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Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

I very much wanted to hear about this and damn :-( Video playback must be hardware accelerated by now and be super efficient. Another worry was about low power sleep modes and waking up, and looks like it is not solved too. I might have to suck it up and buy the Mac for my needs after all. I have my trusty Linux desktop for all my big compute needs. I was hoping to make the mobile machine also run Linux, but the specific needs there (crisp display, nice battery life, Linux friendliness) seems to be an elusive goal.

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It's still a real pain to get hardware accelerated video in a browser on Linux. Google is still outright refusing to support it in chromium, even though they do support it inside Chrome OS. There are few community patches floating around if you're willing to roll your own chromium to enable to Chrome OS hardware decode pathways on generic Linux.

You can mostly get it working on Firefox if you play around with the config options, but it only works with AMD and Intel GPUs (anything supporting vaapi).

Really? I’m pretty sure chromium has decent VAAPI support.

Oh! Looks like they finally started adding official support last summer (June 2021). It still appears disabled by default though.

As a heads up they fixed the intel xe graphics sandboxing issue in firefox 96. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1698778 It works great on my Framework with NixOS. My about:config settings (taken from my home-manager):

graphics = { "media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled" = true; "media.rdd-ffmpeg.enabled" = true; "media.navigator.medidataencoder_vpx_enabled" = true; };

The M1 MacBook Air honestly feels so far ahead of any other laptop I've used that it's not even funny. Fanless, powerful, absolutely bonkers battery life.

M1 + Nix is ideal, IMO.

You have Nix running on M1?

Nix is the package manager, NixOS is the OS.

https://nix.dev/tutorials/install-nix#macos

I’m very happy with purism’s librem 14 but the display is not as nice as frameworks.

* crisp display

* nice battery life

* Linux friendliness

Not elusive at all, you can find an M1 MacBook Pro at any Apple, Best Buy, or Costco store.

M1 are not Linux-friendly at all.

Run it in a VM. Works fine.

This is like responding "well you can make the civic look like a sports car, that should cover you!" when someone says "I want to drive fast".

There's some concerns about paravirtualized GPU performance, but the equivalent of "sports car" (workstation/server-like workloads) runs in VMs in cloud providers all the time.

I can run a Linux vm emulating x64 or aarch64 right now on M1…

Not to mention zsh is the login shell out of the box…

It’s more flexible that WSL2 in my opinion

See https://github.com/lima-vm/lima for a very friendly QEMU wrapper running on M1

You can't even run unsigned apps on your M1. There is linux support slowly coming thanks to the fine folks on Asahi, but it is very pre-beta.

I can run a Linux vm emulating x64 or aarch64 right now on M1…

It’s more flexible that WSL2 in my opinion

See https://github.com/lima-vm/lima for a very friendly QEMU wrapper

I can write a program and send it to my friend - and they can actually run it - without me paying $99/year to Apple.

Try that on your M1.

You can run unsigned software on an M1 Mac, clicking “run anyway” isn’t that hard lol

That is untrue for native arm apps. The OS actually requires signing. If you are running an x86 app through Rosetta you can currently avoid code signing requirement.

https://eclecticlight.co/2020/08/22/apple-silicon-macs-will-...

What’s the big deal? They don’t require it to be notarized. You can self-sign.

Quite frankly no one should be running unsigned binaries regardless of OS or architecture.

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