KDE runs on the Apple M2 with full GPU acceleration
vt.social
vt.social
Anyone have an idea how soon we should expect GPU support to be in mainline?
Raw performance per watt, and per weight/dimensions is best in class. For pure performance (e.g. an Asus ROG Zephyrus) or lightness (e.g. LG Gram) there are better options, but if you want all three it's hard to beat.
I personally think the hardware is so good, even with the caveats, but the software so bad that I'm honestly tempted to get an Air for portability or a Pro as a daily driver when Asahi Linux is good enough for me and the prices are right (so some sale or something, sticker prices are ridiculous if you max everything, and you kind of have to due to the impossibility of upgrades).
But yes, it's difficult to find laptops as well-rounded as MacBooks are. Generally laptops will require you to make significant sacrifices in multiple categories to be good at one or two things, which is less true of MacBooks (particularly the 14"/16" Pro models), especially if you want good performance without the laptop being huge and bulky and/or have horrible battery life with constantly-screaming fans. The 14"/16" models get you performance in the ballpark of a desktop Ryzen 5800X while unplugged and still getting great battery life while also being silent and still reasonably portable, along with a killer screen, great speakers, decent keyboard and great trackpad.
Funny to read such an opposite opinion.
I don’t mind the pretty casing, but it’s icing on the cake.
The iMac 5k for me, almost a decade later, is still better than anything other vendors have to offer. It’s my childhood dream monitor. Such a shame that they never sold it separately.
The M series laptops seem like an inflection point as well. A fanless powerhouse with more than a day's work of battery life and best in class monitor and trackpad.
Well, they sold the controversial LG 5K, which was the same panel, but certainly not the same build quality. I've got one, and it's... fine, and for a very long time was literally the only 5K monitor you could buy, but for the price it is not a well-built piece of kit. (And the first two versions had weird bugs)
They now (nearly a decade later) finally sell a fully first-party one, which is very similar.
The Apple Studio Display certainly improves on it, but at ~$1600 it costs more than a midrange 24" iMac.
It's too bad that the iMac 5K didn't support Target Display Mode. Maybe Apple will bring it back someday along with a new 27" iMac.
Horrible peripherals, too. I guess you love them for the same reasons I hate them.
My first PC (~year 2000) came with Windows but I wanted to use some software that only existed for Unix at the time and I was used to work in Unix anyway, so I heard about Linux and installed it. Great, I got an OS I was used to and the software I needed for my project.
When finally I had to use Windows for work a couple of years later it took time to adapt and, even to this day, I just find it easier to use Linux. It's just a metter of what you are used to.
Last year I bought a MacBook, because of the M1, and I can't get used to the "weirdness" of MacOS, specially the keyboard and the window management. Every other machine I use (Linux, Windows or ChromeOS) uses the same keybindings but in MacOS the same software I use everywhere else (e.g. Chrome) has been forced to change the standard keybindings to something else and and it's even not configurable. Programs just don't implement stuff as C-c to copy and C-v to paste. Programs link that functionality to S-c and S-v, instead. WTF? This means there is no remapping of the keyboard that can fix this, since the software itself is broken.
For me, this makes the machine pretty unusable. I'm a keyboard guy and quite fast at it. But when I'm in MacOS I waste a lot of time finding the right keybindings even for switching Windows. Example: S-w to close a tab but C-TAB to switch tabs %~(
For what it's worth, long time Mac users feel that *nix desktops and Windows have the same kind of "weirdness" you describe here. The majority of modern macOS conventions can be traced back to the original 1985 Mac or the 5-10 years following its introduction.
I started on macOS but can switch between control schemes pretty fluidly these days, thanks to having regularly used all three major OSes for several years. That said I wish there were at least one Linux DE that cloned macOS conventions as faithfully as the rest have cloned Windows conventions (with the exception of GNOME, which is more like what you'd get if you turned iPadOS into a desktop OS with Windows keyboard shortcuts).
What I'm seeing is: close a tab -> cmd+w; copy something -> cmd+c; switch tab -> cmd+option+left/right arrow, switch window -> cmd + `
Personally I think CMD is more ergonomic but muscle memory trumps all I suppose
The issue is not which labels keys have printed on them. I don't look at my keyboards and I always remap keys for them to be in the positions I like. That's fine and works in MacOS.
The issue is that the same application (Chrome, for example, but happens with most of them) uses the same key combinations in Windows, Linux, Chrome OS and Android (I use DeX from time to time on my S7 Tab) to do something but then decides to do something different in MacOS _without giving the user the possibility to fix it_.
Chrome example: C-w closes a tab and C-TAB changes tab in the first four OSs. In MacOS, though, it's S-w and C-TAB, respectively. There is no remapping which can fix this because the correspondence between keymappings on a given modifier key is not a bijection. The only possibility would be that each program gave the user the option to "use standard keymappings". But very few do, AFAIK. Emacs is the only one that works the same on all systems. But I also need a browser ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I'm not saying that MacOS convention is worse or better than the standard. In fact, I personally like the idea of having the CTRL-like functionality on my thumbs, rather than my pinkies, and I could migrate to this layout on all computers I use (via key remaping, in the same way that I already have remapped on all computers I use the ESC key on the place that normally CAPS is). I'm just saying that using MacOS makes me slower, both when using MacOS itself _and_ when using the other OSs, since suddenly I have to conciously decide which key combo to use. Normally this was something that just happened subconciously and didn't interrupt my flow.
It used to be just a Mac thing, but when the OS became Unix, you suddenly had a GUI key (command) and a command line key (control). Which is great for mental split and flexibility.
You can have Ctrl-C to cancel and Cmd-C to copy on the same Terminal app.
And you get to use both command/option/shift + arrow keys along with readline/Emacs shortcuts on any native text input. So sweet.
I am still often frustrated with keyboard shortcuts, despite having installed a dedicated software to not feel in such an alien place. Sure there is a lot of muscle memory you can blame here. But how does it happens that the default OS doesn't provide the software option? Brew is nice, but here too it's community work filling the hole of the default.
I miss the home, end and del key on the integrated keyboard.
The only way to shutdown the integrated screen and still have the camera usable is to duplicate the screen and diminish brightness to zero. Or use a magnet. Seriously?
No key to show the contextual keyboard.
Where is my select and paste with middle click, outside iTerm2 (community provided)?
Why is there no straight forward way to browse the actual file path in Finder, when a shortcut allows to copy it? It's possibly the file manager that made me feel the most clueless in my life.
It is not like everything is utterly horrible, but I was very surprised at how frustrating it could be as a daily driver. I didn't discovered anything that I would miss from it when I go back on something as basic as a vanilla Gnome.
In Finder, selecting View > Show Path Bar will place a persistent path bar on each window. Additionally command clicking the proxy icon that appears when hovering over finder titlebars will open a path menu (and also works in any application with a proxy icon in its titlebar).
To go to a path, select Go > Go to Folder… or tap Command-Shift-G. This can be rebound to a more convenient shortcut in System (Preferences|Settings) > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts.
Command-Option-C will copy the path of the currently selected item to the clipboard.
I always find it interesting when people complain about keyboard shortcuts on macOS - but I feel exactly the same when I use anything else.
macOS keyboard shortcuts are amazing and os-wide. But they're not made obvious. Its really kinda snobbish that apple just assume you know them they treat it like 'because obviously youve used a mac forever'.
And don’t get me started on the way that OS inserts special keys. How do you insert ® on Windows? Alt-01whoCanRemember? On the Mac it’s usually something that makes sense like Option + R. Ç? Option-C. ƒ? You guessed it.
But remembering a the first mnemonic letter vs 4 random digits is indisputably easier.
No, of course. But the gap between linux and windows for that matter is really smaller, thus my surprise. All the more with the way Apple is marketed as so great in ergonomics.
>Keyboard shortcuts are mostly a pro user thing.
Sure, I would not use a Mac had my employer not provided it. Like many coders out there I guess. But Apple is not willing to pay attention to the adoption ease for this population it seems. Or at least, it doesn't feel like this to me.
>And don’t get me started on the way that OS inserts special keys. How do you insert ® on Windows?
I use a bépo layout everywhere, with it the answer is obvious. It comes out of the box in linux distros. Mac and Windows require third party installation. The Mac one is a bit less functional/buggy. The worst issue being that my IDE won't recognize the combination for underscore. It's more a responsibility of IDE producer here certainly. But still, it makes the Mac UX far less pleasant from a dev point of view.
Most web and mobile developers I know use Macs, by far. Windows development is targeted to enterprise custom software, in my experience. It pays handsomely, but no one seems crazy in love with the stack.
I don’t think Apple has to cater to users of other platforms specially when it considers its conventions superior.
Regarding bépo layout, dvorak is already a tiny niche. Bépo is a niche within a niche. I wouldn’t expect wide support anywhere really.
In the meanwhile, I wanted something that would let me focus on my work, not being distracted by basic key combination struggle every few inputs. Karabiner, which is community driven, led me to such a mostly OK situation here.
To me what is baffling is that Apple, with its ridiculously high revenue stream and all its marketing on great UX, is unable to provide that out of the box.
Can you describe what your use case for this is, because this complaint sounds truly bizarre to me. You want to use the webcam at the top of the laptop display, while not using the laptop display itself, but using a separate display (and thus presumably not looking anywhere near the webcam)? Are you pointing the webcam at something other than yourself?
> No key to show the contextual keyboard.
What do you mean by contextual keyboard?
> Where is my select and paste with middle click, outside iTerm2 (community provided)?
The first-party Terminal provides that feature, too. But the rest of the OS doesn't natively.
I meant contextual menu. The only way to open in it in a Mac arms seems to be to use the secondary mouse button.
My bad for the paste in the terminal. I moved to an other terminal for an other reason I can't remember right now. But yeah it is the middle click in general that I miss. To be fair, Windows doesn't provide it either.
What do you mean? They’re all there on apple extended keyboards and are accessible via fn key on laptops. I mostly use command/option arrow keys, which, along with shift are also an amazing Mac feature.
>The only way to shutdown the integrated screen and still have the camera usable is to duplicate the screen and diminish brightness to zero. Or use a magnet. Seriously?
I don’t know if I understand you but you can turn the screen off without sleeping in multiple ways, like keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-Shift-Eject) or assign a screen hot corner for the mouse.
> No key to show the contextual keyboard.
What?
>Where is my select and paste with middle click, outside iTerm2 (community provided)?
It’s not a thing. I use it for exposé. Sounds barbaric to select with the middle button pressed though. Your dexterity goes out the window.
>Why is there no straight forward way to browse the actual file path in Finder, when a shortcut allows to copy it?
There are a couple. Straightforward might mean accustomed to, tough in this context.
>It's possibly the file manager that made me feel the most clueless in my life. It is not like everything is utterly horrible, but I was very surprised at how frustrating it could be as a daily driver.
The Finder leads a double life. It inherited traits from both the classic Mac OS (spatial Finder) and the NeXT (column browser). And it shows. Both can be very powerful but their coexistence is confusing at first.
Incredible that these myths are being perpetuated by a Mac user. The fact is that at release, new Macs (including 68k and PPC) were always the most performant machines available in their class. Always. You could buy a cheaper x86, but it wasn't as powerful on that date. And the fact is, Mac prices were and are always within $100 of a feature-matched PC. The problem was consistently that PC consumers didn't want the included hardware features, wanted other features that weren't included, and translated that they could buy a much shittier PC for less as Macs being outrageously expensive. It was always bullshit. Ornery PC consumers were never Apple's market. Macs were and are the computer "for the rest of us." And, ironically, everything Apple designs gets copied poorly by Microsoft and PC manufacturers. Asahi is the inverse of Hackintosh. Both ideas are somewhat ridiculous. I want a Ford engine in my Chevy powered by tomato soup!
Not really. In 1999, the US government classified them as supercomputers and banned their export to over 50 countries. Apple tried to make hay of it, but almost immediately started lobbying to get the ban lifted. The last G4 tower was released in June 2003 and discontinued a year later and just got old by 2006 because Motorola already left AIM, and IBM wasn't delivering. Not Apple's fault, and the reason for the platform jump to Intel. But, again, at release, any of the high end G4 machines were faster than any consumer Intel tower, though 2003-2006 gave them plenty of time to catch up and pass the G4. The Mirrored Drive Doors 2003 dual 1.25GHz G4 was... is still a pretty sweet machine. It is still in use in Pro Tools studios because Digi equipment and plugins were expensive, and none of the PPC Digi components work on Intel. Try sourcing one. You'll be shocked what MDD 2003 DP sell for in 2022 at 18-19yo.
The G4s were overclocked for most of their life and stuck behind a 133mhz bus that choked the whole system. The MDDs you cite even gained the unaffectionate “Wind Tunnel” nick name. I hope whoever worked in Pro Tools with such machines had it running in a different room.
I remember a video studio still running a 68k Quadra that had some crazy expensive Avid board in 2001 or something, so I'm not surprised by high end equipment lasting a long time. Though I imagine you could emulate it on a laptop these days. Depending on 20yo hardware that ran really hot for most of its life it's not a recipe for peace of mind.
I was a huge enthusiast of 68k and the PPC and was devastated when Apple switched to Intel. Mediocrity won, I thought. Even though both architectures were much more interesting than x86, the reality of chip manufacturing is that scale is almost everything. Intel had it then, mobile phone chips have it now.
As I understand it, Apple uses a "system in a package" multi chip module that mounts RAM inside the same package as the main M1/M2 SoC.
Seems to work well in terms of memory bandwidth, unified memory architecture, and physical size, but it's hard to crack that SIP/MCM open to add more RAM.
And it's even harder to add RAM to an SoC die itself. And the GPU is integrated as well (although in theory one could connect an eGPU over Thunderbolt - assuming the driver issues could be sorted out somehow.)
Some old Macs from the 1990s included an external L2 cache SRAM slot. But cache RAM upgrades became impossible once the L2 cache was integrated on the CPU die.
And for storage that isn't on the SoC, it's just flash chips on the board so it shouldn't be much different cost wise to what the M.2 drive manufacturers are paying. Yet it costs considerably more.
So the options are extreme eye strain due to lights/sun/my own reflection, or extreme back pain due to having to sit like a prawn to hide the light from the laptop? I'd take slightly lower visual quality (doesn't matter in the slightest for what i do on a screen) over either of those.
But if I did, it would be cause apple has unmatched hardware build quality. (But also the battery time would as you mention also be a nice thing)
What else I could buy of similar weight/size/battery/quality?
Even if knew of an alternative, there are other unexpected perks to going with Apple: travel constantly, occasionally selling my old one and switching to a new machine is easy whereas with other brands would be impossible. Amortized cost is less than $1/day.
If this Asahi thing pans out (I'm guessing maybe in a year or two it won't use twice the battery) I'll immediately dual boot and spend the majority of my time in it. :)
ARM laptops from other brands are starting to pop up but they will take at least a year to catch up in terms of performance.
Right now, ThinkPad X13s runs Linux very decently, but it's less powerful than the M1.
In the US market it might be cheaper than M1 Mac Airs. In Europe it's 50% more expensive and customer support is poor.
> In Europe it's 50% more expensive
It's basically the same price in the UK. £84 more than an equivalent M1 Air on the Lenovo site right now.
Plus, the Snapdragon CPU in the X13s is still far from the M1 in regular benchmarks. Linux support is better in the X13s, except for the camera. It's an IR one, and this might never be well supported.
The best think I have found that runs Linux reasonably well (still with lots of caveats) is the X13s. And I cannot get a decent price.
With equally performing software, the one with the best performance per watt will be run cooler and longer.
The graph I sent is not raw performance, but performance per watt.
Because, as I said in the original post, even when Apple was selling Core 2 Duos, their cooling was better than most other manufacturers. I was often buying Macs to run Linux because of this.
Also see what the parent post says about performance per Watt, which mirrors my experience as a user. No current x86_64 machine is close to ARM if you want low heat.
People didn't liked ARM windows laptop, first because the performance was crap, then because the poor compatibility.
The 10W (MacBook Air) variant of the M1 achieves a median CPUMark score of ~14500. That's a lot better than the Intel CPU's 13453 at 29W. Now, if you limit the Intel CPU to a lower TDP by underclocking, the performance per watt can improve substantially (since the efficiency plummets when going for peak clock speeds), but it's still considerably behind the M1.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
I had one of those macbooks… very silent but the fan broke quite soon and to use it I had to limit the cpu frequency or it would overheat and shut down.
I take the noise over the sleek computer with the air intake and outtake placed in the same hole that overheats constantly.
The machine was completely unusable in the summer, the bottom would get scorching hot. I could NOT place it on my legs.
Essentially it comes down to that macs have great hardware but shitty software. The later which asahi fixes.
it runs forever and _fast_, the ergonomics are kick ass for my body dimensions (i mean, it's comfortable), and it's _silent_.
I bought my first MacBook just because of the M1 processor and /despite/ the OS, which is ok-ish but not my cup of tea. I'm looking forward to running Linux on it as my daily driver.
1. I prefer Mac hardware to any PC hardware (I don't know any manufacturers who come close to apple in hardware quality, so I don't think the "comparable PC" you cite even exists in reality).
2. I prefer to use Linux, since I'm more familiar with it, I'm more likely to be able to debug it when things go wrong (macOS Just Works more reliably, but when it doesn't, I'm stuck), and also I work on software that runs in prod on Linux and I don't want to deal with Docker for Mac.
3. While this is not yet the case, I think it's likely that someday Asahi will run better and more reliably on macs than mainstream distros run on PC laptops. The reason is that they only have one target (or, I suppose, one very closely related family of targets) whereas there are a pile of different PC vendors that are all subtly broken in different ways. I've _never_ seen a high-end PC laptop run Linux without tons of bugs and weird quirks; to get a solid Linux laptop experience, you seem to need to eschew discrete graphics cards and use a system that's a few years old at minimum.
If you're in Europe, you can also get the ThinkPad Z13 and Z16 (which are AMD-based laptops) with Fedora as well, and that should be coming to the North American Lenovo store soon (hopefully).
Lenovo works with Fedora to ensure that things work, and there's a nice process to make sure everything stays "good" with Fedora Linux on Lenovo hardware.
[1]: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/t...
I also have a thinkpad, and it gives me no end of issues, presumably largely due to the Nvidia GPU. There are also some weird non-GPU-related quirks; for example, charging over USB-C sporadically stops working (requiring an unplug and re-plug of the cable), especially when the battery is low.
- Scratch their own screens when lids are closed - Have failing LCD connectors (especially true with my 4k variant). - Flex terribly.
I bought an M2 Air recently, and it's a far better machine.
I guess it's why they make them of metal now… Less problems with bad design and using the user as a heat sink.
I think it's as close as it gets, but it's still nowhere near Apple. I'd love to see a premium non-Apple manufacturer.
Work gave me a DELL XPS 15, one of the worst laptops ever. 2 jobs, 2 XPS's, both 2 generations apart and both terrible plagued with issues.
i think the usb-c port is connected directly to the motherboard as well so i suppose i should be greatful that its only the cable that's been breaking. im going to sell this off soon and im pretty much done with lenovo for the foreseeable future
This is how I power my Xiaomi and Macbook laptops.
Not sure such a thing exists!
Apple is the best built laptop. No other brand even comes close.
Linux is the best OS. I have no idea how people can work on Windows, I think other people used to Linux will agree. OSX feels like a really old fork of Linux that has not kept up with the open source Linux.
GPU and display controller were initially expected to have large amount of changes, but this turned out not to be the case.
Amount of changes between M1->M1Pro/Max/Ultra and M1Pro/Max/Ultra->M2 is similar.
Edit: I've directly observed these on my machine, and it doesn't look to be an isolated incident. There is a video in [2] below.
[0] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253679057
[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252777347
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/u486mi/macbook_pro_1...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/oldbb9/mba_m1_cursor_g...
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/applehelp/comments/kfkuqi/is_there_...
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/r037h2/is_this_amount_...
[6] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-mini-m1-mouse-curso...
Never heard of these. Been using M1 for a year. I don’t think it’s worth taking seriously.
I had a choppy mouse at a certain point, but that was only with a bluetooth mouse. Bluetooth runs at a slower rate in any case, but I think it might have had to do with some interference.
The biggest change, IIRC, is that the M1 was based on the A12(?) but the M2 was based on the A14(?). So the CPU/GPU design was newer. They tweaked and improved other modules like the neural engine too.
So it wasn’t just clock speed, but to most end users it was just somewhat faster and more mature.
Nothing special/amazing/transformative.
That chip is also the reason for a lot of support emails I'm getting on Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/) because it seems to break DDC/CI and hardware brightness control stops working through cables and ports that use it.
[0] https://media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%20Sheets/MegaChips%20PDFs...
The flaw means that two malicious processes, already on the system, can potentially communicate without the OS being aware. Even though they already could through pipes, desktop icons, files, inter-process communication, screen grabbing each other, over the network, from a remote website, take your pick. Now, what are the odds of two malicious processes, being on a system, with a pre-agreed protocol for communication, going to need a weird processor bug to communicate over for? Absolutely nothing. It's not supposed to happen - but it's basically useless when you are twice-pwned already.
The other flaw that was found was that Pointer Authentication (PAC) could be defeated on the M1 with the PACMAN attack. However, PAC was actually an ARM standard added in ARMv8.4 that affects all ARMv8.4 implementers - the M1 just happens to be the most notable chip with that ARM version. Versions before ARMv8.4 didn't have PAC at all - so, even with that defeated, you aren't worse off than you were before ARMv8.4, so it's just a "sad, we tried, but oh well" thing from ARM's perspective.