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I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

simonhartcher.com

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Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#511

Post by didibus »

acchow wrote: post #424
didibus wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can’t hibernate (aka suspend to disk) you will never be able to get that power consumption low Does Mac hibernate? Because if it does, the wake up is literally under 100ms, it's just imperceptible. You open the lid and it's already awake.

> Does Mac hibernate? Not by default. If you just shut the lid on your macbook and put it in your backpack for 2 days, it does not hibernate. Which is why waking is instant.

That's what I thought, so I disagree with OP, we don't want hybernation for Linux, we simply need way better power management and hardware that can sustain low power drain for weeks.

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#512

Post by hbn »

heavyset_go wrote: post #254
hbn wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also just tell them to get an M2 MacBook Air for $800. You'll have to do near zero troubleshooting, it'll last them the better part of a decade, they get unmatched battery life and hardware reliability, and if they do run into issues they'll have top-of-its-class support from Apple. I know Linux guys don't mind putting up with the Linux experience but if your family is trusting you as "the techie," you'd be d…

> You can also just tell them to get an M2 MacBook Air for $800 Yes, you will find that most material problems can be solved by buying more stuff. If they wanted to buy a new laptop, they would have done that. > You'll have to do near zero troubleshooting That's the case now. Meanwhile, with the Macs they use, I have to explain that there's a difference between Intel and ARM Macs, that no, their software won't work i…

> I have to explain that there's a difference between Intel and ARM Macs

No you don't? Why not tell your grandma about PowerPC and Motorola 68000 Macs too while you're giving her pointless information about CPUs Apple used in the past.

We're half a decade into the Apple Silicon transition. Intel Macs are not relevant to anyone except people who purchased a Mac within a couple years before the M1.

> no, their software won't work in MACOS_VERSION because Apple deprecated some API, and no, you can't upgrade to MACOS_VERSION+1 to use something that works, no the hardware they've been using for years won't work because the driver for it is no longer compatible with their Mac/macOS version, the simple thing they want to do actually requires $30 paid software to do, I can't help you when Apple sold you a small hard drive at a premium and macOS takes up half of it, etc.

I... can't even imagine what scenario you could possibly be running into any of this so I don't know how to argue against it.

I was already speaking on the scenario you brought up where this is someone that is gonna be living 95% in their browser. I don't know what weird proprietary software non-techie users are needing that's apparently not compatible with new Macs. Anything beyond web browsing - e.g. word processing, light photo editing, dealing with PDFs, etc - can be done with very high-quality, free software baked right into macOS.

You describe using a Mac like the black and white "before" footage from an infomercial showing that previously the only way to cut a tomato is smushing it with the side of a dull knife. If a Mac is too difficult for someone, Linux is not the solution.

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#513

Post by hbn »

ksec wrote: post #455
vander_elst wrote: post #348

Honest question, how is it possible that Macs are so much better in terms of hardware? Context: I use a MacBook at work and a Lenovo with Linux at home and now I might need to change my personal laptop, but I struggle to find (hardware) reasons why not to buy a MacBook, a MacBook Air is actually cheaper than another laptops with similar specs. There's still the ideology of repairability and openness which still plays…

>how is it possible that Macs are so much better in terms of hardware? Mac are premium hardware, and they earn higher margin. Apple use that to reinvest into their own hardware. And has been doing so for 30+ years. Better quality PC generally dont sell as well. They have less incentive to do so. The whole PC business is also cut throat, in the old days you could have most of the margin on PC going to Intel. While oth…

Is your theory that PC's bad reputation is from people only having experience with cheap ones? If so I'm not sure if I buy it.

At my work, all non-developers are given Microsoft Surfaces. They're not cheap machines by any means, but they have nothing but problems with them. Overheating, battery drain, lag, full-on lockups, requiring regular daily reboots, needing replacement after a year, etc.

I'm guessing they just give everyone PCs because it's what most people are familiar with, but I have to assume they're spending more on those units than a base-spec MacBook Air that would get way better mileage and cause less tickets for IT.

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#514

Post by terribleperson »

lukeschlather wrote: post #291
terribleperson wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it just works on MacOS, but it's prone to all kinds of breakage on Windows.

I've never had an issue on Windows. This is why I gave up on using Linux laptops for any purpose.

I've had sleep issues on a Surface Pro.

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#516

Post by rangestransform »

nrp wrote: post #232
cptskippy wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Framework is a personal device, not for work. I might use it once a day or less for a couple hours or less. It was 100% charged this past Saturday night when I picked it up off the charger. I used it for an hour or two looking for doing some planning for Halloween. Nothing serious, just browsing with Firefox. I shut the lid and placed it on the coffee table. I picked it up Sunday night to find the battery had depl…

Windows has automatic Modern Standby to Hibernate support (by default after 5% battery drain in standby). If it is not entering Hibernate, there may be an application keeping the system awake.

this sounds like a dumb workaround for fundamental issues that should ideally be addressed by beating app, driver, and hardware developers into submission in a way that would probably fall afoul of antitrust law

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#517

Post by cyberax »

Daneel_ wrote: post #497
cyberax wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a command line tool for this: "caffeinate". You can add a script that runs it while there are SSH sessions open.

It's a failing that I need to pre-empt every situation where I don't want the machine to sleep and run a tool to prevent it from sleeping, when I could usually just say 'don't sleep when I shut the lid'.

That's probably because most people _want_ their laptop to sleep each time they close the lid.

The exceptions are really narrow. E.g. if you want your SSH sessions to stay alive, you also need to ensure that you never leave the WiFi coverage.

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#518

Post by AnthonyMouse »

chongli wrote: post #464
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not actually a disadvantage, because if it's actually open source no one can stop anyone else from doing it. If you or your company wants to work 80 hour weeks to improve power efficiency on Linux, you can submit patches to all the different projects where nobody else is doing the work. And that actually happens in real life. Most of the projects care to begin with because they use their own stuff and do…

And that actually happens in real life. Most of the projects care to begin with because they use their own stuff and don't want to ruin their own battery life or have a competitive disadvantage over the alternative. Sure, they try not to ruin the battery life , but who is investing the amount of engineering resources into Linux battery life that Apple invests into macOS's? No one, of course, because the ROI of doing…

> Sure, they try not to ruin the battery life, but who is investing the amount of engineering resources into Linux battery life that Apple invests into macOS's? No one, of course, because the ROI of doing that for Apple is much higher than doing the same for Linux.

The answer is rather that everyone is doing it. Then most people care about it a little so they do a little, but because it's most people that adds up to being the majority of what needs to be done. A smaller number care about it a lot but all that's left is for them to shave off the rough edges.

> Linux's open nature means that going for SotA battery life does not yield a competitive advantage, so no one does it.

How does it not yield a competitive advantage? If you're Framework, Dell, System76, Canonical, Red Hat, etc., you want people to use your product instead of buying a Mac or some competitor's Windows laptop.

> In other words, centralize the battery life project.

I don't understand how this is centralization.

Suppose Intel does the work to make good open source drivers and make sure their hardware has low idle power consumption, Red Hat does the work to make systemd behave in a way which is power inefficient in the hardware-independent ways, etc. Then Framework does an analysis of where power is going on their systems and finds that Intel and Red Hat did a good job but there's a bug in the third party network controller driver preventing it from going to sleep, so they fix the bug.

Where is the centralization? The work is being done by all different companies who aren't even necessarily interacting with each other. Some of the bugs in third party software are fixed by hobbyists or other vendors. Then Framework is left with a limited amount of work to do and they do it.

The problem comes when they go to do that analysis and find that the thing using more power than it should is a piece of hardware that the vendor both failed to document and failed to provide source code for the firmware, so that no one else can fix it when they don't. In other words, it's caused by a thing that isn't open source.

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#519

Post by joshuaissac »

mschuster91 wrote: post #419
MisterTea wrote: post #275

Funny side story is years ago when AMD was developing the Opteron A series I commented somewhere that AMD is making a terrible blunder and is going after the wrong market. They needed to start the other way around, and build a kick ass Arm + GPU SoC that was more akin to a PC in terms of performance and not a throw away raspberry pi SoC. Bigger caches, wider memory bus, PCIe e.g. for NVMe, powerful GPU. Essentially s…

For that, you'd actually need a high performance ARM core on one side (and frankly, it's just Apple at that point, they needed well over a decade to get there), and you need some way to make legacy x86/x86_64 applications to run smoothly to get over the chicken-egg effect, and you need some way for all the legacy hardware devices that people plug in into their computers. Apple could do it not just because of their ex…

> and their ARM Architecture License allowed them to do tweaks

FWIW, both Intel and AMD also have architectural licences from ARM.

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#520

Post by Casteil »

eigenspace wrote: post #178
whatarethembits wrote: post #43

Battery life is the only thing stopping me from getting out of the Apple ecosystem. As soon as a viable Linux laptop with "enough" battery life becomes available, I'll make the switch. At that point there's nothing on Apple side that couldn't be done better in Linux (with a bit of work, but that's okay). I travel a lot, and often on standby for work during that time. I need to be confident that when I pull the laptop…

Instead of a hot-swappable battery, why not just carry a large battery-bank that can charge your laptop over USB-C? That way you don't even need to reboot. Browsing around on Amazon, I see there's actually quite a few battery banks that with over 60W of output, and ~100Wh of capacity for under 100€

Charging is a lossy process. Charging a battery, then using it to charge another battery isn't as efficient.

Plus, depending on how/where it's used, having to wait for it to recharge while connected to a power bank might be a non-starter. You also don't necessarily want to recharge while transporting in a bag either because of heat concerns.

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