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Welcome (back) to Macintosh

take.surf

211–220 of 276 posts

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#211
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can probably just dedicate 1GB for the framebuffer, and then let Linux dynamically allocate memory to it at runtime. As far as I can tell this doesn't impact performance, so there's no downside. (Older AMD stacks required a static partitioning under Linux, I think).

I haven’t had much time with it, but I’ve had to set the split in the BIOS. There’s probably a way to do it from within Linux though. Also hoping some progress is made on using the AMD NPU in Linux. I know it only recently got kernel level support.

Finally there's good news for Linux users: https://github.com/FastFlowLM/FastFlowLM

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#213

This is going to be remembered as a comical fumble, in my view. I was fully locked-in to the ecosystem, the phone, the services, the TV, and I am looking for the exits. I’m starting to parallelize to software which will play well on Linux, and when I’m feeling ready (or miserable enough) I will not be looking back. The macOS exodus will be like Hemingway’s line about bankruptcy: very slowly and then all at once.

Off the top of my head:

Yesterday, my wife wanted to use Discord. It was right there in the applications folder. But MacOS couldn't find it. Launching it manually took minutes, for some reason.

We wanted to download a clip using yt_dlp (a Python program). Terminal told us, this would require dev tools, which it doesn't. So we installed Python from python.org instead, which worked. Except, that non-blessed python could not access the internet because of some MacOS "security" feature.

Another security feature requires all apps to be notarized, even the ones I built myself. This used to have a relatively easy workaround (right click, open, accept the risk). Now it needs a terminal command.

I live and work in a multi-lingual environment, and have set up a keyboard shortcut to switch between the German and English keyboard. MacOS does not have a keyboard shortcut for this. But Karabiner can do it, albeit a bit jankily.

Lately, the keyboard layout no longer sticks. It resets to English when I press shift. Sometimes it does work, sometimes it doesn't. This is unrelated to the aforementioned Karabiner shortcut.

The German keyboard layout for MacOS on non-Apple keyboards is insane. So I made my own layout. This is relatively easy, and worked well. Except, every single OS update reinstates Apple's insane layout.

Sometimes my Mac does not wake from sleep. Pressing the power button does nothing. Hitting keyboard keys does nothing. Only a long-press of the power button eventually reboots it. The power button on the Mac Studio is in an insane place of course.

There is still no indication anywhere that the hard drive is getting full.

There is still no simple way to reset the computer to factory conditions.

Gaming is still largely impossible, even though the hardware is very capable.

I have replaced TimeMachine with restic, as TimeMachine keeps resetting itself after a while.

My Linux PC should arrive this week, and will replace the Mac. I've had enough.

It will require wine for two apps, and a VM for two others. At this point, that's a price I'm willing to pay.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are you saying the long list of bugs don't actually happen?

Which particular long list of bugs? I’m on my work laptop, personal laptop and phone all day no problem. I’ve seen all the ranting here about the interface, window corners and menu icons but in day to day use have not encountered a single “bug”. And after some initial skepticism I actually like the design direction of Tahoe.

In the article. It says (paraphrasing): Time Machine goes wrong (over time!), Spotlight doesn't index tags right (requires relaunching Finder), Finder sometimes hangs when using Spotlight (requires relaunching Finder), folders sometimes won't update to show new files (requires relaunching Finder), using Quick Look on a video makes airpods glitch, and switching by cmd+tab to a fullscreen window doesn't give it keyboard focus.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but if your out is linux and windows because you're not happy how stuff doesn't "just work" in the Apple ecosystem boy are you in for a bad surprise. However bad you think Apple is getting with MacOS - windows is getting worse. And Linux ? Good luck getting decent hardware that will run without having basic functionality issues. Queue the linux brigade "my PC works perfect, what linux issues are you having"…

Luck doesn't play a factor in getting your hardware to work with Linux. It's either supported or it's not, and since the code is Open Source you can Google/ChatGPT the answer in less than 2 minutes. Your experience isn't uncommon, but it's largely the result of trying to force a square peg into a round hole. There are thousands of different smartphones, game consoles and set-top boxes that rely on Linux for all of th…

This. If you want Linux to be better, you need to use Linux. It's not any harder for OEMs to support it vs. Windows or MacOS. It's actually easier to support in many cases. There just isn't a business case. Use Linux, create a business case, get better software. Someone has to be the early adopter. Better nerds like us than grandma.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#216
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are you saying the long list of bugs don't actually happen?

They happen but you learn to work around them and they fall into the noise. FtFF has been a mantra for 20+ years; it’s never going to happen, stop trying to make it happen.

OK. I stopped buying Macs more than 20 years ago. The Finder used to work.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gonna say that the switch from X11 to Wayland that was pretty much forced this year across many distributions, broke a ton of things too (screenshot programs, keyboard shortcuts), however, all the code is open source, and there are workarounds and source code available but it still sucks. Basic keyboard shortcuts are still broke with the Wayland migration. e.g. Copyq has this janky workaround for a shortcut to regist…

I've been exclusively on wayland (xwayland for games and browsers before they support/ed wayland natively) since 2019 (!) Yes, there were and are problems, but far, far less than before and not much more than on X11, just different ones.

+1 - switched to Sway (and thus Wayland) in 2017 and it was okay then to only improve over time. At some point I switched xwayland off, as there were env vars to make everyhing I needed run natively on Wayland.

These days my setup is less radical/minimalistic, as I went back to GNOME (Wayland) about four years ago.

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#218

Coincidentally, I had to leave macOS for a Windows 11 pc about a month ago and it’s… fine. There are absurd bugs and ux decisions, but I honestly think there are different but equally bad aspects of macOS. On the other hand, some of the things in windows land are just nicer. For one, my network samba shares stay connected and mounted through restarts. I could never make this work reliably on macOS. File explorer is g…

[deleted]

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#219
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but if your out is linux and windows because you're not happy how stuff doesn't "just work" in the Apple ecosystem boy are you in for a bad surprise. However bad you think Apple is getting with MacOS - windows is getting worse. And Linux ? Good luck getting decent hardware that will run without having basic functionality issues. Queue the linux brigade "my PC works perfect, what linux issues are you having"…

they have yet to invent a linux laptop with good battery life, quality keyboard & trackpad, sleep-then-suspend, bluetooth. as long as apple makes computers with those things, i can be content even if it means living inside my full screen linux vm

the macbooks are crazy for battery life compared to anything else.

But you can run Linux on an M2 Macbook.

And there is premium windows hardware on the market, where Linux actually works better than Windows (notably business laptops like the Thinkpad x1 and HP Elitebook).

Re: Welcome (back) to Macintosh

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t had much time with it, but I’ve had to set the split in the BIOS. There’s probably a way to do it from within Linux though. Also hoping some progress is made on using the AMD NPU in Linux. I know it only recently got kernel level support.

Finally there's good news for Linux users: https://github.com/FastFlowLM/FastFlowLM

Amazing, thank you!
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