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Comment by somethoughts | Hacker News Reader

I think the key difference (hopefully) will be that there are a limited number of hardware configurations for Mac. Still a lot (i.e. 100+ SKUs) but not nearly the number of x86 hardware configurations (i.e 10000+)

Also presumably if Apple wants this to happen, they as a single vendor can provide a single definitive answer on what they are doing for each configuration. Eventually...

In the x86 world, there is Intel, AMD and like 50 different manufacturers each with a particular HW implementation/BIOS customization, leading to IntelAMDHardware_Vendor_customizations^50 permutations that'd need to be validated.

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The permutations don't really matter. If one machine has Broadcom wireless and Intel graphics and another has Qualcomm wireless and AMD graphics and they're both supported and then you come across one that has Broadcom wireless and AMD graphics, you already have the drivers for it.

The real trouble is that you get some wireless chip which isn't popular enough for anybody to reverse engineer it but the manufacturer didn't provide any documentation, so the driver for it sucks or doesn't exist.

There is plenty of well-supported hardware so the solution is, don't buy the bad one. But some poor sucker who already did and now they want to run Linux on it may have a bad time.

But power management is still ussually subpar(compared to Windows) even on the well supported ones.

I run a T14s with nixos. For me battery is never ever a problem, sure it runs out if I fall asleep and YouTube is autoplaying. But it lasts almost an entire workday in the couch, it's usbc powered so I can charge it a bit with my powerbank.

Just clearing some FUD if people consider Linux bad for everyday use, that's mostly shit if you run Wayland and like sharing your screen (Jitsi or obs+virtualcam works well too).

Edit: remember Android runs on the Linux kernel-ish

Because Linux drivers don't implement as many features as their Windows counterparts, sadly.

It’s been a while since I’be owned a MacBook, but the speakers sounded significantly worse on Linux (and if you own a MacBook you know they can sound pretty decent) because they are EQ’d in macOS, not the speaker firmware.

Never has there been any effort taken within Linux to apply a generalstic ‘small speaker EQ’ to anything with detected internal speakers.

Similarly, the Linux kernel by default is optimized for server style workloads (throughput) instead of smoothness. It would be so easy to check for an internal battery and if true apply a few kernel parameters so your laptop stays smooth under load.

Linux as a desktop (well, laptop) OS is terrible not because it is incapable of being great at it, but because people don’t seem to care for the death-by-a-thousand-cuts issues.

The asahi project is working on improving speaker support: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109914949041457536 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109917995005981968

There was even an article[0] about the sound of macbook speakers quite recently.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34935483

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