way I’ve gotten used to Apple’s dumb photo app Using them side by side…

(That said, I liked the Pixel 4a better than the iPhone 15 Pro I’m typing this on)

Re: From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

#136

Post by ksec »

anon7000 wrote: post #98
ksec wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the heatless apple silicon To this day I still dont know why people worship Apple Silicon. Before it was even named and was mostly used by iPhone as A10, A11 and A12, when I stated these CPU are Desktop grade all I got was being laughed at. But then when it was put into usage by Mac using the same chip now known as M1, M2 etc. All of a sudden they are gold. Apple did at one point has the leadership of PPW ( Perform…

What the fuck are you talking about. A current high end laptop CPU is the AMD 9955HX3D, with Geekbench 6 of 3161/19080 geekbench. M4 Pro is 3812/20076. Why do I worship apple silicon? Because it’s literally the best performing processor for a laptop on the planet. I can use it for a full day of work from the couch on battery, no performance hit, RAM maxed out, containers running, the fans never turn on, and it barely…

>all of that in one package was unheard of in a laptop before Apple silicon.

My point is, it was available on iPhone. And has always been the case but people brush it off because it was an Smartphone SoC.

And I literally just stated there are ARM CPU Core offering available. You either compare the whole MacBook / Laptop, or you compare the CPU / SoC. The first being there aren't many choice compared to. The latter are there but not being used by laptop manufacturers.

And this is not the first time HN has mixed the two up. And god I missed the old Anandtech where this distinction was clear.

Re: From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

#137

Post by me551ah »

pjerem wrote: post #80
cycomanic wrote: post #76

> But the quality of MacBooks is just another level. I had 3 or 4 so far since 2010, and each of them held at least 5 years. Crazy good. When I read things like this it really sounds like there is some reality distortion field in the mac world. How is that anywhere special? I'm running a thinkpad X1 as my 2 main laptops (it was my only work machine until 2 years ago) and I never felt the need to replace it. It gave m…

I’d say it’s barely 3 things : - The trackpad (but other manufacturers now have tolerable alternatives and anyway you can work without it) - The screen : at an equivalent price point (and even more), nothing comes close to Apple screens. The cheapest MacBook have a better screen than most high end PCs. - The audio : Apple truly did some sorcery to get such an awesome sound from machines that are flat as sheet. It’s s…

Also durability. I’m shocked that something that looks so good can withstand by downright abuse. I hold my MacBook Pro with one hand and fling it around and I’ve lost track of the number of times it has fallen down. But except for some chips at random places, it works perfectly fine

Re: From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

#138

Post by cycomanic »

mirzap wrote: post #90
gbalduzzi wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe there is a similar situation in the mobile space with iphones, at least here is Europe where they are not ubiquitous. Most people use cheaper android phones, that are slower and with a much shorted timespan. then they try a 1k€ iPhone and it is great and conclude they prefer the iPhone to Android: it is not an apple to apple comparison, you should compare it to a 1k€ android lol. Same things happens on lapt…

You simply can't compare anything to MacBooks. I had a Dell that I paid about $2,000 for, and it was really good (or so I thought). Then at work, I got a MacBook Pro, and that's when I saw the difference. Its not only the Pros, no "high-end" laptop running Windows or Linux with just 8GB of RAM can perform better than a MacBook Air with 8GB. I don't know how Apple has optimized memory usage, but my personal feeling is…

> You simply can't compare anything to MacBooks. I had a Dell that I paid about $2,000 for, and it was really good (or so I thought). Then at work, I got a MacBook Pro, and that's when I saw the difference. > > Its not only the Pros, no "high-end" laptop running Windows or Linux with just 8GB of RAM can perform better than a MacBook Air with 8GB. I don't know how Apple has optimized memory usage, but my personal feeling is that 8GB of RAM on Macs is equivalent to 32GB on non-Apple devices. >

Thanks for confirming my point, we have actual benchmarks that objectively show this isn't the case but apple fanboys still make these sort of claims. The same with battery life, if you listen to apple fanboys you get the impression that battery life above 5h was simply unheard off until the M1 came along. I had a x200 in 2009 or 2010 that was giving me 10h+ in the large battery and I could even swap over to the smaller one to get another 6h (?) or so.

> I'm not some Apple fanboy—I've been using Arch Linux daily for the past month or two, and it's great. However, there isn't a day that passes without screen freezes during peak usage, and I need to reboot every day or two. This happens despite having 32GB of RAM, an RTX 4060, and a Ryzen 5 7600. That never happens with my 5-year-old MacBook Air.

The only thing I can say to that is that in my experience nvidia drivers have become objectively worse over the last 2 years. On my desktop I used to be able to play games without issues, but recently lots of them lock up after a while (only in games in my experience). My Intel laptop never has any issues. I'm now actively looking for an AMD GPU because it has become so annoying.

Re: From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

#139

Post by cycomanic »

swiftcoder wrote: post #96
cycomanic wrote: post #76

> But the quality of MacBooks is just another level. I had 3 or 4 so far since 2010, and each of them held at least 5 years. Crazy good. When I read things like this it really sounds like there is some reality distortion field in the mac world. How is that anywhere special? I'm running a thinkpad X1 as my 2 main laptops (it was my only work machine until 2 years ago) and I never felt the need to replace it. It gave m…

> So from my experience a 5 year lifetime for a macbook is really nothing special and definitely not "crazy good". I doubt they are dead after 5 years - I have a number of decade+ old MacBooks kicking around the family, and they work just fine. It's more that anyone in software is going to need to upgrade around the 5 year mark anyway, because too much shit has changed in the outside world (for example, Apple's trans…

> > So from my experience a 5 year lifetime for a macbook is really nothing special and definitely not "crazy good". > > I doubt they are dead after 5 years - I have a number of decade+ old MacBooks kicking around the family, and they work just fine. >

Yes I agree Apple make good quality hardware and I would be surprised if they died after 5 years. My objection is simply these statements that overly praise apple for things that are pretty bogstandard.

> It's more that anyone in software is going to need to upgrade around the 5 year mark anyway, because too much shit has changed in the outside world (for example, Apple's transition to ARM processors, or Windows 11 requiring recent TPM support).

One more reason to run Linux.

Re: From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

#140

Post by extraisland »

andsoitis wrote: post #3

> It just works. One thing I noticed lately is that sometimes a shortcut breaks, or something is not working anymore. This is also because Omarchy is just brand new, and I’m inexperienced running Linux as my main OS. But for the last 5 years with the M1, hardware-wise, things just worked. My experience over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tink…

> My experience over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tinkering with to keep running well. MacOS is lower effort.

It depends. I've been running Debian since 2020-ish. I picked my hardware to run Linux. Nothing much changed for me between Debian 10 and 13 tbh.

> I haven't run Windows in a long time, but compared to Linux, it also doesn't require constant tinkering.

I would say Windows is a bit worse now. I find I have to use Rufus to enable some magic option to able Local user installation (I am not having a MS account), setup choco, install the stuff via choco and then set a desktop background.

> While I also think Linux user experience becomes more and more "it just works", the incentives are such that a commercial experience like macOS is likely to always be a few levels above

Most stuff just does work. If you are running exotic hardware, then sure. But if you have a bog standard desktop or laptop it will work.

The biggest problem with Linux tbh is that if you aren't using Gnome or KDE, the UI is just bit jank in some places.

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