621–630 of 686 posts
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The bootloader boot/process however is not related to driver support. Not that I know what's nightmarish about it in the Pi.
The Pi is really a GPU with a CPU added on so the whole system needs to be brought up by the (binary blobs for running the) GPU. Hopefully not the case in these more PC-like systems...
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I do this nonstop using the UTM app in Apple Silicon virtualization, not QEMU, mode. I've done this from M2, M2 Max, and M5 machines, it basically wraps the hypervisor.framework (or the current name) and i had used Asahi on an M1 before that. With UTM wrapping hypervisor.framework, i have a complete fullscreen desktop running Linux (i use fedora earlier but Arch the last several months) with full graphics as if it we…
Are you able to play Steam games?
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I worked with some of the people responsible for the Surface Book, Surface docks, and specifically the Surface Book's dock. These were hardware people (EEs), not software people, and this was after their time at MS. Unfortunately I don't remember specifics (both because it's been a few years, and because I'd probably have to fuzz details anyway), but... : Docks are horrifying products. Thunderbolt docks are doubly ho…
This is going to come across a flippant, but aren’t they Microsoft? Couldn’t they order whatever parts they wanted to spec? It’s hard to imagine that every fundamental piece is so horrifically useless as you describe, but it’s also not my world. It just seems to me if any company could, M$ could just spend their way through the problem. Grabbing everybody else’s cheap hardware and going “there’s absolutely nothing we…
Economically and logistically, yes, absolutely. Would it have had positive ROI (stuff like that is expensive)? Who knows, there's a lot of factors to consider, like accessory costs, increased sales, brand goodwill, new markets, whatever. But they could do it if they wanted to.
Culturally, though, this is just not how Microsoft operates. Not for boring accessories like that, anyway. (The Dock team was not where the ambitious-for-promotion people wanted to be.) It absolutely is how Apple operates, though, which is why I mentioned them. Their relative positions in the hardware ecosystem are not an accident.
(However, the technical constraints at that time were severe, and it might not have been technically possible. As I said in a sibling comment, this was the era of Intel's Alpine Ridge (I think that's the right one), and it was a nightmare. I don't know that it was really feasible to do much better, on the timelines needed. Now, after that disaster of a chip was out in the market, everyone else knew what the correct solution looked like, and could build it. But Alpine Ridge had to... salt the earth?... first so we could all move on. Build one to throw it away, but ship it first and poison the market.)
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You clearly have never tried to implement sleep on a microcontroller. It has nothing at all to do with ACPI. And this kind of eldritch bug is par for the course. It has nothing at all to do with Microsoft or PCs at all. Microcontroller sleep just sucks in a lot of incredibly weird ways.
We had another bug involving a single cycle timing tolerance of memory on a bus, we were one cycle off in our config. We dual sourced memory chips and one of our suppliers had chips that worked with 1 fewer wait states, the other chip didn't. Once we started blending the 2nd chip into our production line we had weird issues.
One of my guys spent ~2 months thinking it was a software bug. We had a null ptr deref in our code, he went line by line and by the end of 2 months we had literally bug free calendar code.
Turns out the timing bug manifested in the exact same bit being corrupted every now and then in memory, which happened to be where our pointer lived at. We figured it out when a new production build caused memory to be moved around enough that someone else's pointer was getting corrupted. :)
So then the HW investigation began.
The principal engineer on Band's firmware refused to allow us to have any open crash reports, all crash dumps had to be fully investigated, root caused, and fixed. In a few cases we found customers who had faulty hardware and we reached out to individuals to replace their units, and brought the broken units back to our labs to figure out what went wrong on the assembly line. (Although on occasion stuff just gets assembled wrong, even with slews of automated tests on every unit that leaves the factory floor!)
That same principal engineer reviewed every single line of code that went into the Band's firmware. That code base had a consistency of code, style, and thoughtfulness that I'll likely never see again in my career.
Call me a hater, but the problem is Windows, not necessarily the hardware. I get it they want to stop the MacBook Pro, but: Windows is slow for no reason; it collects everything it can about the user; takes screenshots of whatever the user is doing; has ads - even though you pay for the OS; drivers are still a mess; hardware is made by different companies and no actual proper integration like Apple does. I could go o…
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To be fair, my MacBook Pro had the same issue - if the battery was dead, charging via USB-C wouldn't work, it would need the MagSafe charger. Presumably because the USB controller needs power in order to negotiate power delivery.
I would have thought that the default 5V coming through the cable should be enough to power on the chip and negotiate power delivery though? Or was it actually working but charging only on 5V and taking a long time to wake up?
Microsoft doesn't get it. People don't buy MacBooks because they're powerful. People buy MacBooks because they love macOS.
> Rated for all day battery life So vibes battery life. I'm going to assume it's like most Windows laptops and somehow only lasts 3 hours.
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"Offensive trash" is a bit much, most organizations use it without too many issues. I think it's pretty good!
I prefer windows over others because I'm used to it, but "offensive trash" is pretty fitting with the direction they're going. Windows has been severily enshittified in the past few years. I remember the windows search bar used to work nicely, but nowadays it just shoves Bing into your face on the smallest of typos. My expectation on a search bar like this is that it gracefully handles minor typos or missing letters…
Call me a hater, but the problem is Windows, not necessarily the hardware. I get it they want to stop the MacBook Pro, but: Windows is slow for no reason; it collects everything it can about the user; takes screenshots of whatever the user is doing; has ads - even though you pay for the OS; drivers are still a mess; hardware is made by different companies and no actual proper integration like Apple does. I could go o…
> Call me a hater, but the problem is Windows, not necessarily the hardware. Thing is, MacOS was heading the same way until the new chips saved it. The last few versions that were still running on Intel shouldn't have been as slow as they were. Software is going to shit everywhere, it's just there's now M* equivalent for Windows and Intel. All that to say: yes, I think you're spot on, the problem is sowftware, not ha…
It's gotten to the point that I've switched to omarchy and somehow this tiling-only, arch based distro, with big changes every ~2 months is still more sensible and just gets out my way better than MacOS in early 2026.
Don't think Windows is unique in having their long-time users being unhappy with them. MacOS really isn't any different.