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Comment by rafaelmn | Hacker News Reader

As much as I love the idea of moving to Linux - Mac hardware is like two years ahead of PC currently in pretty much any regard aside from gaming. I keep looking for an iteration where it makes sense to switch but currently the intel core 3 stuff is at best comparable to M5 base. Strix Halo is much more power hungry and also not that impressive other than having a bunch of cores. Nothing comes close to the pro/max chips in M4 series. And with RAM/storage pricing Apple upgrades are looking reasonably priced (TBD when M5 Pro devices launch).

So I can either get a top tier tool when I upgrade this year or I can buy a subpar device, and the power management is going to likely be even worse on Linux.

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I think this mostly only holds if you use local compute in a portable form factor.

Most of my personal development these days is done on my home server - 9995wx, 768GB, rtx 6000 pro blackwell GPU in headless mode. My work development happens in a cloud workstation with 64 cores and 128GB of ram but builds are distributed and I can dial up the box size on demand for heavier development.

I use laptops practically entirely as network client devices. Browser, terminal window, perhaps a VS Code based IDE with a remote connection to my code. Tailscale on my personal laptop to work anywhere.

I'm not limited by local compute, my devices are lightweight, cheap(ish) and replaceable, not an investment.

I'd like to use this kind of setup but unfortunately every time I try there's just soo many annoying edge cases that are wasting my time. Especially when I need to do FE/Mobile - but even BE has gotchas. I guess it depends on your environment - I'll try making this setup work sometimes in the next few months again.

> Mac hardware is like two years ahead of PC currently in pretty much any regard aside from gaming

and any contemporary ergonomics. Seriously, macbooks are an environmental hazard at this point: ultra glossy screen, hand twisting keyboard, wrist cutting sharp edges, lack of modern surge protections etc. etc. I genuinely don't understand this sentiment that macbook hardware is good.

So whatever resources you have, Apple will use them mostly to render 3D glass effects. With Debian (Xfce), I can't speak for other desktop environments, you need roughly three times fewer resources to run the OS itself.

Or you just don't run Tahoe?

Actually, you don't have this choice anymore.

Apple is disabling downgrading across all of iOS, and starting to do the same with MacOS. So you need to keep old hardware to run older MacOS versions, and it's only a matter of a few years before Tahoe is the latest OS you can run on your Mac.

> Actually, you don't have this choice anymore.

I must have taken some shrooms before I downgraded from Tahoe to Sequoia a few hours ago then.

Oh, I must be clear here: I'm not considering M1 Macs or later, since Apple closed the ecosystem with Apple Silicon.

What you did is a downgrade in what's called the supported OS.

However, if you decide to downgrade to Catalina on an M1 Mac, it's not possible — Big Sur is the earliest version that runs on Apple Silicon.

Anyway, you cannot downgrade to a macOS version older than what your Mac originally came with. So if you buy a Mac now, Tahoe will be the minimum option.

Old Macs can certainly be downgraded. iOS doesn’t allow it though and they pulled the latest security update which fucking sucks. And if you buy a M5, Tahoe is the only OS that’s available.

I have nothing against old Macs and MacOS, but I certainly won't be buying anything since the Apple Silicon switch, because now only Apple controls which OS you can run.

>If you buy a machine that isn't even released yet

Uhh, I guess.

AFAIK iOS has been very locked down wrt rolling back upgrades since forever and isn't super relevant to this thread. Happy to be corrected.

M5 MacBook Pros have been shipping for over three months now.

The M5 Pro/Max variants aren't; but an M5 Mac is a thing you could have bought for a good while now.

Here’s the correction.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-m5

The requested correction was on the "iOS has been locked down on downgrading since forever" part and another reply had already provided one for M5 being sold (though only pros seemingly) :)

That's a very temporary solution to be fair. KDE and even, shudder, Gnome put mac os and windows to shame when it comes to responsiveness, performance, and resource usage.

I mean, KDE does 3x the stuff for 1/3 the cost. That's more memory and CPU for your IDE or, more likely, chrome tabs.

There is Asahi Linux project for Apple Silicon Macs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asahi_Linux

It's not really viable

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