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Out of the box, most Linux boxes are broke, especially with new hardware when compared to the status quo Macbook Pro. You have to wrestle with kernels, hardwar
by 2bluesc 10y ago
Out of the box, most Linux boxes are broke, especially with new hardware when compared to the status quo Macbook Pro. You have to wrestle with kernels, hardware, software updates, different pkg repos, GPU power management, GPU drivers, touchpad, HiDPI, Thunderbolt, etc. (HN: please spare me the drama of quoting this list and nitpicking, you know a subset of it is true.)
My Dell precision 5510 (optionally ships from Dell with Ubuntu) takes an hour or two of work from a competent Linux nerd to be on par with a Macbook. In the past I owned a System76 Galago Ultra Pro which prides itself on being Linux ready. Instead it shipped with impressively miserable battery life, "meh" keyboard, and no UEFI (what year is it@!?).
If Consumer Reports were to review either of those laptops, they would give it a failing grade relative to a Macbook Pro.
Yet Linux still thrives fueled by the DIY or open source communities. These communities look for different thing out of the box. Furthermore, the person who consider Linux would have probably discovered the Safari bug LONG before it took Apple + Consumer Reports to find the real cause. This person would probably run Chrome or Firefox until the inevitable fix rolled out from Apple.
- nkkollaw 10y agoSo, the reason for the inconsistent battery life was a Sufari bug (I just scanned the article, didn't read the whole thing)?
- 2bluesc 10y agoPretty much[0]: > After working with Apple over the holidays, Consumer Reports now says that the problem was caused by an "obscure" Safari bug specific to page caching, which the publication disables when it runs its battery tests. To test battery life, Consumer Reports sets laptop screens to a specific brightness level and then loads a series of webpages in the laptop's default browser (Safari in this case) in a loop until the battery dies. Apple suggests that disabling browser caching for a test like this doesn't reflect real-world use, but it does make sense for a synthetic test—users will continually read new pages rather than visiting the same static pages over and over again, so Consumer Reports wants to make sure that its test is actually downloading data over the network rather than simply reading cached data from the disk. [0] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2017/01/consumer-reports-will-re-test-macbook-pro-batteries-after-apple-fixes-bugs/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2017/01/consumer-reports-will-r...
- nkkollaw 10y agoWhat about users that reported bad battery life?
- rbanffy 10y agoMigrating to a new Mac puts some stress on battery while everything is indexed for Spotlight or backed up to a Time Capsule. That's why Macs will tend to have bad battery life in their first few days.
- nkkollaw 10y agoMeh. Doesn't everyone just restores from a previous backup? Why would one start from scratch? Most importsntly, I doubt a developer wouldn't see there's a process draining the battery.