Comment by whateverboat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whateverboat | Hacker News Reader

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I'm probably one of the few people who prefer Linux+KDE stack over macbook software ecosystem. But hardware wise, macbooks are just blowing other laptops out of water after M3-M4.

It's not that mac have become much better but that the rest of the lapto pindustry has just gone to shit: 1. Windows pulling more and more shenanigans 2. Normal laptop hardware becoming as pricey as Mac. I could get much better performance as a Linux user from a 1000 Euro laptop that Mac had no alternative for under 2000 Euros. But today, worse performance Linux/Windows laptops are more expensive than Mac. 3. Linux has become much better but the hardware support for laptop is still being bottlenecked by all money going to Windows support. Also, linux has a application ecosystem problem.

I love linux and use it as much as possible. I had a Macbook in 2015-2023 but I preferred linux laptops then. But this year, I had to switch to a new laptop and got a Mac and it is definitely much better than anything on the market just hardware wise.

Software wise I still prefer KDE+Linux.

Indeed there aren’t many of us, but macOS is easily the worst part of the Mac experience, and worryingly it’s getting comparatively worse vs kde or even gnome each year. ‘It’s POSIX’ doesn’t cut it when I deploy to Linux and I work in containers all day anyway (and wsl is better than macOS at this, too, but the rest of windows went downhill real bad recently).

The problem is even before the rampocalypse it just wasn’t possible to get hardware of MacBook quality at any price unless it was an Apple box and nowadays Macs are downright cheap.

My home runs on Linux and my life/career runs on Mac OS.

I look forward to tinkering and tweaking my home lab but I barely remember my interactions with Mac OS. I like it that way.

It surely beats tinkering with my life.

I’m not saying I want tinkering. I’m saying the macOS desktop environment is worse than kde or gnome for work. I definitely don’t include the setting up the box part in that, macOS on Mac is hard to beat here.

Is WSL better for running containers? I find macos really annoying when dealing with containers, especially first setup.

It is baffling to me how many backend devs who work with containers all day don't understand that using containers on mac (and windows) requires a full-blown virtual machine. While in linux you just run them.

Much better IME, especially if you keep all development inside the wsl vm, too (which there is no reason to not do).

Ah right, WSL is already a linux VM so there is no need to run docker inside a VM again. I suppose one can do all dev work in macos inside a VM too which would achieve similar results, but I never seen anyone do that.

Thats my problem. I only tolerate macOS, because of the hardware & battery life. WSL is a better *nix dev env than macOS, at least its real Linux, but like you said, the rest of windows sucks still.

I just want a macbook pro, but Linux. I want the performance, thermals, silence, fantastic screen, touchpad, speakers, etc. I refused to give anything up the mac hardware offers, and the PC OEM industry has just chosen, time and time again, to not bother to compete.

Hopefully these new Nvidia laptops will run Linux, that surface ultra is the first time I feel like a laptop on the other side of the fence will finally offer hardware parity.

FWIW I run real linux VMs on my Mac with Lima. Only limitation is that it can’t use the GPU. Otherwise works great for me. Is WSL functionally equivalent?

WSL supports GPU passthrough.

I think the laptop hardware pre Apple M chips was just terrible and has pretty much stayed that way. There’s a reason why Apple moved away from Intel.

Before M chips an Apple Intel laptop was just a shiny wrapper for a PC laptop experience: fans turn on to full blast all the time, battery lasts <3 hours under any regular usage beyond just browsing (say having an IDE open, and frequently switching between apps). Laptop would get hot to the point where you need padding if you keep it on a lap so you’re not boiling yourself. Made for a good leg warmer during the winter though haha.

With an Apple M4 laptop, the only time I’ve heard the fan turn on is when I almost 100% filled the memory with some local LLM model. I can’t recall any other times. Battery life is finally as advertised, can last many hours, laptop is consistently fast, never gets hot and any CPU throttling is not perceptible under medium to high CPU usage.

Gaming on Linux is also way better than mac since Proton became a big thing.

I too prefer Linux + KDE, overall it has been cause _less_ problems than macOS for me and I like the extra customizability.

The only thing keeping my work computer a mac is that I need to run iOS simulators.

Apart from the GUI environment, the Mac is a Unix and I find it hard to notice much difference between it and a Linux. I use MacPorts on my Macs and there is no drama with command line tools.

On my work Mac I don’t have sudo and I still could install MacPorts with zero issues.

sed has different syntax on macos because macos is based on BSD.

Really annoying to get a ticket "fix this build script for macos" and it is freaking sed compatibility issues.

edit: to be fair that happened once, but it was annoying

MacPorts provides GNU equivalents to the native BSD ones. You can always check if there is a `gsed` binary and use it (or check the OS, but checking direct behavior is always best).

But yes, macOS is a Unix, not a Linux.

Then you run into Mac scripts expecting the BSD ones when you installed GNU. Similar issue with changing shell to bash.

I used Linux for a long time. I still prefer it. But I can’t justify the extra work. Last time I tried to move back to Linux, I spent far too long admiring the machine. This was only 5 years ago.

AI agents are incredibly useful in this regard. Omarchy even releases some skills, so anything you want to configure is just a matter of asking the agent to do it.

Of course, it would've been better not to need it in the first place. However the experience is much better now (and Omarchy is great!)

I shouldn’t need an agent to configure it.

Is this the new “just compile it from source”?

You do not in fact need an agent. Without it, you'll just need more time to inform/educate yourself and do it yourself.

Agents in this case are just accelerators.

Agreed. I've setup many VPS servers. I've configured both Apache and NGINX by hand. It's the sort of thing that I only do sometimes, therefore I have to look up docs each time.

This year, I wanted to run an experiment that was extremely low stakes. I had CC ssh into a VPS and do everything for me. It worked.

Did it have any security gaps? I don't know, I didn't audit. It didn't matter. It was a personal project that had no personal data to risk and the project lasted ~1month (I'd actually audit if I was keeping it). I saw no signs that my server became a bot, fwiw.

I've had agents figure out git repos that were interesting to me but not worth putting in effort on my own. Not things I depend on, just things that I otherwise wouldn't have tested. It's too bad the subsidized pricing is coming to an end. There's a lot that I wouldn't have bothered doing myself that was cheap to have an agent do that won't be worth it again. I'll try out a fraction of the stuff by hand like before and that's fine, but it was a fun ~six months.

I have an M3 ultra and a coworker got a Linux laptop with Omarchy which blows my machine. Don't remember the hardware.

Needless to say my M3 also sucks compared to a very good desktop.

Depends on the workload.

The M3 Ultra is no slouch. It sits at the top with best processors on both single-core and multi-core x64 processors.

Meanwhile my mini PC with a Ryzen 7 8845HS processor, which is nowhere near an M3 Ultra, feels much snappier using it as a day to day desktop in both Linux and Windows. I think this speaks more to the sluggishness of the macOS experience rather than hardware performance.

But, then I start doing something data/gpu/local LLM intensive and my M3 Max shines.

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