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Comment by alex_smart | Hacker News Reader

>I honestly don't understand why devs use MacOS over Linux

I turn the lid down on my laptop and it goes to sleep. It pull it up and the system comes back up. Reliably. Every single time.

I guess that narrows my choices down to Windows and MacOS. Between them I find it much harder to choose, but Macs just have a solid lead on the hardware front for now. The M1/M2 chips are just chef's kiss. And I don't know why most Windows laptops come with such junk webcams.

Edit: I almost forgot! Linux still doesn't have hardware accelerated video playback on browsers. How can anybody recommend using linux on their laptop despite this is beyond me. Is this a joke? Like do you guys just always keep your laptops plugged in all day? Why not just get a desktop at that point?

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>I turn the lid down on my laptop and it goes to sleep. It pull it up and the system comes back up. Reliably. Every single time.

So does my laptop. And my sister's laptop; and my father's laptop; and my cousin's laptop; you see where I'm going.

>Linux still doesn't have hardware accelerated video playback on browsers.

I don't know about Chromium, but Firefox has.

>Like do you guys just always keep your laptops plugged in all day?

No, because I installed Linux its battery now last longer than on Windows.

> I turn the lid down on my laptop and it goes to sleep. It pull it up and the system comes back up. Reliably. Every single time.

It's not the case for my M1 MBP. Having it connected to an external USB C/Thunderbolt monitor makes it simply refuse to sleep, even when clicking on the Sleep button, closing the lid, etc. Even outside of that it's a crapshoot if simply closing the lid when on battery power will actually make it sleep, or i will realise on Monday it never slept.

I have a 16" M1 MBP. Never had this issue. Connected to a OWC TB4 dock with 2 monitors. I have to use Amphetamine to keep it from going to sleep.

Undocking/docking works fine. Perhaps you have some process running that is preventing sleep.

In your Battery settings, do you have “Wake for network access” set to “Only on Power Adapter” or “Never”? If it’s on “Always”, your laptop could just be getting woken up frequently.

Thanks! It's set to never, and is one of the two things that are the only recommendations to fix this problem, but neither did the trick.

> Linux still doesn't have hardware accelerated video playback on browsers.

Yes it does.

Windows doesn't sleep well. Starts to spin up fans randomly in backpack, battery drains.

I don't even know what hardware accelerated video playback in a browser is. I've gotten along fine without it. I do keep my laptop plugged in all day. I don't get a desktop because a couple days a week I unplug it to drive to the office where I plug it in again. Rarely close the lid unless I'm about to put in in it's case and take it somewhere.

> I don't even know what hardware accelerated video playback in a browser is

It means that your browser uses the dedicated video card for rendering video frames and pushing it to your monitor instead of using the CPU.

Why you would want this? The same reason you use a straight-edge to draw a line and a compass to draw a circle. The right tool for the job. I'm sure most people here would have had the experience of the first time training their machine learning model on a GPU instead of the CPU and having their jaw drop at how much faster it was? GPUs are simply much better than CPUs at the things they are designed for. Sure, most CPUs are still powerful enough to push 1080p videos to the screen, but that comes at the cost of poor performance and battery life.

I do have hardware accelerated video playback on Firefox on Linux.

AFAIK it's easier to set up on Wayland, but I have it working on X.

edit:

Maybe I'm super lucky, but I rarely had problems with suspend on Linux. Having said that I prefer no suspend on closing the lid, and AFAIK that's not an option on MacOS.

Pretty sure it's an option if you have an external monitor attached. If not, why would you close your laptop if not to turn it off?

I sometimes find it more convenient to carry a laptop to the meeting room or to a separate teleconferencing space (or even to the couch at home) with the lid closed.

Especially if I'm also carrying something in my other hand.

And what is the problem with doing that? The system comes back up when you reopen the lid nearly instantly anyways?

This assumes that you don't have stuff you would rather leave running in the background. Like compiling, or keeping an ssh session alive.

I at least sometimes see coworkers walking around with open laptops, which looks inconcenient. I am sure they have their reason for not closing the lid.

It does, but it still requires unlocking the session on resume, which is a minor inconvenience if you're just moving to a neighbouring room with a coffee cup in your other hand. Slightly more importantly, sometimes it's also convenient to keep network connections open, e.g. for ssh sessions.

Those aren't really problems, but it can be a minor matter of convenience, and I've set both my work and personal laptops to not suspend when the lid is closed.

I'm not saying that's in any way a better idea than keeping the typical default, and I have absolutely no opinion on what anybody else should do.

FWIW, I also don't care whether macOS gives an option for not triggering sleep when closing the lid, which was the original matter. But I don't agree that there's no reason to close the lid except for suspending.

>I do have hardware accelerated video playback on Firefox on Linux.

How much time did you have to spend fiddling with your config to get it working? Does it work reliably? Last I checked, it wasn't even possible with an NVIDIA card.

>Having said that I prefer no suspend on closing the lid, and AFAIK that's not an option on MacOS.

Yes it is.

> How much time did you have to spend fiddling with your config to get it working? Does it work reliably? Last I checked, it wasn't even possible with an NVIDIA card

Max an hour. It's an Intel GPU on a cheapo netbook (hence the need to make it as efficient as possible). Arch wiki is quite decent for this kind of stuff.

I don't know about NVIDIA, I didn't own one since a long time.

> I turn the lid down on my laptop and it goes to sleep. It pull it up and the system comes back up. Reliably. Every single time.

This is exactly how my Librem 15 works with Linux and Qubes OS.

> I turn the lid down on my laptop and it goes to sleep. It pull it up and the system comes back up. Reliably. Every single time.

Linux does that on my laptop. In fact, I just close the lid, put it in his bag, and forget about it.

The battery does last about 6 hours of coding and browsing. It's not 12 hours like the Apples, but it has been enough for my writing sessions.

I do agree about the junk webcam :/

I have been using linux since 2008. Have installed and used it on at least a dozen laptops in the time. The number of times I have not faced any battery or suspend related issues is, well, zero.

I have been that guy who loved to customize every last ounce of the user facing experience of my system. (I still spend most of my time inside of Emacs irrespective of which OS I'm on.) I had a dotconfig folder that I used to carry around to different machines and it's fun and all that. But I'm no longer a student, I simply can not justify spending time tinkering around trying to get the basics working. Bad battery life is a deal breaker. Unreliable suspend is a deal breaker. No, I will not spend a minute trying to get it working. I would rather just run linux on virtualbox or, more recently, use Windows + WSL or a Mac.

>The battery does last about 6 hours of coding and browsing.

And does hardware accelerated video playback work on the browser?

> I have been using linux since 2008. Have installed and used it on at least a dozen laptops in the time. The number of times I have not faced any battery or suspend related issues is, well, zero.

This works with my current HP Spectre x360, I don't remember it ever working in any of the previous laptops.

> And does hardware accelerated video playback work on the browser?

I think the answer is not, as I notice about 6-8% of CPU load when watching videos in the browser.

That also eliminates windows. If I did that with my dell laptop and put in in my bag the battery would be drained and fans running on full blast very quickly.

It hasn't been my experience so far with windows.

On every single windows or mac laptop, I just seem to the same peace of mind I have come to expect from smartphones. Click, system goes to sleep. Click, system is up.

On linux, every time I approach the laptop, it is with that small but unshakable feeling of dread. What is my laptop going to do this time? Will it decide to come up with the same state I left it in? Or will it decide this is a good time to reboot?

even windows laptops are inconsistent with sleep working. how is this not enforced at a hardware level? randomly turning on and generating heat while inside a backpack seems like something that could physically damage the laptop.

LTT recently did a video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHKKcd3sx2c

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