M1 Pro and M1 Max MBP owners complain of crashes playing HDR YouTube videos

In the 90s systems like OS/2 and NeXT were defined as "workstations" to make a distinction between the old lineage of personal computing platforms (like Win 9x and Mac OS running on typically budget hardware) from high end systems running typically multi-user systems (often literally mainframe OSs).

Post-90s and the "workstation" definition went away when NeXT became OS X and NT replaced the DOS-bootloaded Windows lineage; and dedicated workstation hardware became cost ineffective due to improvements in consumer hardware -- not least of all x86 (and later AMD64).

But in the 90s the distinction was real.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workstation

Any BSOD in Windows is a kernel panic. Most of the BSODs I recall were directly down Windows getting itself into a state that it couldn't recover from. Like IRQ errors, memory errors, etc. And it was often very easy for an application to force a BSOD. I remember this well as someone learning Win32 APIs "by experimentation".

Also to say you "it wasn't impossible to break 9x by using a lot of resources" but that is a huge understatement. Even today tou can still break modern operating systems by using too many resources and they have far better protections (OOM killer, smarter paging and stored on media with orders of magnitude higher IOPS, multi-core CPUs that offer true parallelism of operations, etc). 9x, on the other hand, had very little to protect you in that regard. I couldn't even estimate the number of times I've hit ctrl+alt+del on Windows 9x, preying there is enough capacity for the OS to kick in the task manager[2], which back then would also suspend all operations of other applications, thus allowing me to manually terminate whatever processes were causing Windows to grind to a halt.

As an aside, it was also possible for applications to hide themselves from task manager too. I had great fun playing around with writing a remote administration tool for college (sadly not for "official" purposes...) so figured out a number of tricks in 95 to work around user permissions, task management, and so on and so forth. Basically 9x was a playground where running applications could pretty much do whatever they wanted.

[1] https://telcontar.net/store/archive/CrashGallery/images/cras...

[2] https://telcontar.net/store/archive/CrashGallery/images/cras...

I don't know about you but I wasn't running Internet Explorer on 386BSD in the mid 90s. :P I do get your point -- I honestly do -- and it is a well formed one too. Unfortunately you're missing the context of the conversation by listing all these workstations. Instability of the main personal computing platforms was a real thing. Listing niche platforms and workstations doesn't change the everyday trauma that the majority of desktop users faced.

> Also, there is nothing special about a "server operating systems," it's just another application. Reliability came from hardware and OS isolation, which costs more.

You second sentence contradicts your first sentence. In fact your second sentence basically agrees with an earlier point I'm making despite it being prefixed by a sentence that reads like you're trying to disagree with it.

> Too costly for end-users in the 80s, reasonable for those who cared by the mid-90s. Which is what my original comment said.

I think you're overestimating the budget most households had in the mid-90s. And definitely overestimating the capabilities of most desktop users. In 1995 I wasn't even running an Intel CPU, instead having cheap knock off that lacked a number of features (it might have been Cyrix but I'm not 100% sure). Let alone a workstation.

Your post is very typical of the "you could just..." meme on HN where a comment starts out making a claim that something is easy and then goes on to list something that is very much specialised tech and well outside the realm of "easy" for your average user.

> NT, OS/2, 386BSD... all from the 90s, Q.E.D.

As were BeOS, NeXT and plenty of others. And in fact I personally did run BeOS, Linux, (amongst others) in the late 90s -- when I eventually replaced the Intel-clone with a workstation class board (and it was a fantastic bit of hardware too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 ). But my point wasn't that no stable platforms existed -- obviously they did. The point was instability was a common pain for personal computing in the 90s. Even with BeOS and Linux installed I still found I needed to drop back to Windows regularly for specific tasks and I'm in the top 1% of technically capable users. So imagine what the other 99% were stuck with.

This is where you're talking cross purposes. You're making a point nobody technically disagrees with but equally nobody was technically discussing either. You're making an academic point that doesn't contradict the spirit of the conversation.

There's a few caveats:

* Sound works fine in general, but might be a bit buggy with Bluetooth. If you encounter any issues, installing Pipewire reportedly solves most of them.

* External monitors works fine, as long as you don't mix HiDPI and LoDPI at the same time. In the future, Wayland should fix this.

* HiDPI mostly works, but still requires some config tweaks for a handful of apps.

* Suspend/resume still sucks, mainly due to buggy nVidia/AMD graphics drivers. Only the Intel GPU drivers suspend reliably in my experience.

* WiFi works flawlessly, especially if you're using the Intel WiFi hardware, which is very common on laptops.

* Printing works fine except with Windows-only printers, but they are pretty rare.

* Distros don't really matter that much, but you'd might need to update your kernel if you use an LTS distro with newish hardware. The Ubuntu based distros, e.g. Mint/Ubuntu/Pop!_OS are good options and have the largest user base, so it's easiest to find solutions if you encounter any issue.

* If you just want to test hardware compatibility, I recommend trying Ubuntu 21.10 on a USB stick.

* You'd might want to look at /r/linuxhardware [1] for specific hardware recommendations for your needs. You can also look at the Ubuntu Certified Hardware [2]

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/

2. https://ubuntu.com/certified