The screen is atrocious. Apple has been using HIDPI 220ppi displays on macbooks since 2012. No we dont need a matte display. Ever see a matte smartphone?
linux does NOT SUPPORT fractional scaling.
StarBook 14-inch
341–350 of 381 posts
Re: StarBook 14-inch
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
ah yes, let me find the instructions! EDIT: this is what fixed it for me: > Pressing the bottom center of the touchpad firmly a few times has resolved the issue in some cases.[1] Said in a slightly different way: > There were also a small number of early units produced that may have contact issues on the physical switch on the Touchpad. Try pressing the bottom middle of the Touchpad firmly a few times to see if that…
Looks like after a few _hard_ presses the problems are gone. Thanks!
Awesome! super glad to hear it. btw framework support is really great. I've opened a couple of cases with them and they're super helpful
Re: StarBook 14-inch
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me guess the device is over two years old, your display is always above 70% brightness, you have chrome opened with over a dozen tabs, alongside it a bunch of other background apps you don't actually need open. Oh and probably a VM or docker. How close was I? ;-)
The only one that matters is if their MBP is over 2 years old. I got my M1 the week it released and I only run it under the conditions you describe. Sometimes accidentally leaving baldurs gate 3 / Stellaris / Civ6 running in the background. It still gets a battery life of “oh I showed up to an all-day working session with a friend with 50% battery life and forgot my charger and I don’t have any anxiety about that” ba…
>The only one that matters is if their MBP is over 2 years old
I wasn't just asking because of the potential wear on the battery from abuse, but M1 laptops did not exist 2 years ago. Although the intel macbooks still had great battery life for their size. People who put their device through it's paces and wonder why the battery is draining so fast are a special breed that's for sure.
Re: StarBook 14-inch
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like after a few _hard_ presses the problems are gone. Thanks!
Awesome! super glad to hear it. btw framework support is really great. I've opened a couple of cases with them and they're super helpful
Yeah, I had the same experience. They reply super fast and with no bs. As a support engineer in the past life, I really appreciated it.
Re: StarBook 14-inch
#345I got one of these in December 2021 and frankly love it. Got fed up with being pretty much the only person on earth who had a shitty experience with Apple Silicon, so jumped back to Linux after 17 years away. I don’t use it as a portable, or at least haven’t yet - it’s my daily driver for work and permanently plugged in to a monitor (which also is a USB hub). I opted for Manjaro and enjoy using it way more than I did…
What put you off the M1? I’m still on an Intel MBP but fear my eventual switch to an M1 will be frustrating.
So I changed jobs in May 2021. Had been a happy Intel mac user since the intel switch (my first Mac was a PowerBook). New employer supplied me an M1 MBP and I was fucking delighted, since I didn’t have the means to buy my own at the time.
Contrary to other comments later, I have no niche needs. Well… I’m predominantly a Perl coder, so that’s niche but nothing to do with architecture. I spend most of my days with just iTerm, a couple of browsers, Slack. Not much else. I’ve been an edit-over-ssh developer for 20 years.
My M1 was also my first experience of Big Sur, so I was never sure whether my issue was hardware or software. But issues I had:
• frequently it would stop all ipv4 networking, going ipv6 only (which in practical terms meant I went offline)
• I would often - multiple times a week - lose all sound devices. Suddenly things would go silent, and all inputs/outputs (including the built in speakers/mic) would disappear from preferences. For a while only a reboot would fix it, until I learned to `killall coreaudiod`
• chrome would often say “you don’t have a camera”, which I could only fix by a reboot (we use Google Meet, and safari was always terrible with it. But I just prefer chrome anyway)
I had a variety of other problems but can’t recall them clearly enough to list them, especially from this temporal distance.
[EDITED to add: I did go through hardware checks and company IT checks, but nothing ever came up as faulty]
I did love that it was silent and permanently cool, but that was about it. Since it too was always plugged in, any difference in trackpad or keyboard or battery life made zero odds to me, and that’s why those things don’t matter to me about the Starbook either.
When Monterey came out I upgraded and actually things got mostly (but not entirely) better. But by that time I’d ordered the Starbook, and the desktop Linux experience has been so good - not to mention just a refreshing change - that I don’t regret it one bit. And if I do, well, the work MBP is sat in the corner and I can resurrect it…
Re: StarBook 14-inch
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
>yet the hardware they built is arguably very libre-friendly Well they're already in legal trouble for abusing their iOS market dominance with the new EU proposed legislation, they know the tides are turning against big tech, so they didn't lock down the MacBooks preemptively to brace themselves for what's coming, not because Apple has somehow now become a FOSS supporter. Before you applaud Apple for being too libre…
I suspect everyone is waiting for the news to drop that either a top of line ARM machine is released outside of Apple, or for AMD/Intel to announce a competitive ARM chip. Computer enthusiasts have heard for ages that X86 is bloated, and that alternate instruction sets are better if only the tooling good catch up. Now that Apple is pushing ARM across the line, and ARM servers are becoming popular - folks want to see…
this describes me to a T. I'm dying for a nice arm laptop with a good form factor with open source bios running linux.
Re: StarBook 14-inch
#347I know the people working on Asahi Linux don’t have things perfect yet, but it runs on an M1 Air. That machine claims 18 hours of battery life (in some tests, MacOS) and gets 14.5-16.5 hours depending on who tests it. The StarBook claims 10 and probably achieves less (everyone does). The base specs are roughly comparable, except i3 vs M1 and the high resolution screen on the Mac. The site is quoting me $883 vs $999.…
> I understand the value some place on its openness, but it’s not even a medium sacrifice. It’s pretty big.
There's open, closed, and then there's the crap Apple pull off. None of their devices are even slightly serviceable or upgradeable. RAM, disk, battery are all, physically or otherwise, fixed for the whole life of the machine. Add the huge premiums they charge for going from 8GB RAM to 16, or similar in storage, makes the sacrifice much more bearable.
Re: StarBook 14-inch
#348So close. I really want a laptop with a "2K" 4:3 aspect ratio 14" screen, 64GB of ECC ram, a Ryzen processor, and an M.2 SSD. Would be interesting to get a nice web cam too but that is less important to me. I'm also not a huge "thinness" type, thicker is fine if it isn't heavier.
Hey Chuck - been trying to email you. You have a bad link to your VAX stuff on your main web site.
Re: StarBook 14-inch
#349So close. I really want a laptop with a "2K" 4:3 aspect ratio 14" screen, 64GB of ECC ram, a Ryzen processor, and an M.2 SSD. Would be interesting to get a nice web cam too but that is less important to me. I'm also not a huge "thinness" type, thicker is fine if it isn't heavier.
Hey Chuck - been trying to email you. You have a bad link to your VAX stuff on your main web site.
Weird, the email in my profile should work. But thanks for the tip, I'll fix the link rot
Re: StarBook 14-inch
#350I got one of these in December 2021 and frankly love it. Got fed up with being pretty much the only person on earth who had a shitty experience with Apple Silicon, so jumped back to Linux after 17 years away. I don’t use it as a portable, or at least haven’t yet - it’s my daily driver for work and permanently plugged in to a monitor (which also is a USB hub). I opted for Manjaro and enjoy using it way more than I did…
What put you off the M1? I’m still on an Intel MBP but fear my eventual switch to an M1 will be frustrating.
Macbook Air requires you to get a DisplayLink hub to support multiple monitors.
Macbook Pro eliminated this limitation, but it almost feels like it's using the same technology, as it often loses window locations.
Early on software support was limited, but for many apps, that's been resolved. (Even "unsupported" apps can still run, though I typically don't jump through many hoops, especially when I run into Docker images that don't support ARM)