From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by gigatexal » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 6:23 PM UTC

asimovfan wrote: post #209

gigatexal wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. My 2013 MacBook Pro lasted just shy of 10 years no issues. My m3 max mbpro I only wish was the larger screen one and not the 13 inch one … oh well. But I suspect it will last me — and be passed down as well — 8-10 years as well. The trackpads are second to none. So are the speakers. The screen are pretty good. I wish mine got even brighter but the m4s do. The keyboard is finally awesome. The OS just works. In f…

I read why you left linux as your main platform.. You say you are "practical now and tired" implying GNU(+linux) is unpractical and tiring, which is perfectly wrong in my opinion. Not only my opinion but also in your own opinion, as you also write how package managers are better in linux, macOS is not as hackable, how much it is locked down etc. So it comes down to this paragraph: "I learned to like nice things. I be…

I should monetize my blog for the 5-10 or so people who hate read it ;-)

I am not a sane, logical, rational person most of the time ... but I think not many folks are.

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

#402

Post by sandreas » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 6:33 PM UTC

Retr0id wrote: post #330

sandreas wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does the Palm-Detection work? To test this, you can do the following: Place your palm where the X-es are, then try to scroll with two fingers or move your mouse. I don't like that the mouse does not react anymore if the palm is placed there - it should just be ignored. ┌─────────────────────────┐ │XXX │ │XX │ │X │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ └─────────────────────────┘

I performed your test and mouse movement and two-finger scrolling still works if my palm is there. Even 3-finger window switching gestures. My palm is effectively ignored.

So this would mean that either my configuration is bad or it might be a hardware limitation. So if you don't mind I would love to see your

  gsettings list-recursively | grep 'peripherals\.touchpad'

Here is mine (before you ask, disable-while-typing=false does not fix my problem) :

  org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad accel-profile 'default'
  org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad click-method 'fingers'
  org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad disable-while-typing true
  org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad edge-scrolling-enabled false
  org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad left-handed 'mouse'
  org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad middle-click-emulation false
  org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad natural-scroll true
  org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad send-events 'enabled'
  org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad speed -0.044999999999999998
  org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-and-drag true
  org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-and-drag-lock false
  org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-button-map 'default'
  org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-to-click true
  org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad two-finger-scrolling-enabled true

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

#403

Post by elcritch » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 6:34 PM UTC

rangestransform wrote: post #328

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 audio is magic because Apple overdrives their speakers by analyzing the signal to stay under the sustained power limit of the speaker, instead of clipping everything at the sustained power limit. https://forum.devtalk.com/t/a-reason-why-mac-speakers-sound-...

I'd argue they're technically not over-driving them if the speakers survive and work well. Rather it's that other vendors are under driving their speakers by using a simplistic algorithm.

Apple is actually driving their speakers closer to their actual physical limits which are driven by average power not peak momentary power.

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

#404

Post by Brybry » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 6:34 PM UTC

goyagoji wrote: post #160

me551ah wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not really sure that's remarkable, maybe compared to the netbook level machines. Now that HDs are gone the only cause of failure I see from my coworkers is extended vacations and remote work in tropical climates.

I threw a 15" Dell laptop from the early aughts into a wall (for reasons I am not proud of), hard enough to put a hole in the sheet rock, and the laptop still worked fine.

Cracked the plastic case a bit but that was it. The most amazing part to me was not the HDD surviving but the LCD backlight. This back was when they still used those super fragile thin CCFLs.

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

#405

Post by sensanaty » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 6:48 PM UTC

mirzap wrote: post #180

hermanzegerman wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really come off as a Hardcore Apple Fanboy > 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 Doesn't matter because for the equivalent price you can load up your non-Apple Machine with RAM to the Max, same with SSD Storage. With a MacBook you would need to prepare to cough up, up to 9k more than the base model for a huge SSD…

I use WebStorm, CLion, Cursor, 2-3 Claude Code instances, Chrome/Brave with 50+ tabs, Docker, and a bunch of other things on MacBook Air all at the same time. It works. Never freezes. Never crashes. I tried that on Windows recently, and now on Arch with a lot more memory (32), and it simply can't handle it. I reboot daily. Freezes in the middle of the work. It may be the issue with nvidia drivers as other pointed out…

I dunno I use similar apps on my work-provided 32GB M1 Pro and that thing chugs along horribly after a certain point. I still get the spinning beach ball from time to time, and the massive work Vue codebase in Webstorm is so fucking slow that it can take upwards of 10 seconds for type intellisense to give me results in tiny files, with constant freezing. The same doesn't happen on my personal linux machines, my work codebase is incredibly speedy there.

Don't get me started on MacOS itself and its myriad of problems.

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

#406

Post by goosedragons » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 6:50 PM UTC

coliveira wrote: post #333

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.)

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.

Download Power Toys and use Awake. Will keep the screen on if you want.

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

#407

Post by sensanaty » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 6:50 PM UTC

codeflo wrote: post #93

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…

> 8-10h battery life If you think that's even close to good, then it's you who lives in a reality distortion field. But so are all of the PC laptop manufacturers, reviewers and buyers. I don't get it. I desperately want to move to a Linux laptop (I run it on every desktop PC I own, and I hate that I have to deal with a locked-down system). I've tried more laptops than is probably financially healthy for me. There's n…

My work-provided M1 Pro (which I got brand new out of the box) will last all day if idle, but if I'm doing literally anything like even light browsing, the battery life is around 8-10h. More like 5 when I'm running my full local dev setup.

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

#408

Post by pxc » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 6:51 PM UTC

KerrAvon wrote: post #360

pxc wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you bought even a small bluetooth speaker that sounded the same as an MBP, you'd think "this thing kinda sucks... no bass, but at least it's small; what do you expect". Either that or you aren't someone who cares about sound (which is fine)

I’ll wager you have not listened to high-quality music or movies on a recent MacBook Pro. I’ve never heard a BT speaker of any size sound that good. (The HomePod Mini sounds quality really sucks by comparison, FWIW.)

> I’ll wager you have not listened to high-quality music or movies on a recent MacBook Pro.

Because of this conversation, I just watched Ne Zha (the first one, from 2019) on my M1-generation MacBook Pro. It sounded okay. I didn't hate it like I'd hate listening on a tablet or something. But...

> I’ve never heard a BT speaker of any size sound that good.

My MacBook Pro didn't sound as good as the smallest bluetooth speaker that I personally own and use (Marshall Kilburn), which is battery powered and whose primary daily use in my life is playing podcasts while I shower. It definitely didn't sound as good as the budget brand PC speakers I use with my TV (Edifier 1700BTs), either-- with or without a subwoofer. It didn't even sound as good as my wireless earbuds, let alone my headphones.

I don't think my tastes are that fancy. I've never had a surround sound setup. I've never tried a pair of IEMs. I've never owned or pursued a "audiophile"-grade equipment. I'm not a basshead, either.

I can appreciate some of the nice qualities of my MacBook's speakers relative to the form factor. But at the end of the day it still clearly falls in the "not real speakers" bucket. They're laptop speakers, not magic.

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

#409

Post by pjerem » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 6:52 PM UTC

elcritch wrote: post #403

rangestransform wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The audio is magic because Apple overdrives their speakers by analyzing the signal to stay under the sustained power limit of the speaker, instead of clipping everything at the sustained power limit. https://forum.devtalk.com/t/a-reason-why-mac-speakers-sound-...

I'd argue they're technically not over-driving them if the speakers survive and work well. Rather it's that other vendors are under driving their speakers by using a simplistic algorithm. Apple is actually driving their speakers closer to their actual physical limits which are driven by average power not peak momentary power.

Actually they do over drive them. I think it is explained in the asahi sound driver GitHub which reverse engineered the Apple driver.

IIRC, there is an algorithm which overdrives the speakers in physically dangerous zones only on some frequencies and only in short bursts of time with a throttle until the next over drive if necessary.

For the user it’s transparent because we are talking about timings in milliseconds so except if you play a static frequency you can’t notice anything.

Asahi explained that they had to reverse engineer this because they didn’t understand why the sound was so bad on Linux.

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

#410

Post by sensanaty » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 6:52 PM UTC

baq wrote: post #267

W3zzy wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We run dell or HP laptops at work. After 3 years they get replaced. I usually buy my old work laptop to use it for personal use or to hand off to my family. Tge first one I bought in that way is still working after 14 years. I converted it from Windows to Linux a few years ago and My mother uses it for browsing, banking and email. Personally I'm using a 7 years old HP. Batteries get upgraded when necessary and first…

The point is corporate wouldn’t need to replace the Apple MacBooks after 3 years. I’ve got an M1 air bought what feels forever ago and it’s still as fast as I need it to be. I’ve also been using hp laptops in my previous job and they couldn’t even wake from sleep when needed (but would wake in backpacks to the point IT explicitly forbade putting sleeping laptops in bags. Absurd.)

IME they do anyways? They won't replace every single device every 3 years, but most companies I've worked for will do refreshes every 3-5 years, Mac or not