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Comment by mirzap | Hacker News Reader

I use WebStorm, CLion, Cursor, 2-3 Claude Code instances, Chrome/Brave with 50+ tabs, Docker, and a bunch of other things on MacBook Air all at the same time. It works. Never freezes. Never crashes. I tried that on Windows recently, and now on Arch with a lot more memory (32), and it simply can't handle it. I reboot daily. Freezes in the middle of the work. It may be the issue with nvidia drivers as other pointed out, but that's precisely my point. Apple has very limited number of drivers to maintain, and they can improve them to perfection. They are not perfect, of course, but compared to alternatives, it's light-years ahead.

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I also use a MacBook as my daily driver, but have used different ThinkPads for years and there is no way that that workload should bring any medium specced TP to its knees like you're describing.

Good to know. Many people recommend ThinkPads, but my experience has been with Dell. In the future, I might consider a ThinkPad or a Framework laptop.

I use Dell at work, Thinkpad at home. Either gets the job done, but to me it's clear Thinkpads have superior quality, at least if you don't go for the cheapest model. Keyboard and battery life are so much better on my old Thinkpad compared to 2 years newer Dell of same price range.

Ollama crashed my MacBook just last week, they definitely crash, as they might not have created the “report this application” feature if they didn’t.

I don’t know for sure, I need to confirm it, but it feels like my similarly specced Arch machine would just shrug at it. It’s a 10 years old PC, yet it feels like it’s a non issue for it to handle this. I bet my MacBook Pro from 2014 (with Arch too) won’t even start a fan. It depends on these 50 tabs, I guess, but the rest is just doesn’t feel like a big deal to handle.

I dunno I use similar apps on my work-provided 32GB M1 Pro and that thing chugs along horribly after a certain point. I still get the spinning beach ball from time to time, and the massive work Vue codebase in Webstorm is so fucking slow that it can take upwards of 10 seconds for type intellisense to give me results in tiny files, with constant freezing. The same doesn't happen on my personal linux machines, my work codebase is incredibly speedy there.

Don't get me started on MacOS itself and its myriad of problems.

My 10 year old ThinkPad can handle RStudio,PyCharms, VSCode with Copilot Agent and Firefox with 30+ Tabs open just fine on 32 GB RAM and Fedora.

Again, I don't think the issue here is Linux itself

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