[capableweb]

Prefacing this with that I'm not normally a Apple fan and use Linux on Intel and AMD CPUs as my daily driver.

Apple does do incredible hardware, but their software is really crappy, from UX to reliability and being general useful. Since the M1 appeared, I've been looking at purchasing it only for the hardware, but then run something like Arch Linux on it, as that software experience is really hard to beat.

So in short, the combination of Apple hardware but Open Source/Linux software makes a lot of sense and is a pleasure to work with. The hardware Apple been producing lately been kind of shit though, so it's not until now it starts being interesting again.

[josephg]

Yeah I’ve been an apple fan for years. As of a couple of days ago my work desk has a M1 MacBook pro and a ryzen x5800 running Linux Mint. The CPUs are remarkably similar - same core count, and only slightly different single core performance. So the only main difference is software.

I expected the MacBook to blow Linux out of the water - after all, their hardware and software integration is excellent. The trackpad drivers and consistent UI is fantastic. But watching CPU usage on both machines, Linux mint stays lean and quiet while the MacBook has all sorts of weird processes popping up to do who knows what.

On macos the “WindowServer” process sometimes just pegs an entire core until I reboot. My usb-c Ethernet dongle doesn’t do hardware offload, so cpu usage goes way up when I use it. Firefox uses way more CPU on macos than it does on Linux. And there’s random processes all the time reporting things to apple or other garbage like that. I’ve been googling process names all day trying to figure out what all this crap does. Spotify alone uses 10% of a core on macos sometimes, even when it’s not even playing music.

It was a pain to get Linux working how I want it to. But now that it’s mostly[1] set up, it feels snappier and more reliable than macos. When I don’t touch the computer, it settles at 0% CPU; just like it should. I suppose that’s what the desktop looks like without the last decade of macos features that nobody really cares about.

I’m really surprised how close the competition feels between my two machines; though I miss Snow Leopard.

[1] Keyboard shortcuts on are all over the place in Linux though. And I can’t even set keyboard shortcuts up how I’d like because intellij can’t use the meta key as a modifier. And the Linux trackpad drivers are nowhere near as well tuned as they are in macos. In linux the trackpad is way too sensitive. I’m sure there’s a way to fix it hiding in a config file somewhere.