Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamesy0ung | Hacker News Reader

> 1. Extra silicon area being used by NPUs and TPUs instead of extra performance?

I'm not an expert in silicon design, but I recall reading that there's a limit to how much power can be concentrated in a single package due to power density constraints, and that's why they are adding fluff instead of more cores.

>2. Passmark runs under Windows, which is probably using increasing overhead with newer versions?

This is a huge problem as well. I have a 2017 15" MacBook Pro and it's a decent computer, except it is horribly sluggish doing anything on it, even opening Finder. That is with a fresh install of macOS 13.7.1. If I install 10.13, it is snappy. If I bootcamp with Windows 11, it's actually quite snappy as well and I get 2 more hours of battery life somehow despite Windows in bootcamp not being able to control (power down) the dGPU like macOS can. Unfortunately I hate Windows, and Linux is very dodgy on this Mac.

View on HN

That is WILD that Windows 11 runs faster than the machine's native OS...

Could this suggest that modern Windows is, dare I say it, MORE resource efficient than modern macOS?! That feels like a ludicrous statement to type, but the results seem to suggest as much.

Modern macOS might be optimized for Apple Silicon CPUs. But even when it was Intel only, there were probably times when Windows was lighter, albeit bad in other ways.

It’s a microkernel OS, it’s going to be slower by its very nature. And on ARM it wastes memory due to its 16KiB pages.

Neither of them use microkernels. They are monolithic kernels with loadable module support ("hybrid" kernels). The cores of both Windows NT and XNU were originally microkernels, but then they put all of the servers into the kernel address space to make them into the monolithic kernels that they are today.

XNU apparently stands for "X is not Unix." Well that's confusing.

It actually was a recursive acronym that stood for XNU is Not UNIX. Then at some point Apple got it UNIX certified as part of MacOS.

> It’s a microkernel OS, it’s going to be slower by its very nature.

Yawn. Ever heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family ?

Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genode ?

(Wenn man keine Ahnung hat...)

You're comparing a modern microkernel to something originating from the 80s?

Keep your rude attitude to yourself.

It's from 1993. Also be more precise about what exactly you are meaning by writing "It’s a microkernel OS, it’s going to be slower by its very nature."

Otherwise don't be offended when people are offended by regurgitated and meanwhile disproven non-sense.

kthxbye

Why is this convo about kernels so angry? And macOS isn't even based on a microkernel.

i forgot ;)

I'm just as surprised. Also, I was using Windows 11 LTSC 2024, not the standard version, which could impact the validity of my comparison.

The pessimistic viewpoint is the hardware vendor would not mind if you felt your machine was slow and were motivated to upgrade to the latest model every year. The fact that they also control the OS means they have means, motive and opportunity to slow older models if their shareholders demanded.

Or they simply keep supporting old models with new versions of the OS, even though newer software versions are optimized, and contain new features, enabled by newer hardware improvements.

If you machines have more RAM, you can use a more RAM intensive solution to speed many things up, or deliver a more computationally intensive but higher quality solution, or simply add a new previous challenging feature.

What would be interesting, is how fast to old but high spec'd models slow down. What slow downs are from optimizing for newer architectures, vs. optimizing with expectation of higher resources.

The problem seems to be CPU bound, it's got 16GB of memory and memory pressure is low. The CPU is a i7-7820HQ, though I thought that it was interesting that my iPhone XR (Apple A12) scores higher on a synthetic benchmark than my top of the line MacBook Pro from the same time.

This doesn't feel terribly surprising to me. MacOS has always had impressively performant parts, but their upgrades always generally lower responsiveness. On modern hardware it's less perceptible obviously, and they want to sell machines, not software. But the last iteration that felt like it prioritized performance and snappiness was Snow Leopard, now twenty years ago.

I will say the problem was a lot worse before the core explosion. It was easy for a single process to bring the entire system to a drag. These days the computer is a lot better at adapting to variable loads.

I love my macs, and I'm about 10x as productive as on a windows machine after decades of daily usage (and probably a good 2x compared to linux). Performance, however, is not a good reason to use macos—it's the fact that the keybindings make sense and are coherent across an entire OS. You can use readline (emacs) bindings in any text field across the OS. And generally speaking, problems have a single solution that's relatively easy to google for. Bad-behaved apps aside (looking at you zoom and adobe) administering a mac is straightforward to reason about, and for the most part it's easy to ignore the app store, download apps, and run them by double clicking.

I love linux, but I will absolutely pay to not have to deal with X11 or Wayland for my day-to-day work. I also expect my employer to pay for this or manage my machine for me. I tried linux full-time for a year on a thinkpad and never want to go back. The only time that worked for me was working at google when someone else broadly managed my OS. macs the only unix I've ever used that felt designed around making my life easier and allowing me to focus on the work I want to do. Linux has made great strides in the last two decades but the two major changes, systemd and wayland, both indicate that the community is solving different problems than will get me to use it as a desktop. Which is fine; I prefer the mac-style to the ibm pc-style they're successfully replacing. Like KDE is very nice and usable, but it models the computer and documents and apps in a completely different way than I am used to or want to use.

I love Linux and run it on my servers, but on the desktop, it requires too much tinkering—I often spend more time troubleshooting than working. Laptops are especially problematic, with issues like Wi-Fi, sleep, and battery life. Windows is a mess—I hate the ads, bloat, and lack of a Unix-like environment. WSL2 works but feels like a hack. macOS, on the other hand, gives me full compatibility with Unix tools while also running Office and Adobe apps. Also Command+C for copy, Command+V for paste is much nicer than Control+Shift+C and Control+Shift+V. macOS does have absolutely terrible screen snapping though in comparison to Windows 11. The hardware is solid—great screen, trackpad, speakers, and battery life. I considered getting a high-end PC laptop (based on Rtings’ recommendations), but every option had compromises, either a terrible screen, terrible processor or terrible battery life. By the time I configured it to a non crappy config, it would’ve cost more than a MacBook Pro 16.

> Laptops are especially problematic, with issues like Wi-Fi, sleep, and battery life.

100% true, but I love Linux as a daily driver for development. It is the same os+architecture as the servers I am deploying to! I have had to carefully select hardware to ensure things like WiFi work and that the screen resolution does not require fractional scaling. Mac is definitely superior hardware but I enjoy being able to perf test the app on its native OS and skip things like running VMs for docker.

Same! That's One less OS that I have to remember how it works!

I'm not sure I understand the whole tinkering thing. Whenever I tinker with my Linux, it's because I decided to try something tinkery, and usually mostly because I wanted to tinker.

Like trying out that fancy new tiling Wayland WM I heard about last week...

I feel like the main times Linux requires tinkering are:

1. You're trying to run it on hardware that isn't well-supported. This is a bummer, but you can't just expect any random machine (especially a laptop) to run Linux well. If you're buying a new computer and expect to run Linux on it, do your research beforehand and make sure all the hardware in it is supported.

2. You've picked a distro that isn't boring. I run Debian testing, and then Debian stable for the first six months or so after testing is promoted to stable. (Testing is pretty stable on its own, but then once the current testing release turns into the current stable release, testing gets flooded with lots of package updates that might not be so stable, so I wait.) For people who want something even more boring, they can stick with Debian stable. If you really need a brand-new version of something that stable doesn't have, it might be in backports, or available as a Snap or Flatpak (I'm not a fan of either of these, but they're options).

3. You use a desktop environment that isn't boring. I'm super super biased here[0], but Xfce is boring and doesn't change all that much. I've been using it for more than 20 years and it still looks and behaves very similarly today as it did when I first started using it.

If you use well-supported hardware, and run a distro and desktop environment that's boring, you will generally have very few issues with Linux and rarely (if ever) have to tinker with it.

[0] Full disclosure: I maintain a couple Xfce core components.

First, thanks for Xfce. I'm a (tiny) donor.

Two kinds of linux tinkering often get aliased and cause confusion in conversations.

The first kind is the enthusiast changing their init system bootloader and package manager and "neofetch/fastfetch" and WM and... every few weeks.

The second kind is the guy who uses xfce with a hidpi display who has to google and try various combinations of xrandr(augmented with xfwm zoom feature), GDK_SCALE, QT_SCALE_FACTOR, theme that supports hidpi in the titlebar, few icons in the status tray not scaling up(wpa_gui), do all that and find out that apps that draw directly with OpenGL don't respect these settings, dealing with multiple monitors, plugging in hdmi and then unplugging messing up the audio profile and randomly muting chromium browsers, deciding whether to use xf86-* Or modesetting or whatever the fix is to get rid of screen tearing. Bluetooth/wifi. On my laptop for example I had to disable usb autosuspend lest the right hand side USB-A port stop working.

If our threshold for qualifying well-supported hardware is "not even a little tinkering required" then we are left with vanishingly few laptops. For the vast vast majority of laptops, atleast the things I mentioned above are required. All in all, it amounted to couple of kernel parameters, a pipewire config file to stop random static noise in the bluetooth sink and then a few xfce setting menu tweaks (WM window scaling and display scaling). So not that dramatic, but it is still annoying to deal with.

The 2nd kind of tinkering is annoying, and is required regardless of distro/de/wm choice since it's a function of the layers below the de/wm, mostly the kernel itself.

I think that for your example of having problems with HiDPI you might have had in mind another desktop environment than XFCE.

I have been using XFCE for more than 10 years almost exclusively with multiple HiDPI monitors.

After Linux installation I never had to do anything else except of going to XFCE/Settings/Appearance and set a suitably high value for "Custom DPI Setting".

Besides that essential setting (which scales the fonts of all applications, except for a few Java programs written by morons), it may be desirable to set a more appropriate value in "Desktop/Icons/Icon size". Also in "Panel preferences" you may want to change the size of the taskbar and the size of its icons.

You may have to also choose a suitable desktop theme, but that is a thing that you may want to do after any installation, regardless of having HiDPI monitors.

My first thought is that Apple is throttling performance of older machines on purpose (again). As they did with the phones.

Would explain why Windows runs faster.

> My first thought is that Apple is throttling performance of older machines on purpose (again).

The battery life argument was relevant, but where one sits on the issue is going to depend on the poison one picked.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate

I have a 2016 MBP-15 (sticky keyboard). I suspect Apple changed something so the fans no longer go into turbo vortex mode. Normally it isn't sluggish at all, but when it overheats, everything grinds to a halt.[1] (Presumably this is to keep the defective keyboard from melting again.[0]) Perhaps old OS/bootcamp still has the original fan profiles.

[0]Apple had a unpublicized extended warrantee on these, and rebuilt the entire thing twice.

[1] kernel_task suddenly goes to 400%, Hot.app reports 24%. Very little leeway between low energy and almost dead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com