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.
> 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.
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
I've had at least as many issues moving complex documents between MS word versions than moving from MS to Libreoffice.
> 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.
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.
I'm fairly certain that anyone who recommends GIMP hasn't really used GIMP.
The idea that having to relearn all software and deal with idiosyncrasies for a professional is laughable.
Granted, I am not a professional in that field, but why would I not recommend it ?
It does everything I want to, and more.
Even the most basic UI elements, such as the slider bars, are horrible and unusable.
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.
So does ms paint for a large part of computer users. Not sure that's a good enough argument.
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!!!
- “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.
For some of us, dealing with GIMP's warts is more tolerable than the alternatives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Switch to whatever you want https://youtu.be/9GO3mccvTCs
> 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.
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.
I can't imagine it being better on Linux.
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.
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.)
You can very easily exclude folders from Time Machine backups yourself.
> 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
Compared to what?
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.
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.
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.
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.
For desktop I'd still rather threadripper etc. where it has more competitive CPU memory bandwidth and is upgradable and can run multiple GPUs.
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).
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
I guess because the integrated graphics was always weak?
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.
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.
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?