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Sounds like the lesson learned here from reading your travail is not to invest in an ecosystem that makes it difficult to do a standard operation.

Maybe. But what are the options? Windows? Not really. Linux/Debian/Ubuntu is great, in theory, but it lacks tools: Acorn, Keyboard Maestro, OnniGraffle, Alfred App, MS Office, MS Teams, and a dozen more. Plus Apple silicon. I test LLMs locally.

This isn't me trying to convince you to use Linux, but the listed reasons (other than LLM testing) aren't real deterrents (and there are plenty that exist for many people, no use pretending not):

> Acorn

GIMP (or Glimpse, if you want a more modern UI) or Krita can definitely do pretty much anything Acorn can.

> Keyboard Maestro

GNOME and KDE have been able to do this out of the box from pretty much the beginning. The OSes are still mostly terminal-first (one of the big complaints, actually), and that translates into the DEs and Applications. A keyboard automation is just a sequence of commands.

This is probably one of the few areas where Linux almost definitely beats macOS or Windows.

> OnniGraffle

There's a large swathe of diagramming tools in Linux.

> Alfred App

Yep, both KDE and Gnome are able to handle this task as well as Alfred. Like automation, this is probably an area Linux will be able to shine above macOS.

> MS Office

LibreOffice would be the common alternative.

> MS Teams

They used to have an official client. They now recommend you create a PWA, and there are some unofficial clients that do pretty much that:

https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux

This seems to be the route they'll be going all around, similar to slack (web + an electron app).

> I test LLMs locally.

LLMs run fine on Linux, but you will be limited to about 16GB on the VRAM side. Though, you could technically use Asahi + Apple Silicon as the support matured if you want.

Most of these are open source applications, with cludgy UIs/warts and all; and aren't really designed by teams with UX masters, so operate oddly and require relearning. But if you were interested in making the move, they're options.

> GIMP (or Glimpse, if you want a more modern UI) or Krita can definitely do pretty much anything Acorn can.

I'm fairly certain that anyone who recommends GIMP hasn't really used GIMP.

> anyone who recommends GIMP hasn't really used GIMP.

Or they only ever used GIMP but never Acorn/Pixelmator/PS and thus don't understand how they run circles around GIMP.

Same about OmniGraffle vs the supposed horde of Linux diagramming tools.

Or Logic (or even GarageBand) vs Ardour or - deity forbid - Audacity (which is at best a glorified wav editor, but a far cry from a DAW)

They're just not in the same league.

Gimp and Libreoffice both seem to go out of their way to do everything their own way and ignore what has been demonstrated to work well and has essentially been established as a standard, this is one of the major issues with OSS for me along with trying to offer more than is reasonable and put in time on niche features (MORE MORE MORE) instead of working out the issues with what is already implemented. LibreCAD is a prime example example of doing it their own way, cutting off their nose in spite of their face, there was no reason to change most every command and require us to hit return after every single command. The free version of QCAD is still superior to LibreCAD and it is difficult to justify suffering through all of LibreCAD's failings when QCAD only costs $45 with a year of updates, even if you don't renew that outdated QCAD it is still more capable and usable than LibreCAD.

I have used nothing but linux for over two decades now but it is getting harder and harder to justify using linux, too much of the software is so fixated on competing that they have lost all perspective. For awhile now I have seriously considered switching to Haiku and developing the software I want for Haiku with its API that will not run on anything else, but I have not quite been irritated enough to go that far. Getting there and it might happen once Haiku irons out those last few wrinkles.

Edit: Should add, been a few years since I last used LibreOffice, they may have gotten their act together. I suffer gimp far too often.

> Gimp and Libreoffice both seem to go out of their way to do everything their own way and ignore what has been demonstrated to work well and has essentially been established as a standard, this is one of the major issues with OSS for me along with trying to offer more than is reasonable and put in time on niche features (MORE MORE MORE) instead of working out the issues with what is already implemented.

I haven't tried GIMP or LibreOffice for years now, but I speculate this is one outcome of ego-driven development instead of market-driven development, and possibly also because UX people aren't contributing as much to open source as developers are.

> I have used nothing but linux for over two decades now but it is getting harder and harder to justify using linux

At least in the context of windows vs Linux, Microsoft is making it incredibly easy. Once again pushing MS recall, integrated ads, and user hostile updates made me finally switch to Linux again. I absolutely hated having a computer that seemed to have a mind of its own. I had a dual boot setup that defaulted to Linux, and very frequently I would be doing something in Windows, leave the computer on with programs or games running, and come back to find that it had rebooted into Linux.

Can confirm. GIMP after Photoshop is a true BDSM experience. And no, it's not about "doing things differently." It's a torture.

That is just basic resistance to change.

People keep recommending Krita or photopea against Gimp but I am using both (Krita for digital painting, gimp for other stuff) and have made back to back test with all 3 software and the UI is almost identica[1] so that is just ignorance talking.

[1] just a handful of menus in a different order woaaaaa torture indeed!!!

I have only ever used GIMP and I will admit that the UI looks like hell. I also rarely do anything very advanced in it anymore so I can’t say whether it has feature parity with PS.

I can, it doesn’t.

I have been using gimp for almost a decade now.

Granted, I am not a professional in that field, but why would I not recommend it ?

It does everything I want to, and more.

>why would I not recommend it ?

You're free to recommend it, but if you tell somebody coming from a Mac that GIMP is an alterantive to tools like like Affinity Photo, Pixelmator, Acorn, or even Photoshop, you're doing them a disservice, because it's not.

I'm glad that GIMP works for you. That's good. And technically, it probably does a lot (or even everthing) that most people do in other applications. And maybe you can even argue that it doesn't do those things worse, it just does them differently.

But the reality is that if you're used to a tool like Acorn on the Mac, which puts a huge priority on providing a good, efficient user experience, you're just never going to switch to GIMP.

Same applies to a tool like OmniGraffle. I've looked everywhere, there's nothing like OmniGraffle on Linux. By that, I don't mean that there aren't any tools that allow you to create diagrams and mockups, I mean there aren't any tools that are as nice, simple, and quick to use as OmniGraffle.

> It does everything I want to, and more.

So does ms paint for a large part of computer users. Not sure that's a good enough argument.

I've been using GIMP for 20 years now, but the UI is atrocious; you can tell it's been designed by engineers who know nothing about UX.

Even the most basic UI elements, such as the slider bars, are horrible and unusable.

I didn't recommend it, I offered three options (one specifically created to fix the exact issue you're probably complaining about - GIMP's horrendous UI)

The problem is, you imply the alternative solutions are somehow just a stand-in replacement, which is not true, and not just with Gimp in the programs you listed. Software matters, and when software you need is not available, it is a significant compromise.

Up until the last paragraph, where he freely admits all the options are basically shit in comparison.

The idea that having to relearn all software and deal with idiosyncrasies for a professional is laughable.

Also, Glimpse has been abandoned since 2020.

GIMP 3.0 is going to be released soon. That might interest you.

Ousted the front door, coming back by the backdoor:

- “Maybe you’re using it wrong”

- “It has greatly improved since Gimp 2.0”,

- “It’s just doing things differently”

- “It has 90% of the features of MS Office”

seem to be the top arguments for trying Linux over Mac, again for the 20th time in 20 years, each time awfully bad. As Steve Jobs once said about Microsoft: “The problem is these people have no taste.” It’s correct that when you have no need for something to be beautiful or no need to be productive between two recompilations of the kernel, then Linux is the OS of choice.

My backups work though. As a Linux user, it's exhausting watching people complain about macOS and Windows every single day on this site, because there's nothing you can do about. You're a captive prisoner on their platform.

For some of us, dealing with GIMP's warts is more tolerable than the alternatives.

> aren't real deterrents

They are, because your listed alternatives are substandard. Just the fact you recommend incompatible LibreOffice as an MS Office alternative is enough, but then comparing KM to system defaults is also a joke.

> The OSes are still mostly terminal-first

And terminals are universally so bad at shortcuts that many can't even support all the modifiers keys on your keyboard

What kind of nightmare documents are you encountering that you actually run into MS Office / Libreoffice incompatibility?

And in turn don't also run into to incompatibility between different versions of MS office?

I've had at least as many issues moving complex documents between MS word versions than moving from MS to Libreoffice.

> > Acorn

> GIMP (or Glimpse, if you want a more modern UI) or Krita can definitely do pretty much anything Acorn can.

You will be surprised to know how some professional treat their tools.

Some illustrator love their software just like some mathematician love their chalk. Many woodworker make their own tools to make them feel just right.

> > MS Office

> LibreOffice would be the common alternative.

If you export them as PDF, maybe. If you need to exchange editable file with others, every small layout different hurts. You won't want your tables paginate differently from others.

Which is why I specifically stated that the feature set matches and not that they're drop in replacements. Then gave a giant disclaimer about open source software in general at the bottom.

I'm not evangelizing, I'm stating that the listed software/workloads are perfectly amenable to Linux if you wanted to make the move/relearn those softwares.

Almost none of the software you mentioned is a realistic, fully featured, profesionally-usbale alternative to the software that doesn't run on Linux. So, overall, Linux can't be an alternative to the Mac and/or Windows for anyone who relies on these tools.

That's an opinion.

A realistic opinion.

You might want to try the German program Softmaker. It's not free--though I think there's a free version--and it's designed to be a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office. There is a Linux version as well.

Keyboard Maestro is a lot more powerful than what you're thinking of. A sequence of shell commands bound to hotkeys is in no way an adequate replacement.

Do you have any examples of use cases Keyboard Maestro is great for?

When building macros you can leverage OCR and image recognition so it can know how to find elements on the screen that you need it to click. I have barely scratched the surface of what it can do I am sure there is lots more.

Xdotool/xdo, xsel and so on.

> > I test LLMs locally.

> LLMs run fine on Linux, but you will be limited to about 16GB on the VRAM side.

That'll probably be a dealbreaker.

> Acorn

GIMP

Don't get me wrong, I am still gratefully using GIMP, it's a fine tool for what it is and I am happy with it. But from a "meet people where they are" perspective, it's absurd to tell someone who uses tools like Photoshop that GIMP is a viable alternative as it is right now.

Libreoffice isn't the alternative, office on web is. And even that is still gimped compared to Windows Excel. (Which is the true killer app for professional use of Windows in general)

Yes, I find it fun to use office as a Mac differentiator when the Mac version is so inferior to the Windows one. At least, office365 works fine on Linux using Crossover.

It’s the same weirdness with people recommending Gimp for Acorn when Linux has great photo manipulation with Darktable and good digital painting with Krita.

And I say that as someone who quite like MacOs even if it’s getting worse with each version.

Office on the Web is a cruel joke. It theoretically does what you want it to do, but more often than not, it will do it extremely slowly while vaporizing your RAM.

I can't imagine it being better on Linux.

Try Softmaker Office for Linux.

A bit of nostalgia.

Switch to whatever you want https://youtu.be/9GO3mccvTCs

And here I am running Linux on M1 Macbook. Graphical interface is superior, native docker support is superior, development experience is superior, backups for sure are superior than Time Machine. For work purposes online office on the web is sufficient. It is not for everyone (like photographers), but for software developers it works very nicely.

I question the native docker support is superior. On a mac I can run linux/amd64 docker containers at near native speed with Rosetta 2 for Linux, this is something that you just cannot do (at the moment) on Linux running on Apple Silicon.

May I ask what distro you're using, and when there's any good documentation around for the installation procedure?

I'm an Arch guy, but for the M1 I am using the official Asahi Linux distro which is based on Fedora. Documentation and information about compatibility can be found on their site: https://asahilinux.org/

I previously used the Arch based Asahi distro when it was official, but Arch on ARM is a 3rd party project and it was not very well maintained and lacked some packages, so they switched. Fedora could also be considered more stable and better supported. But there are Ubuntu, Debian versions for Asahi if you prefer those.

Platforms that lack MS Teams are doing the user a favor.

I don't think the end user is the one making the choice to use MS Teams.

Are we reading different comments? Because the only reason he had problems is because he didn't do anything standard. He futzed with his backups instead of letting the OS take care of it, and that's the only reason he had any trouble.

If you let Time Machine doing it's thing, restoring from a backup is fast and painless.

(Though it's been years since I had to restore a Mac for any reason. It makes me wonder what he was doing.)

The reason is the opposite - he was doing the standard thing of using the substandard Time Machine for backups, which has been poorly engineered not to allow restoring without pre-pruning

> If you let Time Machine doing it's thing

Then you can corrupt your whole backup, and then fully restoring becomes impossible instead of long and painless, but possible

> It makes me wonder what he was doing

He was doing the restore recently, not many years ago

> substandard Time Machine for backups

Compared to what?

Mentioned was a pretty fundamental issue with time machine, to this day. In that it doesn't (de)allocate older backed up space to make for up space for newer back ups. This or some variations of that.

The bug may not always manifest itself I suppose which makes it worse emotionally.

I'm there setting on a 1tb backup disk dedicated to backup a 500GB root HDD, it keeps saying there isn't enough space available after 1h sorting out what needs copied over. Deleted a series a snapshot but it won't tell what doing this is saving me. I can only resort to wipe the entire backup and backup again. Now wondering, what if I deleted some documents a while back which I thought would have a snap. Do I care more about getting a fresh backup or unweilded snapshots that may or may not contain something I don't know I've lost.

I had only 600-700 gb of data on my Mac. Installed OneDrive, did not know that I had configured my NAS to do 800gb of cloud backups to OneDrive. And Time Machine downloaded that data into its backup. Although I had configured OneDrive not to download that folder to my Mac. So time Machine screwed up in the first place.

Sounds like an edge case that Microsoft didn’t think of when they developed OneDrive on Mac. You should contact them and let them know that they should exclude OneDrive from Time Machine backups automatically unless it’s configured to download everything.

You can very easily exclude folders from Time Machine backups yourself.

My point was about being able to boot from ssd. Not about whom to blame re Time Machine backup.

Ahh, I didn't see that you were the original commenter.

> restoring from a backup is fast and painless.

Had to restore recently. Was painless, but most definitely not fast. Took 24 - 36 hours to restore a 1 TB drive with < 400 GB in use after restore.

Takes me around an hour or so to restore a 2tb drive from a HDD NAS with borg. Wasn't a full 2tb, and I might be off by an hour or so as it's been a minute. Usually I dd from the old drive to the new one over USB which doesn't take too long 30-40 minutes?

I don't think that making a backup unrecoverable from is "doing its thing". I would expect a 1:1 copy of a drive to be less or exactly the drive size.

Sounds a bit too simplistic. Apple is about the only company that allows you to run any decently sized LLMs on a laptop. They also have all day battery life, amazing single-threaded performance and great multicore performance. And they didn’t stop there, they also threw in a truly fantastic display and speakers that are so far ahead of any competitors that I wonder what kind of magic they have that no other laptop brand is able to put better speakers in their laptops.

> I wonder what kind of magic they have that no other laptop brand is able to put better speakers in their laptops.

The answer is integration.

With Windows laptops, you have one company doing the sound card, one company doing the speakers and one company doing the enclosure. What you actually want is your sound card's equalizer curve being perfectly tuned to your speakers' frequency response, taking into account how their positioning in your specific laptop enclosure affects the sound. If your sound card maker doesn't know what laptop the card will go into, they just straight up can't do this.

There's also the fact that sound cards have to be conservative about how much power they output, to avoid blowing up the speakers. Apple knows the exact tolerances of the ones in their laptops. They even have special temperature sensors in them, so that they can increase the power even more, and go back to a safer level in software if the temperature ever crosses a safety threshold.

> Apple is about the only company that allows you to run any decently sized LLMs on a laptop

Comments like these make me wonder if people even use different computers anymore or if they just say stuff and hope that it's right.

Apple is the only company that makes integrated GPUs that are actually any good, and even their CPUs are really well-optimized for these sorts of workloads.

They also build their RAM in a way that makes it suitable for both CPU and GPU uses. This means you don't have separate CPU RAM and GPU VRAM, it's all just memory. If you get more RAM for your Macbook, that automatically means more memory you can use for LLM inference.

Yes, you can technically buy Nvidia, but you'd pay just as much for that if not more, and I don't think you can get as much VRAM in a consumer GPU anyway.

Haven't laptops used integrated RAM for decades? It was always considered to be a bad thing in the past.

I guess because the integrated graphics was always weak?

One big factor was bandwidth. Seems Apple mostly solved that though.

> Apple is the only company that makes integrated GPUs that are actually any good

I will reiterate; if you have used AMD or Intel iGPUs recently you would know this is just plain wrong. AMD's iGPUs often outperform Apple's for the price, and come with a featureset that isn't intentionally gimped and supports "professional" features like Vulkan conformance. People condemn Apple's GPUs for having a featureset too simple for anything besides video transcoding and compute shaders. If Intel didn't exist, Apple would probably be the single least-efficient and lowest performance GPU designer shipping products today. And they had to cut corners to get there.

> If you get more RAM for your Macbook, that automatically means more memory you can use for LLM inference.

And then it's your paltry GPU that's the bottleneck. You can get comparable results on pretty much any sub-120b parameter model with PCIe offloading on Nvidia hardware that costs a fraction of a Mac Studio with enough memory to compete.

See for yourself. Nvidia's fastest laptop chips still outperform Apple's most powerful desktop GPU chips: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks

And it's not even close. Apple's biggest professional GPUs struggle to swap spit with Nvidia's last-gen laptop chips.

Without a concrete counter example you risk looking like you’re denying the claim with no elaboration and hoping you’re right. :P

I don't know of any other laptop with a GPU that has 32GB of VRAM, and definitely not any with 64 or 128.

Please, do tell me where else can I run 32b models locally without quantization

If you do not care about speed, pretty much everywhere.

On any other computers with integrated GPU you can have more memory than on Apple computers, where memory is abnormally expensive.

The main advantage of the current Apple computers is a wider interface with memory, which provides a better memory throughput for their integrated GPUs.

In 2025 it is expected that others will catch up with Apple even from this point of view (e.g. AMD Strix Halo).

Let's hope that AMD Strix Halo will allow for 128 GB of VRAM when it releases next year. That's what Apple has to offer at the moment.

> On any other computers with integrated GPU you can have more memory than on Apple computers, where memory is abnormally expensive.

Are there any laptops that support 256 GB of RAM that cost less than a fully speced out Macbook Pro?

> Are there any laptops that support 256 GB of RAM that cost less than a fully speced out Macbook Pro?

No, but there are absolutely laptops with more than 128gb of addressable RAM. If you did your research you might have found them, at a literal fraction of the Macbook's price:

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadp/th...

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/cty/pdp/spd/precision-16-768...

Really, this is what I mean by wondering whether anyone even cares anymore. When you work long enough in the tech industry, you end up sitting next to people that just do not care about anything they interact with. People that use a paid GUI to write git commits, people that pay Pakastani developers to do their work for them, people that brag about computers and smartphones like jewelry. Do you actually research the domain that you claim to care about, or do you just own things and then find reasons to get defensive when people attack your insecurities online?

If you have not used a non-Apple laptop since Apple Silicon released, do not pretend you're in a position of authority to make comparisons. I had an M1 Pro for work, and while it was nice for day-to-day browsing I would have never bought one for myself. It's GPU is truly one of the least appealing parts, both from a performance perspective and considering what little it actually supports.

I did eventually stumble upon the Thinkpad one which supports 192 GB of ram. So that is better than the MacBook. I still can’t see where it says that the Dell machines support that much.

The Lenovo one comes with a decent GPU, but you can’t get it with more than 16 GB of memory. But the 5000 ADA should be a lot faster at running smaller models compared to the M4 Max. It does cost a lot. The one with 128 GB of RAM costs 5519 USD compared to the MacBook at 5999 USD. So it’s not that much cheaper.

GPU is great, for smaller LLMs, but the CPU is not that great. The i9-13950HX is quite behind the M4 Max.

Battery life isn’t half bad either. PCmag was getting close to 10 hours, but then again they got 27 hours out of my current laptop and I can say that I get much closer to 10 hours with my workload, so then I would be getting maybe 4 hours out of the Lenovo, which is not exactly great.

I’m glad that you’ve found a machine that works for you.

64GB of system RAM and partial offload to a laptop 3090 or 4090 will run 32b unquantized.

What kind of performance are you seeing? The tests that I have seen are not usable for anything because they are so slow.

Will I get an answer back anytime soon? On a MBP pro it's conversational speed.

Nope, on cloud it is faster than conversational where you can skim to the right place or quickly regenerate seeing it is going down the wrong path.

I take that to mean that it is basically so slow as to be useless and that you would in fact need a Macbook to be able to run this model locally.

This whole thread has become a bit frustrating with comments about how other laptops are competitive with a Macbook. But no one can actually name a single laptop that can do all the things that a Macbook can.

I just replied to someone saying it couldn't run on a Windows laptop with how it can. It's below reading rate. Both are below skimming rate that is more useful for LLMs. I would rather have a 96GB macbook than a windows laptop if my only case was local LLMs and I didn't care about all the hoops around sealed system volume, signed app troubles, etc. that are bringing Macbooks closer to ipads/chromebooks, or the many other things that are better with nvidia GPUs.

For desktop I'd still rather threadripper etc. where it has more competitive CPU memory bandwidth and is upgradable and can run multiple GPUs.

idk about the LLM part, but the rest of this is not true. there's multiple laptops that compete or even beat MacBooks in display, battery life, performance etc. and the MacBook displays have really slow response times

I guess we all have different requirements in a screen. I don't care so much about response time. For me it's more important that the screen can do 1000 nits continuously, support 120 hz and is close enough to 4K that I can't see the pixels.

Although I can't find a windows laptop that can beat the M4 Max in single threaded or multi threaded. Got any tips for any laptops that can compete with the M4 Max?

I’d be curious to see an example.

You act like other ecosystems are better. They aren’t.

I've really been noticing how Apple software quality has been on a slow decline since Snow Leopard. I look at some of their older source code and it's a joy to read!

Nowadays, my daily travails with restarting Xcode multiple times a day to work around bugs (package blahblah is not available) have really worn thin (I mean, Xcode has always had problems, but not THIS bad). Add to that the fact that the "system data" on my mbp now takes up 80% of the space on my SSD (800GB of system data! Even after manually deleting caches and derived data)...

It's like they don't even care about code craftsmanship anymore. And yet their culture of not putting in useful debug messages (because "it just works") persists.

My latest and greatest headache? Some parts of AppKit now directly call [NSApplication _crashOnException:] regardless of the "NSApplicationCrashOnExceptions" setting, and WITHOUT even calling [NSApplication reportException:]. So now you lose the exception entirely and good luck figuring out what caused the crash. Ugh...

I don't use Xcode so maybe it is an exception but in general I would say the opposite. For me it has been getting better over time.

People talk about Snow Leopard being stable but it was riddled with bugs, just take a look at the release notes for all the updates it received over the next year.

I have had a similar experience after i shared my MacBook with my girlfriend for a while. Turned out even after uninstalling her cloud file sharing software thing, there were still over 100GB of cached files left on disk. MacOS didn't make the obvious identify or find in the storage overview.

I ended up finding it through a disk space visualizer that showed a large folder (the stolen 100GB) in some cache directory. I can highly recommend trying that out. MacOS' inbuilt tools are in my experience inadequate to find what is stealing your disk space (on top of applications being unable to clean up after themselves).

The system data apparently contains the Time Machine backups that haven’t been flushed to your external backup, including folders that are set to be ignored.

I discovered this while trying to restore a docker vm image that was maybe ignored, while not having enough space on the drive to restore it back, because deleted versions still take up space in the system data, even when the trash is emptied.

Yeah

Let me guess, the best engineers are working on iPad/iPhone apps today and MacOS is relegated to code fixes and people building for the "common user" that doesn't know what a drive is

"Create a fresh install and manually (!) copy individual files from time machine to your mac.“"

This is, and always has been, the only sane answer.

If you value your time, energy and sanity you do not upgrade your OS - you wipe it clean and install from scratch. It is as true today with OSX as it was going from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95.

When I last restored from Time Machine it allowed me to select which folders I wanted to restore. Then I could just restore the most important bits and leave anything big behind on the backup drive to restore manually later.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102551

I only was offered to select top level folders. Nothing below them.

Did you try to reinstall the mac and use migration assistant to restore from the Time Machine backup?

Yes I did. But the time machine backup was way larger than my macbook‘s ssd. The reason was this:

I had only 600-700 gb of data on my Mac. Installed OneDrive, did not know that I had configured my NAS to do 800gb of cloud backups to OneDrive. And Time Machine downloaded that data into its backup. Although I had configured OneDrive not to download that folder to my Mac. So time Machine screwed up.

I don't know time machine, but why would a full restore take more space than the original drive? Wouldn't a full time machine restore by default restore the last state of the system being backed up (and not full history) by default like any half decent backup solution?

I had only 600-700 gb of data on my Mac. Installed OneDrive, did not know that I had configured my NAS to do 800gb of cloud backups to OneDrive. And Time Machine downloaded that data into its backup. Although I had configured OneDrive not to download that folder to my Mac. So time Machine screwed up in the first place.

How did you end up with TM backup larger than original source? Sure, total storage consumed on TM drive can be larger than source, but that is because older versions of files are stored as well. But restoring most recent versions of files should be equal to source in size.

I had only 600-700 gb of data on my Mac. Installed OneDrive, did not know that I had configured my NAS to do 800gb of cloud backups to OneDrive. And Time Machine downloaded that data into its backup. Although I had configured OneDrive not to download that folder to my Mac. So time Machine screwed up in the first place.

Ah, ok, that's a nasty bug/scenario. I long for the good old days one could just rsync the internal drive and bless it and you have a bootable clone, or make compressed disk image. Those were the days.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but I just want to say that it is extremely refreshing to see a good ol' fashioned Linux vs Win vs Mac debate in 2024. The Internet isn't dead.

I lied; I actually do. GIMP sucks!

You chose the walled garden.

Apple doesn’t care. They want you to subscribe to their iCloud plans and “abstract” away backups so that you lose the ability to own your backups.

I wish they did abstract it away. But iCloud is the only widely used cloud storage service that doesn't have file versioning. So as an iCloud user you really do need a backup and they're telling you as much every step of the way.

To most Apple users, the most important version is the latest version.

My experience with Apple backup is, please turn every backup on so you’ll max out your iCloud storage. There’s no way to tell iOS or MacOS to backup to a self hosted target.

> I didn’t want to buy another Mac just to restore from backups.

And then presumably one more Mac to backup your backup Mac.

It's Macs all the way down!

> Second person told me to buy a new Mac with 2 tb ssd and restore to that.

Or you can just upgrade the SSD as you would do with any normal laptop. Oh, wait...