Comment by pfranz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pfranz | Hacker News Reader

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It sounds like you have a hardware problem with your Mac. Time Machine and wake from sleep could be signs of bad RAM...maybe the audio problem, too. Or maybe the extra stuff your work installs? In my experience (for all platforms) that software is low-level and of dubious quality.

OTOH, as long as your hardware is decently supported, I haven't really had fundamental complaints about desktop Linux in the 10+ years I've used it full time. It sounds like for certain laptops there has been good support for a couple years.

Typically, I'll get about 30-100 days of uptime on my mac laptops (usually a software update or installing a kernel extension). On my Linux desktop or server it'll be closer 100-300 days (again, usually kernel patches). Working with OpenGL heavy software, once or more a year there will be a bad combination of Nvidia drivers and kernel that could cause your desktop to crash during certain operations.

The audio issue only happened to me on one copy, but the wake from sleep and TM issues have happened on multiple MacBook Pros, both with & without the work bloatware. I'm inclined to blame those on bugs in macOS.

Are you using it in clamshell mode? Where you keep the lid closed and use an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse (you mentioned mbp and macbook air in your post). If so, I have heard about multiple problems like sleep/wake and cooling issues across multiple models and multiple OS releases. That is a specific use case I've heard avid mac users complain about over the years.

I did encounter corrupted Time Machine backups when I set up my own network Time Machine Server in Linux (using netatalk). When my laptop would go to sleep in the middle of a backup over wifi the whole backup would get corrupted. I haven't had that problem since I switched to using Synology as a network Time Machine server (I never had it happen when using a USB Time Machine backup, either). I've never used a Time Capsule.

> could be signs of bad RAM

Well, they can just open it up and cha-... I hope it's an older model.

Sadly, comparable PC laptops are following the same trend. (this could be like the headphone jack, where Apple leads the way and others follow even if consumers aren't happy). The other week I was looking at alternatives to a 13" MacbookPro that were known to run Linux well. My shortlist was a Dell XPS 13 and a Razer Blade Stealth--both have soldered on RAM (I was also looking at Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga and Dell Precision 7xxx, but I never got far enough to see if they had replaceable memory).

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