Comment by yingw787 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yingw787 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Oh, don't get me wrong. Apple hardware from 2012-2015 was really great, and I recently reversed my decision to "upgrade" to a Dell XPS 15 w/ Ubuntu 18.04 in order to stick to my MacBook because it honestly wasn't an upgrade.

But I think Apple is coasting on its fundamentals and trying to monetize (cannibalize) a bunch of intangibles that led it to meteoric success in the first place, and that would worry me as an AAPL shareholder (I'm not one). At least in the field of package management, Linux is doing some pretty interesting things; 'snap' is pretty interesting: https://snapcraft.io/, so are AppImages: https://appimage.org/, and this is in addition to the regular updates to 'apt' or 'yum' that are officially supported by distros. Meanwhile, 'brew' still dominates the OSX landscape because Apple can't be bothered to create its own package manager. When was the last time Apple updated native UNIX-like tooling? I had heard it was around OS X Lion (basically when Steve Jobs died).

"Apple hardware from 2012-2015 was really great"

You didn't have your MacBook Pro spontaneously reboot because of the NVIDIA problem? I don't know if it was the driver or the hardware but it wasn't fun.

Hasn't happened to me. If it did, I might have switched completely already :-)

In fact that was why I returned the XPS 15, the OEM version of Ubuntu 18.04 (which did have correct sleep/hibernate behavior and worked well with the OEM battery) couldn't detect the NVIDIA Quadro P2000 card at all, which I wanted to run CUDA with. That persisted after about three factory resets, so I was like kthxbai.

This sort of thing is why I've resigned to just use WSL (after switching from Mac). Works well enough.

I'm still using my MacBook Pro from 2010, and I'm working on ways to mitigate the NVidia card rebooting at its worse it was 120 times a month, but I've managed to get it down to about 10 times a month.

Although IDEs seem to cause frequent reboots, but using Jupyter is far more stable.

I found this[0] fix when I last researched this problem for a client. It seemed to substantially reduce the problem. The only drawback is the need to re-run it after MacOS updates, but I don't think this functionality has been the target of any updates from Apple for some time anyway.

[0] https://github.com/julian-poidevin/MBPMid2010_GPUFix

...or troubles with SATA cables seemingly designed to break in the most subtle ways.

If that's the same issue I had, it was a defective nvidia chip. I went through 2 logicboards and I know several of my friends who had 2012 MBPs went through a few too.

We used to be an Apple shop, and we had a lot come in due to that issue.

The NVIDIA problems hit laptops from many manufacturers. I remember buying an HP TX 1000 with a faulty NVIDIA chip to try and reseat the GPU via heat (it didn't work but it was a cheap experiment)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ1i78kmb0M

Aren't snap and AppImages trying to do exactly what Mac OS app bundles have been doing for ages?

I think so, and I think Apple does a better job with macOS app bundles than Linux does with either snap or AppImages. In particular, I really like the macOS permissions design; snap upgrades in the background I think and compatibility issues broke some infra on my end, which was annoying.

But Linux has something like that now, and Apple has been staying still. It's not perfect, it's still fragmented, and a lot of fundamentals like fit+finish Linux will likely never get right. But it exists and it didn't exist before. And it's toyable/open-ish for the most part, so it'll last and won't change against your wishes without you being able to fork it or stay on an older version, and for professional users who devote a lot of time to their setup, software warts like that that I can whack with a stick without letting out the magic smoke in my computer are more bearable than things I can't fix and out of my control, like my keyboard not working because Apple likes thin laptops.

Not exactly. Snap is a container (like Doker for desktop apps). AppImage is almost like it, but it contains an executable header in addition to the FS image. DMG are pretty much just a glorified ISO image.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com