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Comment by Teknomadix | Hacker News Reader

My daily driver for several years now has been an AMD Ryzen 7 powered ThinkPad t495. $120 used. After upgrading the RAM to 64gb it felt very snappy and usable. I run NixOS / Hyprland with rofi/waybar. When an accident happened and the first t495 was damaged, I bought a second for $80, swapped the parts and was back in business. I use it for coding, web research, and a bit of CAD design via FreeCAD. Very happy with the hardware!

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I have a MBA M1 and it is everything you would wish in an hardware feature wise (except the keyboard as I like lot of travel). But the OS is abysmal, unless you like to use your device with only apps. Anything else out of the straight path is a pain. And the last years, it seems that the allowed path is closer to mobile OS than a computer to do work.

So, my daily driver is an oldish dell latitude (8th gen intel) running openbsd. Not for the faint of heart, but for a tinkerer, it's a dream.

I keep hearing this thing about apps and I'm confused. I write code on my MBA M1, run orbital simulations, run a media server... All like I would on Linux. What am I missing on userland?

I understand there is low level system stuff I can't control, but I've made my peace with that. When using Linux I hadn't touched its internals for years.

I have made my peace with that as well, but the ground keep sifting under. There was the Music.app stuff, the System settings, Apple Intelligence, and now the whole UI of the OS. Those are the things that you would interact with daily.

It could be fine. I'm also OK with GNOME's strict approach to design. But with Apple, you wait the next release with dread because you never know what they will pull next.

To be honest, I have used macOS since OS X 10.4 and most of it is still very similar UI-wise? Finder, Spotlight, basic window management, etc. are still pretty much the same. If you had a time machine and took someone from 2006, they would still feel pretty much at home on macOS 26. For me the only larger breaking change was when they axed Spaces in 10.7 for Mission Control (Spaces was so much better).

GNOME from 2006? Quite a different story.

I agree on lower-level stuff. Nowadays you have to partially disable SIP to use DTrace, which is meh... (and it seems largely unmaintained) Instruments is quite great though.

You can install Linux on an M1/M2. It's not perfect, but it does work pretty well.

Possibly 40gb, but not 64gb. The T495 has 8gb soldered and one DDR4 slot. Concur great hardware, particularly the keyboard.

Point taken, but actually it's 16gb soldered and 32GB DDR4 SO-DIMM @2400mhz for a total of 48GB.

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