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Comment by Shadonototra | Hacker News Reader

i find it very hard to suggest an intel/amd laptop nowadays now that M1 macbooks exist..

M1 is a league on its own, everything else is just tech junk at this point

M1 is overrated. I own MacBook Pro with M1 Max. It’s fast, but it’s not something that helps in day to day use. And ARM compatibility issues not really helping. Battery is not that amazing either. I spent 30 minutes in discord and battery was at 91%, 5 hours is not something unique. It’s good, fast and expensive laptop. But not something that I could call mind breaking.

Hmm, I have the air with m1, and my battery life is insane. Like 20 hours, even with a parallels vm running some of the time.

I do however have no idea what discord is. Isn’t it some kinda forum?

Also using safari when on battery doubles your life, fwiw.

Discord is like Slack, with video calls. I’m using Safari.

Slack has video calls… they’re Shite though ;)

> I do however have no idea what discord is. Isn’t it some kinda forum?

Budding Slack competitor that started with a focus on gaming. If you couldn't guess from the context of its eating battery like crazy, it's a webtech "application".

Discord in particular is a horrible battery hog—we used it a lot over the worst stretches of the pandemic in my social group, and it was constantly killing laptop batteries that could reasonably last 8+ hours, in like 3 hours flat. I've always had to avoid Electron (and leaving enormous web-apps open all the time, like Gmail) and use Safari to achieve (or sometimes exceed—they're relatively conservative about it) Apple's battery life claims. Unfortunately, a handful of common programs seem to be the equivalent of having your computer to find more digits of Pi constantly, on all cores, while what they're actually doing justifies maybe 10% of their actual power use. Mostly, it's webshit doing it.

My regular M1 MBP is comfortably managing 18 hours of normal use (non-video browser and terminal) or 12ish hours of more intensive use (video and Slack). Sounds like putting the M1 Max in a laptop form factor is a bit of a waste, as I've never even strained the base level processor.

Try the Discord PTB which is native to M1. https://discord.com/api/download/ptb?platform=osx

> And ARM compatibility issues not really helping

There were two things I wanted to try on my MBP w/ M1 - compiling an Android app that has some C code, and also to run Fidelity's Active Trader Pro program (not that I would use it that actively). I also installed the Rosetta stuff it prompted for.

The Active Trader Pro program would not run.

In Android Studio, the production version can not compile with CMake as it can on Intel-based Macs yet ( https://github.com/android/ndk/issues/1299 ). They say there is stuff in the beta/alpha/canary branches where it is working, but I am not in a rush and will wait for that to make its way into production.

> It’s good, fast

Yes, I did see the speed, especially with a normal Kotlin/Java Android Studio compile, on 16GB RAM.

Now using a Macbook Pro with the M1 Pro chip with 16gigs of RAM for fullstack development. Best laptop I've ever used (that coming from a linux aficionado). Battery life is about 10 hours with Chrome, qutebrowser, Slack, Apple Music, Ruby and node processes for coding, and Neovim. Laptop basically never stutters or freezes. Screen, keyboard, speaker, mic, camera are all on-point.

My only complaint is that the window manager I use (Yabai) is acting buggy, and I miss i3wm.

There are still zero Apple laptops with touch/pen displays. M1 gives good performance per watt, but at the same time my computer's longevity has been more than enough for probably a decade now; as long as I get a good solid 10 hours on a single charge, that might as well be 20 hours because it'll be hooked up to my home monitors before too long. And yes, M1 performance is very good, but so are a lot of other machines out there, and most laptops today, even the slowest worst ones, are more than sufficient for the everyday computing needs of most people.

So the value of a amd/intel laptop is all the performance you need, all the battery life you need, and also you get extra features you'll never see on a Mac like pen and touch screen, plus compatibility with all of your games, programs, and hardware. That's not tech junk, imo.

Are you that guy who gives free M1s to those who can't afford it to reduce humanity's junk?

The macbook pro M1 is actually cheaper, at $1999, the precision 5500 is $2300

Obviously I was referring to 'everything else is just tech junk at this point'.

I'm very curious about counterpoint to this from a causal unix user perspective

The counterpoint would be that huge swathes of the public (myself included) despise using Mac OS for anything more serious than browsing, so that entire line of laptops would be dead to us.

The counter-point is it may be "unix" but it is not Linux and if you think it is, it will bite you in ways you don't expect (why does the sed command that works completely fine on Linux fails weirdly... oh because even though it is mostly the same sed except it is not really... it's the BSD sed from whenever Apple forked it).

The "package manager" brew is it's own thing because it is not first party, will never be and will conflict with your OS in unexpected ways when you least expect it.

And then, it's not even amd64. So, if you use docker for example, you have to remember to cross build for linux/amd64 if you are deploying to an amd64 server, which is much more likely than you deploying to arm64... and then, you have to run an emulated VM in the background for this purpose.

Do you rely on specific software/libraries? Well, you may read that it is supported now for M1, but you don't really know what bits aren't supported... and you may find that the hard way.

Does it run Linux?

First of all, Desktop linux barely works on the hardware it is designed to work on.

Let's say that because of some miracle, Linux becomes usable on M1 macs... and people start buying M1 macs to run Linux, Apple will have incentive to lock the bootloader (which they don't currently do) so that people are forced to run macOS only... because their profits does not come from the hardware itself but the "ecosystem" (a.k.a. vendor-lock-in) they have built around it.

> First of all, Desktop linux barely works on the hardware it is designed to work on.

Huh. I have been running linux on laptops for years and I don't even pick my laptops to run linux spefically. My last laptop was a surface pro and Linux ran with 0 issues and that is pretty esotoric hardware in the laptop space.

> Let's say that because of some miracle, Linux becomes usable on M1 macs...

The release of the first version of Linux on M1 mac is weeks away. With the only major things not working beeing the GPU and bluetooth.

> and people start buying M1 macs to run Linux, Apple will have incentive to lock the bootloader (which they don't currently do) so that people are forced to run macOS only... because their profits does not come from the hardware itself but the "ecosystem" (a.k.a. vendor-lock-in) they have built around it.

I don't follow this logic. Why would Apple first create more work for them to unlock the bootloader and build ways to load other Operating Systems to then take it back? Like do you think Apple likes to pay their engineers to play a prank on the Linux community? Or how do you envision this happened.

> I have been running linux on laptops for years and I don't even pick my laptops to run linux spefically.

That is very surprising to me because I have owned 8 computers in the last 18 years; I have tried to run desktop Linux on all of them and I have yet to have an experience where I haven't had wide variety of issues with all of them. I have also yet to meet anyone who is happy with running Linux on their computers, even those whose preferred desktop operating system is Linux (as is mine). The people I know were the happiest are those who ran it under Virtualbox as their main OS for work (while running the Virtualbox itself on macOS or Windows obviously) because then they only have to worry about it working on Virtualbox and even then they encounter issues all the time.

> My last laptop was a surface pro and Linux ran with 0 issues and that is pretty esotoric hardware in the laptop space.

Then, you are probably the luckiest desktop linux user to ever exist. Cherish it while it lasts.

>The release of the first version of Linux on M1 mac is weeks away.

I assume it is just like how the year of the linux desktop has been every year forever.

>With the only major things not working beeing the GPU and bluetooth.

These have been issues on desktop Linux forever throughout all these years. If you think it will be suddenly fixed on a completely new platform that came out last year, I can only tell you that you will need to be prepared for disappointment. I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't work without major problems in any platform in 2042.

>Why would Apple first create more work for them to unlock the bootloader

It doesn't take more work to unlock the bootloader. They don't lock it because they don't expect anyone to be able to make anything else work... so having it locked would make them look bad without the benefits. If people do manage to make other operating systems work, their cost/benefit equation will change significantly and they will take steps to block it.

>play a prank on the Linux community?

Why do you think people working at Apple would even consider that Linux community is somehow remotely relevant to their business?

> I have also yet to meet anyone who is happy with running Linux on their computers, even those whose preferred desktop operating system is Linux (as is mine). The people I know were the happiest are those who ran it under Virtualbox as their main OS for work (while running the Virtualbox itself on macOS or Windows obviously) because then they only have to worry about it working on Virtualbox and even then they encounter issues all the time.

And yet there are millions of people that do run linux and like it (using virtual box to run linux is like licking lolipos covered with plastic). Sure there are sometimes issues, but in 90% of time it is for new hardware (and that is reduced nowadays - e.g. intel sends patches to kernel ahead of time) and my play with compiling new kernel versions :)

It is not a system for grannies (unless it was setup by someone else at the beginning - then it can be, I saw it used like one) - it is mostly system for powerusers, those that don't need to push alt/opt to show a hidden menu option.

it doesn't matter, it has a native unix environment

i live in the terminal most of the time for my dev tasks, i even have a tilling window manager

for everything else, i am glad macOS exists, applications are great, i get to use iOS apps too and everything is consistent and snappy, it stays cool, quiet, it never throttle on battery, things compiler super quick, and battery lasts super long

laptop? apple won, i wouldn't put anything else on the podium

macos is specifically dumbed down for normal users, that don't want to be forced to see something complicated.

Can it run xmonad?

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