Comment by jetpks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jetpks | Hacker News Reader

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I'm an engineer that has both an apple silicon laptop (mbp, m2) and a linux laptop (arch, thinkpad x1 yoga.) I choose the mac every day of the week and it's not even close. I'm sure it's not great for specific engineering disciplines, but for me (web, rails, sre) it really can't be beat.

The UX differences are absolutely massive. Even after daily-driving that thinkpad for months, Gnome always felt kinda not quite finished. Maybe KDE is better, but it didn't have Wayland support when I was setting that machine up, which made it a non-starter.

The real killer though is battery life. I can work literally all day unplugged on the mbp and finish up with 40-50% remaining. When i'm traveling these days, i don't even bring a power cable with me during the day. The thinkpad, despite my best efforts with powertop, the most aggressive frequency scaling i could get, and a bunch of other little tricks, lasts 2 hours.

There are niceties about Linux too. Package management is better and the docker experience is _way_ better. Overall though, i'd take the apple silicon macbook 10 times out of 10.

Battery life followed by heat and fan noise have been my sticking points with non-mac laptops.

My first gen ThinkPad Nano X1 would be an excellent laptop, if it weren’t for the terrible battery life even in power save mode (which as an aside, slows it down a lot) and its need to spin up a fan to do something as trivial as driving a rather pedestrian 2560x1440 60hz display.

It feels almost like priorities are totally upside down for x86 laptop manufacturers. I totally understand and appreciate that there are performance oriented laptops that aren’t supposed to be good with battery life, but there’s no good reason for there being so few ultraportable and midrange x86 laptops that have good battery life and won’t fry your lap or sound like a jet taking off when pushed a little. It’s an endless sea of mediocrity.

> The thinkpad, […], lasts 2 hours.

This echoes my experiences for anything that needs power management. Not just that the battery life is worse, but that it degrades quickly. In two years it’s barely usable. I’ve seen this with non-Apple phones and laptops. iPhone otoh is so good these days you don’t need to upgrade until EOL of ~6 years (and even if you need it battery is not more expensive than any other proprietary battery). My last MacBook from 2011 failed a couple of years ago only because of a Radeon GPU inside with a known hw error.

> There are niceties about Linux too.

Yes! If you haven’t tried in years, the Linux desktop experience is awesome (at least close enough) for me – a dev who CAN configure stuff if I need to but find it excruciatingly menial if it isn't related to my core work. It’s really an improvement from a decade ago.

I'd like to offer a counterpoint, I have an old'ish T480s which runs linuxmint, several lxd containers for traefik, golang, python, postgres and sqlserver (so not even dockerized, but full VMs running these services), and I can go the whole morning (~4-5 hours).

I think the culprit is more likely the power hungry intel CPU in your yoga?

Going on a slight tangent; I've tried but do not like the mac keyboards, they feel very shallow to me, hence why I'm still using my old T480s. The newer thinkpad laptop keyboards all seem to be going that way though (going thinner), much to my dismay. Perhaps a P14s is my next purchase, despite it's bulk.

Anybody with a framework 13 want to comment on their keyboard?

I really like the keyboards on my frameworks. I have both the 13 and the new 16, and they are pretty good. Not as good as the old T4*0s I'm afraid, but certainly usable.

Interesting. I do similar (lots of Rails) but have pretty much the opposite experience (other than battery life - Mac definitely wins there). Though I use i3/Sway more than Gnome. The performance of running our huge monolith locally is much better for Linux users than Mac users where I work.

I used a Mac for awhile back in 2015 but it never really stood out to me UX-wise, even compared to Gnome. All I really need to do is open a few windows and then switch between them. In i3 or Sway, opening and switching between windows is very fast and I never have to drag stuff around.

This is going to change once Arm on Linux becomes a thing with Qualcomm's new jazz. I am mostly tethered to a dock with multiple screens. I have been driving Ubuntu now for over 4 years full time for work.

>The UX differences are absolutely massive.

Examples?

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