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Comment by RomeoDelta | Hacker News Reader

I am no Apple fanatic. I'm a die-hard Linux user and open source proponent. I wouldn't touch the M1 with a thirty-nine and a half foot pole.

But with all that said... I kind of like articles like these. I enjoy seeing people happy with good tech because I like good tech. It pleases me that there are people getting this much enjoyment out of innovative and (I'll admit it) quite impressive hardware. So rock on, Apple fans. But when there's a Linux computer that is even a bit better, I hope you can tolerate me shouting from the rooftops, because you bet I will be!

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The world is a better place when someone can disagree with another's opinion, and yet still take pleasure in their happiness.

I feel the same and hope that moment will come in about 1.5y zen4 5nm ddr5 64gb ecc 2tb nvme linux laptop ..without having to trade my body parts to buy it :)

Sounds awesome! Can you share what type of laptop are you using?

Right now it,s an xmg which is a seller of clevo probably i will remain with that because I can change parts without voiding warranty , my reseller leave me add rm and hdd of my choice after the sale, i can buy without hdd and ram.. aalso have swappable battery and even if touchpad may not be apple quality i usually use mouse or trackball , but with the next I'll take a look at what Lenovo, hp dell etc will offer by that time , about linux compatibility and drivers.. I'm quite sure is improving every year.. except for macbooks ;)

Are you seriously comparing a gaming XMG Clevo laptop (I looked up the Clevo NH57ADS) that has been designed for the gaming crowd, that requires a 230W external power supply in a maxed out configuration, that is nearly 3x heavier and 3x thicker than a 13" MacBook Air ultraportable, more than 2.5x heavier and 2x thicker than a 13" MacBook Pro? I could not quickly find stats on the battery life for the latest and greatest Clevo NH57ADS, but – since they use a desktop CPU in it – I do not expect it to be that great.

If I were to apply your logic, I could then declare that my POWER9 2U blade is a portable device ahem laptop (technically, I can carry it around as well as keep the blade on my laps, yes) that surpasses any other known laptop in terms of hardware configurability, and Linux compatibility will be even greater, too.

Thanks, I'll have a look!

I hope you get to experience that! My worst computer recently has been a Thinkpad running Linux, basic things like suspending the laptop when it closes just never work properly.

But I'm sure the year of Linux on the desktop will come one day.

I have been using Linux for a little over 20 years. I remarked a the start it did not sleep when it closed. My current laptop is also Linux and it still does not always sleep when I close it. I need to get up to speed on BSD or something.

On Ubuntu:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/logind.conf

Looking for HandleLidSwitch, options are lock, hibernate, poweroff (might be more that I am unaware of)

The biggest culprit for suspend issues are GPU drivers. Unfortunately, all the options suck.

Both nVidia and the AMD have buggy Linux drivers, especially regarding suspend issues.

After experiencing suspend issues with the closed-source nVidia drivers, I bought an all AMD laptop (Dell G5 SE), only to deal with even buggier open-source AMD drivers.

The Intel drivers just work, but Intel integrated GPUs are painfully slow, and using the integrated GPU makes the CPU run noticeably hotter.

That said, AMD drivers are getting more stable over time, and buying AMD is probably our best chance of improving the driver situation long-term.

The linux desktop has mostly arrived-- it's just we all switched from desktops to laptops a while ago.

I'm not experienced with thinkpad but I do have some laptops and desktop and in all of those suspension and hibernation works, require swap but even with zfs raid over luks layer with zil on pcie mounted optane on old ubuntu 18.04 things worked.. but i agree that on some hardware linux sometimes need patience :( hope that will change.. but probably to change linux need more love from desktop users ..

What distro? I've run Arch Linux on a ThinkPad, and suspend-on-lid-close worked perfectly out of the box.

Well at least on Linux someone has a chance at debugging the problem and devising a solution.

Technically you’re correct, your comment just begs the question: if it’s so easy to fix why hasn’t it been done?

The answer is probably because to make things like sleep on lid close work, you’re probably going to need to know more about the hardware than manufacturers are going to make public.

It won't get better than this,

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

https://chromeos.dev/en/linux

Unless the fragmented desktop communities finally decide what the whole stack should be like, for users and desktop developers.

> It won't get better than this,

Microsoft don't let you access perf_event, which immediately makes it useless for me for example.

It's not really fragmentation as much as there not being being a billion dollar company making the stack actually work in the first place - if Apple decided to rebase onto Linux for some reason there's nothing stopping them getting everything shipshape just that it takes a lot of time and money. The vast majority of Linux boxes distro's are probably pareto distributed so 20-80 to make up a random number. The stack isn't that sparse.

If Linux decided to switch to a different license, like say a BSD-style that would allow Apple to do the things they want to do commercially, then Apple might consider that option.

However, the probability that Linux will switch to a license that is sufficiently Apple-friendly is precisely as likely as Apple switching the core of their OS over to Linux.

In other words, approximately 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000%.

I said "for some reason" to indicate that Apple would never do this, not least because of NIH.

Apple will never bother again with GPL software, while Google would rather migrate everyone to Fuchsia if they could, IBM is focused on making Linux a good citizen for cloud and mainframe computing, Oracle just wants to make it run their database stack, so that leaves out Microsoft, in what concerns billion dollar companies that would care to do that.

That has nothing to do with what I said.

Sure it has, Apple has no reason to adopt Linux on their consumer devices, in fact they are slowly moving away from POSIX, e.g. new networking stack.

And then I gave the list of the companies with very deep pockets that have any reason to ever bother having a Desktop Linux of some form.

Which Thinkpad and which distro? I've always found them reliable, but I've only used ones from about 2012 and have stuck with Ubuntu.

I'm definitely watching the space. Similar to how auto manufacturers are now all pivoting hard to electric following the insane tear of Tesla, I hope that this lights a fire under other computer hardware manufacturers.

And the signs are there. Windows already has an arm64 build out, and Linux of course has dozens of projects working great on ARM.

The software is largely ready, and the industry tends to copy Apple, for better or for worse. In this case, I'd say for the better.

Are you keeping an eye on the Asahi Linux project or is the Apple hardware a non-starter?

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