Comment by rafaelmn

Comment by rafaelmn 5 days ago

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.

barrkel 5 days ago

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.

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rafaelmn 4 days ago

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.

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wraptile 4 days ago

> 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.

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reconnecting 5 days ago

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.

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deaux 5 days ago

Or you just don't run Tahoe?

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- reconnecting 5 days ago
  
  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.
  
  Reply View | 7 replies
  
  deaux 5 days ago
  
  > 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.
  
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- array_key_first 4 days ago
  
  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.
  
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