I'm on macOS High Sierra for the spontaneity. Every morning, I go to wake my Macbook Pro with two 4K USB-C connected displays and external keyboard and mouse. Will one display turn on? Both? Neither? Who knows!
For a ~$6k setup, it’s awful. It’d be awful for $1k. About 10 years ago, I had a Dell D830 running Fedora and later, early versions of Gnome shell. The dock powered the laptop and a mouse, keyboard, external drive, and two monitors. It was a single (albeit proprietary) connector, and the dock was fairly expensive (~$200 IIRC). It worked damn great, nearly every time, even with sleep States in Linux on a laptop 10 years ago.
Why is this suddenly harder than putting a Tesla on Mars? Why don’t we have good real wireless HD displays by now? The current state of affairs with Apple laptops and docking is just sad to me. I’m almost bothered enough by it to switch jobs to go there and work on fixing it.
What does this mean/how do you do it?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Display_Identificatio...
The usual problems were missing mode lines that were actually supported (and needed) and incorrect dimensions.
And what did we learn here?
That I should pay Apple $10k for my next MBP so these features can work?
If the problem is in fact lazy device manufacturers botching the identification data then I'm not sure how a third party could effectively work around the issue.
If I make two devices that report identical ID information there's no practical way for the OS to tell them apart.
Now that office suites are in the cloud along with music and everything else, I no longer see the draw of Apple hardware for a developer laptop.
Only thing left is someone willing to clean up the code and upstream it.
I like the touchpad on my X1 Carbon, but I never used a mac long enough to really adapt my workflow to all the touchpad gestures (I think on Linux you'll be happy with general usage/scrolling/etc, but stuff like pinch to zoom is still not widely supported).
Surprisingly, some Tk applications that I use irregularly actually work with HiDPI with Tk 8.6 (as in, they are scaled up with an integer scaling factor, and are sharp).
Multiple displays with different DPIs also work with Wayland (I have one 4k screen and a LoDPI display 90 degrees rotated). Though, there are some bugs with GNOME 2.26 on Wayland with HiDPI displays that are switched off and on again (e.g. some applications such as GNOME Terminal become blurry, they seem to be rendered at lower DPI and scaled up). I have reported some bugs and the gnome-shell/mutter developers are quite responsive.
The touchpads are fine too. I regularly bounce between a macbook and a T460, and I don't have any problems operating the latter.
Yoga 900's touchpad is way worse though, so if you really care, always check if you can try it first.
You want to look for windows precision touchpad support. Turns out the problem with windows touchpads was not the hardware, but the crappy drivers touchpad vendors make. Microsoft made their own drivers and if you can get hardware compatible with those you'll have a much nicer experience.
HiDPI is generally pretty decent although it's slightly annoying that different layers of the graphics stack (Xorg, GTK2, GTK3, etc.) have different mechanisms for tweaking the scaling but with a few evenings of work, I have everything dialed. A small price to pay for years of use to come. The Arch Linux wiki is super helpful for this.
Developer is not a synonim for UNIX programming.
The older hardware can be quite nice with linux, but my next notebook wont be a mac, not due to value for money (spec and built quality balance is actually quite good for price these days), but because all attempts to run linux or any OSS on the more recent models are a disaster.
If I was to buy right now my list is roughly in the order of:
- Dell XPS 13/15
- Razor Blade (It's getting official linux support soon)
- Librem 13/15
- One of the million and one thinkpad models although I have no idea which
Lucky for me I have a copy of all of it on my 2011 iMac hiding in my closet.
Most folks on my team have the same deal to differing amounts. We don’t use any special software.
2017 13" TouchBar MBP running 10.12.6
I’m assuming I’m an outlier because I see this in almost every thread that mentions MacBooks and I am real curious how it manifests.
Edit: reading further comments it sounds like possibly the monitors use the same edids? Wonder if you can check that easily.
I’ve almost always used Dell monitors fwiw.
You shouldn't be. This is an actual GIF from the Ars Technica review of High Sierra: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Sep-2...
I've had over the years a 2005 PowerBook G4, three 2010ish MacbookPros, a 2014 MacBook Air and a 2016 MacBook Pro. All have occasionally hung on a blank screen after lid open. The latest routinely forgets Dell screens (two identical ones at once) and I have to replug them.
Otherwise, no issues (except random kernel panics). Like brains, I'm astonished that they work at all, let alone work so well. Of course I'd like something bulletproof, but Apple doesn't seem to be able to make one.
Then there’s the case of it getting an ip from the docks ethernet.
And all of that is assuming the thing even wakes up.
1. Stopped using clamshell mode (laptop lid closed) and that has helped.
2. Downloaded the LG firmware update for the monitors. Updated both monitors, also seems much more reliable.
(10 day uptime, up from about the usual 12 hours)