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Comment by brycewray | Hacker News Reader

It's not just the Apple Silicon Macs, either; I have a 2017-model Intel Mac which runs any number of distros just fine except that sleep just doesn't work right. No amount of keystrokes or mouse-clicks will wake it up if it sleeps.

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Have you tried very recently? I have a 2018 Macbook Pro with touchbar and the progress on getting T2 macs working lately has been amazing - 3 months ago I was having issues but I reinstalled last week with a 7 kernel and it has been flawless: suspend, restore, touchbar, fan control all great.

Sorry I didn't respond earlier. Mine isn't a T2 Mac. Also, I've actually been doing some distro-hopping in recent days --- switching among Fedora, the Arch-based CachyOS, and the Fedora-based (and very-early-stage) RakuOS --- and the sleep problem has been consistent among all three. I also have tried Debian, and Debian-based distros, in the past and seen the same issue. I have a nagging feeling that it's something really simple but have no idea what.

I've also been frustrated by the whole old-Mac-on-Linux problem with internal speakers, as I've written before:

https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2023/09/sound-reasoning/

On your post: I really don’t get why a widely used/available and pretty standard (as in there aren’t 5000 weird variations - more or less one per device of 4-5 devices per year, mostly the same controllers for most things) group of hardware doesn’t get more love from the Linux community. It’s the perfect case for showing the superiority of the open source model and the devices are amazing for their age.

Without any bloat it could show that they also perform reasonably well and it also solves the gaming problem on Mac.

I’ve also updated a few patches but it seems to be a pain to submit these.

> it also solves the gaming problem on Mac

Yep, I admit that it's my main use of Linux. My daily driver for everything non-games-related is my 2023 (Apple Silicon) Mac Studio, but for Steam stuff I go to the old Intel iMac and whatever distro I'm running on it at the time.

Is there anything stopping this from being thrown some investment plus LLM tokens? I wonder what a KVM connected to the machine plus a few thousand in Astra/Fable tokens could do here. It seems funny to think of software feature defects in OSS software now if people are building full recombinations of closed source software daily now!

It's hard to debug sleep in a VM or some self contained system. You need to physically interact with the laptop, reboot it after it gets stuck, etc.

Add a tool to the harness you use that can ping you on Telegram/whatever when it gets stuck and need you to do stuff physically, tell it to use it in the workflow with you. Used this approach a bunch with Codex to work on and debug hardware stuff. Once every 5-15 minutes I receive my command, and as a good r̶o̶b̶o̶t̶ human I moved the resistor/patch cable in the way the agent instructed me, eventually it got things working in the way I wanted it to.

In Soviet Russia, LLM prompts you.

Presumably, that would be what the KVM/some kind of power switch would be used for

Wow thank you for saying this. Always thought it’s my problem(because its the same with my 4 OSes), some misconfiguration etc. Mine doesn’t reboot, I am always turning off and on after SSD change; and I thought it’s about that.

Same problem with iMac - got 5k mostly working and a patch for audio using my favorite coding assistant, but that final bit remains tricky. Will post to GitHub if I can solve it.

Yep, mine also is an iMac (mid-2017 model).

ChatGPT just found a solution to the sleep problem - but it only works if I deactivate wake on wlan, which would defy the purpose of enabling suspend for me (I use it as my remote development box, want to be able to ssh into it and don’t have any cables in that room).

Will update once I’ve solved this.

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