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Comment by gigatexal | Hacker News Reader

Yup. Software is why I am on Linux on a thinkpad. It’s fast enough. And I control everything.

Personally, I switched to Asahi Linux on my M1. It’s becoming the perfect experience for me: Apple hardware with an OS without bloat.

(Yes, many things don’t work yet. For personal use it’s fine though)

I’ll never be overly critical of anyone’s computing choices, but this just seems like the worst of both worlds to me unless you specifically want to tinker with Apple-ARM Linux.

Why not Linux on much better supported hardware from Lenovo or Dell? It just doesn’t make sense to me to buy such an expensive computer only to remove a core part of the package, Mac OS.

> Why not Linux on much better supported hardware from Lenovo or Dell?

Specific Intel laptops aside, something doesn’t work for each of them either. These days sleep is a big issue with Linux on modern Intel laptops due to Windows Modern Standby. All in all, characterizing Asahi Linux as poorly supported is probably just based on some expectation that does not necessarily match reality. It runs very well and GPU is about the only thing that is missing. Plus, Linux on Macs has always had the advantage of having a big community focused on solving very standardized hardware issues. Once they work they work for everyone out of the box.

Because Lenovo, Dell don't make laptops as sleek as Apple's

I still ditched Apple though, I don't regret having traded battery life for compatibility. Arm64 remains a pain over 2 years later and for many years to come.

How much does sleekness actually matter day to day? Both vendors offer very nice hardware these days, it’s not the bad days mid-00s anymore.

I think you’d be surprised!

I have a Dell Workstation from work (Specifically a Linux supported one, whatever that means) using linux and my personal Macbook Air M1 is running Asahi Linux.

I really ran into no issues, the experience was almost scarily smooth. Everything just works. Sleep is definitely worse than on MacOS but it’s better than my Dell.

I can’t name a single thing that is not equally bad or worse on the Dell.

Fair enough, I wasn’t aware they’d made so much progress. I was under the impression it was still a proof of concept and people were glossing over a lot of issues.

I guess that’s the benefit of only having to target a very small amount of hardware, it saves time for improving other things.

I remember preferring Linux on PPC to Linux on intel laptops years ago. Apple PPC laptops tended to “just work” with Linux in my experience.

As soon as Asahi gets proper GPU support I'm installing linux and relegating macOS to a tiny partition for managing my iPhone.

I’m surprised there are still people out there using their Mac to manage their iPhone.

Is there a way on Linux to backup the photos to the computer without using a cloud service?

Yes! There is an OSS implementation of (parts of) the proprietary protocol for USB communication to iTunes so you can indeed get your photos. I say parts because some functionality is not implemented, like the offline backups feature.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IOS

Thanks for the link. Looks like I won't need macOS at all! :-)

Note though that with only one apple device, you won't have access to to icloud if your device is stolen or you get locked out because you forgot your pin or similar. If I log in to icloud on my laptop, I first have to confirm it on a linked device... if you only own one device if that device is linked you thus can't use Find My, remote locking or similar. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34407087

Any suggestions for calendar syncing? It's basically the only thing I use iCloud for.

Would like to avoid Google and don't mind running my own server to manage it so long as I can use the default calendar app on iOS.

You can run owncloud and use their app to automatically upload photos and videos in the background.

I can't even resume my Ubuntu ThinkPad from suspend without the nVidia driver going absolutely off the rails. I'm generally happy with the laptop, but it's got basic issues that Macbooks solved decades ago. The touchpad is noticeably worse.

To be completely fair an apples-to-apples comparison would be an all Intel (GPU included) laptop or one with an AMD GPU’d laptop as their drivers are baked into the kernel and are 1st-class supported. This, to me, is akin to the Apple top-down, wholly owned model. Even Intel MacBooks stopped shipping Nvidia GPUs years ago.

But… I get you. To have a really good experience you need to have a really supported setup and then everything works swimmingly. My work issued thinkpad is the AMD version of the P14s and it’s brilliant.

You may control _more_ but not certainly everything. You choose from the options available to you. You don’t control the processor internals, chipset, networking hardware, or millions of decisions behind the software and hardware. I’d say you curate, but you don’t really control.

> You may control _more_ but not certainly everything

I control some important details, like having 128G of RAM and a dual 4Tb NVMe setup.

You’re being needlessly pendantic: of course I don’t control the stuff in the cpu or the firmware blobs in the Wifi … but I control my OS and have freedom to choose a different distro or even a BSD one if I like — I love that I’m part of a community of hackers of fellow Linux nerds (and thinkpad enthusiasts) instead of being beholden to a giant company to dictate the direction the OS will take. It has its pros and it has its cons but on the whole I like it a ton more.

Yes, I understand what you are saying.

It is interesting: I clarify and point out the limits of your (own) control, which you agree with, but you still call me pedantic.

You didn't have to write "everything". You could have said "more".

It is so easy for open source proponents (which I am, but not to an unlimited degree) to fall into these illusions that are entangled with imprecise language.

Perhaps the answer is not to shoot the messenger? Perhaps the cause of the negativity is the realization that we don't have that much control. You knew this at some level, but your choice of language downplays it. The big manufacturers are in the drivers seat, like it or not. This reality is uncomfortable. Better not to mention it, then!

If I was being too harsh I am sorry. I mean I am open to moving from the traditional AMI bios to CoreBoot but I am not a FOSS zealot. I mean I have to get work done. So I make compromises.

I think we're very much on the same page.

No problem at all. I just learned about CoreBoot, BTW, thanks for mentioning firmware.

You're welcome! There's a really cool hacker that's been refurbishing old Thinkpads with the coreboot bioses -- https://minifree.org/ and the sales help fund the development!

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