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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

#331

Post by reactordev »

zozbot234 wrote: post #286
reactordev wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t wear glasses, I can see pixels on a 1080p screen just fine whereas on a Retina display or anything with 4k+ I can’t at a normal distance. Glad you know how my eyes work. You probably will say next that I can’t see the refresh.

You can see pixels up close on a 1080p screen if you have good eyesight, but that's not the way you're supposed to work with a screen as a matter of ergonomics. Even on a laptop, you're always looking at the screen as a whole, not just seeing a tiny portion of it in your field of view.

I can see pixels at rest when sitting at my desk and a 1080p monitor 27” or more is on it.

Thanks for letting me know how my eyes work.

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

#332

Post by ant6n »

zozbot234 wrote: post #300
ant6n wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad the trackpad software behaves differently on MacOs than the rest of the world - when using tap-to-drag, when you release your finger, the drag doesn't get released until like a second later (and the release delay can't be turned off, it's been like this for decades). So when switching between windows and mac often, there can be a lot of annoying miss dragging.

That's an intentional feature, to avoid unintentional "drops" due to mere involuntary twitches (which are way more common on a touchpad than a physical mouse). (Another option on some touchpads is to require a second tap for the "drop" action, and otherwise just keep the dragging active. It takes some getting used to, but then it works quite well.)

It's not a "feature" when Apple decided to do it differently than everybody else, and doesn't give you an option to do it the normal way. It's just a constant reminder that Apply wants me to adapt to it, because they decide what's the right way.

For those who keep moving between systems, there will be many more mistakes because objects will be dragged 'again' and involuntarily move where they shouldn't. It's so exhausting trying to deal with the "Apple way" of things, it's a total drag on otherwise pretty decent hardware.

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

#333

Post by coliveira »

baq wrote: post #264
pjerem wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 add a very important feature of ‘lid is closed - the computer is asleep and it wakes up when lid opens’. Both windows and Linux are simply broken in that regard. What I need is Apple MacBook hardware with a 100% supported Linux OS. This combination simply doesn’t exist and there’s no amount of money to make it happen (yes I know about asahi.)

There's another issue: Windows keeps turning off the screen after a few minutes of idle time, no matter what I try. They have options to control this, but the hardware seems to override these options for some reason.

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

#334

Post by GeekyBear »

piskov wrote: post #319
andoando wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can dual boot Asahi Linux https://asahilinux.org/fedora/

It seams asaho is basically dead at this point. Prominent maintainers quit and in a couple of months there will be two years since latest m3+ macs are unsupported

> It seams asaho is basically dead at this point.

This month's Asahi blog post begs to differ.

> This completes our transition to a fully upstream graphics stack, and as such we are retiring our Mesa fork completely...

we have managed to upstream a little over 20% of our entire patch set in just under five months.

https://asahilinux.org/2025/08/progress-report-6-16/

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

#335

Post by blep-arsh »

goosedragons wrote: post #200
pjerem wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The MBA screen is /alright/. It's better than a lot of Windows machines but you can get better for the price for sure. I'd argue the screens in the Surface line are comparable and arguably better, 3:2, brighter, 120Hz at basically the same price. And there's loads of 4K OLED Windows laptops if you're willing to pay for them. Apple screens also tend to have pretty bad response times too. They are sharp and color accur…

Laptop OLEDs aren't usually the best wrt color accuracy and uniformity. I've tried two. One had green splotches across the screen, the other just displays a certain range of gray shades with a green tint (so e.g. a black-to-white gradient test image has a green band in the middle). And there's always a static noise pattern of sorts due to non-uniform pixel brightness.

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

#336

Post by proee »

kaladin-jasnah wrote: post #290
pjerem wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interestingly, I really don't like MacBook trackpads. The actuation force is too high for my taste. Maybe this has changed.

I always just enable tap to click and also adjust the speed to max. Once your brain gets use to this it works great (for me).

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

#337

Post by coliveira »

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 think the issue of 5 years is not hardware, but software instead. Windows gets somehow bloated and unusable after a few years. Every time I used Windows machines they have to be reinstalled with the OS after some time. With macs I have been using them non-stop since 2010 and never had that problem.

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

#338

Post by conradev »

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…

Also worth noting that Apple actually defines and decides the lifetime of their own computers using software support, whereas Windows and Linux typically support hardware indefinitely (that might be changing with Windows 11).

My sister had a 2011 MacBook Air until it stopped getting software updates in 2020.

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

#339

Post by coliveira »

LtWorf wrote: post #313
bluecalm wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am on my 3rd Thinkpad already and while I still like them they are not close to Apple quality. On my current one keyboard touches the screen when it's closed so the screen becomes dirty quickly. After Windows 11 upgrade it auto-dims on battery after like 30 seconds and I can't figure a way to turn it off. Hibernation never worked properly (apparently AMD/Windows issue). You don't need to deal with any of that on a…

> Hibernation never worked properly You can blame microsoft for that unfortunately. They made the vendors to change how it all works to workaround windows issues and it didn't even work.

It is amazing that after decades Microsoft still cannot nail such an important usability issue... There's no way I can use Windows laptops full time.

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

#340

Post by baq »

rjzzleep wrote: post #283
baq wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also add a very important feature of ‘lid is closed - the computer is asleep and it wakes up when lid opens’. Both windows and Linux are simply broken in that regard. What I need is Apple MacBook hardware with a 100% supported Linux OS. This combination simply doesn’t exist and there’s no amount of money to make it happen (yes I know about asahi.)

It's not really Linux' fault. Most It's Microsoft that forced this, and most vendors don't know how to deal with this and work proper firmware. I think Framework and Valve fixed theirs. I have a GPD and just found out that the reason I kept getting it wake from sleep was some MS related option triggering an ACPI IRQ 9 sleep wake. On another note, I actually think that the most important things that work better on the…

As a user I don't care whose fault is it. I want my laptop to go to sleep when I close the lid; I want it to stay asleep while the lid is closed; I want it to wake when I open the lid. Only macs seem to be able to do that consistently; I'd be glad to be proven wrong, but over the past decade I haven't found a counterexample yet.
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