15 ms·

You can still install Linux on a mac (which is what I did) and still get a powerful and beautiful machine, if you so desire.

fabianhjr 4y ago
There is almost no firmware support for the recent aarch64 Mac hardware.
vinceguidry 4y ago
Least-worst option if you're stuck running OSX is to run a Linux VM. VMWare makes probably the best solution.
raxxorraxor 4y ago
I use a Mac Book from time to time and the keyboard alone is special... I don't think Mac is a good universal machine for development to be honest. The devices overall are nice, out of the question, but a Linux machine is ultimately more powerful.
- swozey 4y ago
  "Ultimately more powerful" As a previous BSD engineer please explain further, this entire thread is just horrendous and should be downvoted to oblivion. Nobody cares what laptop you decide to use, nor are you incapable of doing your own research. My grandmother calls me for laptop recommendations. My M1 Max 14" MBP has 64gb ram, mucho cores and is the fastest machine I've used. My gaming/dev desktop is a 12core ryzen with 64gb and I prefer to use the Macbook which can sit on my lap without even having a fan running. Did I used to hate Apple? Yes. Do I have a $2500 Dell XPS 13z sitting in a closet that I never use because it throttles so horribly it's useless? Yes.
  - wtetzner 4y ago
    I think you misunderstood "more powerful". I don't think they were referring to the hardware being more powerful, but the OS in terms of its flexibility.
  - formerkrogemp 4y ago
    I'll pay you 5$ and shipping for that XPS.
    - swozey 4y ago
      It's being sent to my mom this week, if you make that $1k I'll do it. It's barely 2 years old and has been awful since I got it. I think I just had higher expectations out of its form factor which can't keep itself cool at all.
      - formerkrogemp 4y ago
        I'm always in support of donating laptops to relatives in need. Good on you.
  - raxxorraxor 4y ago
    Well, you might be able to make it work, but the OS simply leaves you less freedom compared to a Linux machine. And you would need to jump through hoops. I am an embedded dev and I have tried. Theoretically it is possible, but you would miss a lot of tooling on the way. I don't really care about performance that much. I have an MB Air with M1 and I like it because the battery and display is very good. But it isn't really used for productivity. I also work in industry and everything here is Windows and maybe Linux. MacOS doesn't exist here. Good luck attaching your Mac to a reflow soldering machine (I have tried too). It just doesn't play well with others and is rather exclusionary itself.
    - swozey 4y ago
      Unique devices is definitely a concern! I wasn't sure when I got my Garmin watch if I'd be able to update it from my mac. Thankfully I can.
      - barbacoa 4y ago
        I had to connect a work Macbook to Ethernet. It didn't have a port so I bought a no-name brand USB-to-RJ45 adapter off Amazon. Come to find macOS doesn't have driver support for the adapter even though Windows and Linux are both plug and play. And I wasn't willing to do some backdoor process to install drivers on a work laptop. I had to buy a Apple branded adapter, which was 2x the price and only USB 2 vs the other one being USB 3.
        swozey 4y ago
        I have a random off-amazon 2.5gbps usb ethernet adapter on my M1 and it works great. I did specifically make sure someone said it worked on a mac, but wasn't sure about on ARM.
  - eertami 4y ago
    I too have an M1 MBP and XPS 13. I pretty much always use the XPS. Side by side, there is no noticeable difference in speed for my everyday work. The MBP is more efficient for sure, but I get 8+ hours of battery from the XPS which is good enough - and I can run Linux without jumping through hoops. Edit: Missed the 'z', sorry, possibly explains different experiences.
    - swozey 4y ago
      Mine is the ultrabook, the XPS 13z 2n1. It throttles nonstop, I've even gone so far to rip it open and attempted to re-paste everything inside of it. Unfortunately the ultrabook CPU can't be de-lidded and pasted without breaking things, I was actually the first person on /r/dell to rip this laptop open.. The XPS 13 is a much larger device (better cooling). The 13z ruined me ever buying another Dell. I really wanted to love that laptop and NOT buy a $3k macbook. I really want the 2n1 feature.
      - aenis 4y ago
        My wife has one of those things for work. She had to downclock the CPU in order to prevent it from running the fans at full speed for her workflows. After that, it was OK, slow, but at least no longer too loud to have a conversation next to it.
    - Lio 4y ago
      8 hours is amazingly good for an XPS13 in my experience. My XP13 9370 running Fedora lasts maybe 2 hours at a push. I'm actually considering moving back to a 14" MacBook Pro because of the battery life. Rumours of an imminent M2 upgrade are about the only thing stopping me now.
      - swozey 4y ago
        I got the 14" Max when they first came out and it's an absolutely fantastic laptop. I love it. The Max battery life is quite a bit worse than the regular M1, if thats your main concern go with the non-Max.
      - 4y ago
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Different strokes for different folks. My Macbook collects dust whenever I'm home because I'd vastly prefer to do my work on a desktop Linux box. I don't have to spend my time updating coreutils, fighting Homebrew, fixing my screen sharing permissions for the 6th time this month, or really much of anything. My desktop and the systems we deploy to have almost complete parity.
    - password4321 4y ago
      > fighting Homebrew I switched to MacPorts when Homebrew moved on from macOS Mojave... now I wish I had done so much sooner!
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        MacPorts is pretty unstable (in my experience). Felt like 2011-era Arch Linux all over again... Honestly, Nix is the only package manager I really like on Mac.
        password4321 4y ago
        Appreciate the anecdata! Have they straightened out the issue(s) with a read-only root directory, and installation / uninstall? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30917354#30918593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30917354#30918593 > seems to be an issue of macOS and the root dir being read-only > Took me a month to finally remove Nix from my macOS https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/6206#issuecomment-1059381471 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/6206#issuecomment-105938...
        smoldesu 4y ago
        I believe that's fixed upstream. Afaik, those issues stem from some strange FileVault/APFS inconsistencies, and have patches coming to fix it (in it's current incarnation). I don't dev on Macs unless I have to though, so I really couldn't say for sure.
  - freeopinion 4y ago
    If I pay for shipping, would you part with the XPS?
    - swozey 4y ago
      I'll sell it for cheap, ie 1kish but it's going to my mom next week otherwise
  - princevegeta89 4y ago
    How does M1 play with an external 4K monitor? I have a 2020 Mac with the highest fucking configuration (32GB RAM and i7 8-core 10th gen) and the fans on it are always going off. I figure a laptop with a discrete GPU can handle external screens and graphics much better than integrated, but was wondering what your take on the M1 mac for this would be.
    - swozey 4y ago
      I use a 49" Samsung monitor that does 4k and like you mentioned my Intel work macbook pro is constantly spinning fans/hot. The M1 I honestly haven't noticed it making any noise while plugged into it. It also runs a lot better, less graphic glitches and weirdness. I don't like having to use my work mbp at all anymore.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - princevegeta89 4y ago
        To the commenter above this, is the M1 able to handle a 4k resolution on well its own ground?
        matwood 4y ago
        I had an M1 MBA and it ran my 4k monitor fine. I would use it and the laptop screen at the same time. Great machine. I ended up giving it to my wife and getting an M1 MBP because I needed more than 16gb RAM for my workflows.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- lazyier 4y ago
  Apple keyboards are miserable. I don't know why people keep saying that it's so wonderful. I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing. As an Emacs user I find the whole concept of a "touch screen esc key" as deplorable and regressive. And this is on top of the poor reliability and high cost of repair.
  - Unbeliever69 4y ago
    The new macs are (for me) a return to the pre-2015 era but on steroids. My M1 Macbook Air is a blazing fast dev machine for what I do (dockerized full-stack web dev). I do sympathize with all the mac hate during the dreaded 2016-2020 era. I'm glad I held out and skipped that era entirely.
  - tmh88j 4y ago
    >Apple keyboards are miserable > I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing. You have an older version made sometime between 2016-2019. They got rid of the butterfly keyboard for the 2020 models.
    - masklinn 4y ago
      The keys on the new ones still have pretty short travel though. Much shorter than the pre-butterfly generation, which wasn’t very deep in the first place. I can well understand that people who like / want deep key travel would dislike them.
      - tmh88j 4y ago
        I hate the butterfly keyboard too, but most importantly the worthless touchbar is gone and the physical escape key is back.
        4y ago
omginternets 4y ago
Right, but the parent poster is presumably going to spend most of his time under linux, at which point a native linux box seems like the reasonable choice.
brimble 4y ago
The OS and first-party software are at least 50% of the reason I buy Mac hardware, personally. Safari (+20% battery life), Notes (missing a couple features I'd like, but has also never crashed or glitched on me in a decade of use, so...), Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Digital Color Meter, Preview (I love Preview), the excellent and remarkably low-latency Terminal, Mail, et c. Take those away and I'd just go back to buying used Windows laptops on Ebay, putting Linux on them, and being sad.
- moreira 4y ago
  > Take those away and I'd just go back to buying used Windows laptops on Ebay, putting Linux on them, and being sad. Same. It's also interesting to think of this in terms of the real $ value of the OS. If I had to choose between a $1000 Windows laptop or a $2000 macOS laptop, I'd still go for the macOS laptop, even if they had the same specs. The specs of a laptop matter far less to me than the OS and surrounding ecosystem. Same as how a $10K Mac Studio would still be useless for gaming. Could have the world's best GPU, and it would still have no value to anyone looking for a gaming computer.
  - brimble 4y ago
    I'm really, really not happy about there not being a single OS I consider comparable, when it comes to getting work done. It's like the rest are all competing with each other and macOS is just off doing its own (better) thing, while they don't even try to compete with it. I'm tentatively hopeful that Google's new OS will be good enough to compete—after a couple decades of using desktop Linux full-time, then off-and-on, I think its GUI model (and by extension those of the BSDs) is just fundamentally not capable of producing something really good. Too fragmented for mostly-bad reasons, whole stack's too big and creaky and Wayland doesn't seem to be helping with that very much, having it not just separable from but very separate from the base OS causes lots of support-related trouble if you try to target it as a platform, and so on. BeOS was nice. Windows could be nice but they decided to make it adware and spyware and completely ruin the settings screens for no good reason. Sigh.
- boringg 4y ago
mort96 4y ago
So are you suggesting getting a 3+ year old Intel model then? Since the ARM models aren't really supported yet.
ho_schi 4y ago
This will come with a lot of problems and requires extra work. Apple Hardware is not intended by the manufacturer to be used as general purpose computer but to run MacOS.
- lazyier 4y ago
  No kidding. I can walk into any office store, plop down 350 dollars, and get a laptop that will probably work very well with Linux. Any problems I end up hardware-wise is probably going to be the same sort of problems I would run into if I was running Windows. With plenty of companies providing great support for Linux I don't know why anybody would want to deal with Evil Corp Apple and then spend day struggling to get a mostly working system. Apple are the people who make a living on creating and pedaling spyware ffs.
  - ho_schi 4y ago
    Not my words but yes. Giving a corporation money encourages them to keep going that direction further. I would spend more money on Linux certified computers from (e.g. Lenovo, Dell, Purism, System76, Tuxedo...) which hopefully encourages this companies to keep going and improving. A single customer of course doesn't change much but 10.000 do.
chociej 4y ago
YMMV. Linux on the 2019 16" MBP has a lot of issues that make it irritating. It works, but not perfectly by any stretch. And yes the machine is nice, except for the keyboard, which is probably one of the most important parts!

fabianhjr 4y ago

There is almost no firmware support for the recent aarch64 Mac hardware.

vinceguidry 4y ago

Least-worst option if you're stuck running OSX is to run a Linux VM. VMWare makes probably the best solution.

raxxorraxor 4y ago

I use a Mac Book from time to time and the keyboard alone is special... I don't think Mac is a good universal machine for development to be honest. The devices overall are nice, out of the question, but a Linux machine is ultimately more powerful.

swozey 4y ago
"Ultimately more powerful" As a previous BSD engineer please explain further, this entire thread is just horrendous and should be downvoted to oblivion. Nobody cares what laptop you decide to use, nor are you incapable of doing your own research. My grandmother calls me for laptop recommendations. My M1 Max 14" MBP has 64gb ram, mucho cores and is the fastest machine I've used. My gaming/dev desktop is a 12core ryzen with 64gb and I prefer to use the Macbook which can sit on my lap without even having a fan running. Did I used to hate Apple? Yes. Do I have a $2500 Dell XPS 13z sitting in a closet that I never use because it throttles so horribly it's useless? Yes.
- wtetzner 4y ago
  I think you misunderstood "more powerful". I don't think they were referring to the hardware being more powerful, but the OS in terms of its flexibility.
- formerkrogemp 4y ago
  I'll pay you 5$ and shipping for that XPS.
  - swozey 4y ago
    It's being sent to my mom this week, if you make that $1k I'll do it. It's barely 2 years old and has been awful since I got it. I think I just had higher expectations out of its form factor which can't keep itself cool at all.
    - formerkrogemp 4y ago
      I'm always in support of donating laptops to relatives in need. Good on you.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  Well, you might be able to make it work, but the OS simply leaves you less freedom compared to a Linux machine. And you would need to jump through hoops. I am an embedded dev and I have tried. Theoretically it is possible, but you would miss a lot of tooling on the way. I don't really care about performance that much. I have an MB Air with M1 and I like it because the battery and display is very good. But it isn't really used for productivity. I also work in industry and everything here is Windows and maybe Linux. MacOS doesn't exist here. Good luck attaching your Mac to a reflow soldering machine (I have tried too). It just doesn't play well with others and is rather exclusionary itself.
  - swozey 4y ago
    Unique devices is definitely a concern! I wasn't sure when I got my Garmin watch if I'd be able to update it from my mac. Thankfully I can.
    - barbacoa 4y ago
      I had to connect a work Macbook to Ethernet. It didn't have a port so I bought a no-name brand USB-to-RJ45 adapter off Amazon. Come to find macOS doesn't have driver support for the adapter even though Windows and Linux are both plug and play. And I wasn't willing to do some backdoor process to install drivers on a work laptop. I had to buy a Apple branded adapter, which was 2x the price and only USB 2 vs the other one being USB 3.
      - swozey 4y ago
        I have a random off-amazon 2.5gbps usb ethernet adapter on my M1 and it works great. I did specifically make sure someone said it worked on a mac, but wasn't sure about on ARM.
- eertami 4y ago
  I too have an M1 MBP and XPS 13. I pretty much always use the XPS. Side by side, there is no noticeable difference in speed for my everyday work. The MBP is more efficient for sure, but I get 8+ hours of battery from the XPS which is good enough - and I can run Linux without jumping through hoops. Edit: Missed the 'z', sorry, possibly explains different experiences.
  - swozey 4y ago
    Mine is the ultrabook, the XPS 13z 2n1. It throttles nonstop, I've even gone so far to rip it open and attempted to re-paste everything inside of it. Unfortunately the ultrabook CPU can't be de-lidded and pasted without breaking things, I was actually the first person on /r/dell to rip this laptop open.. The XPS 13 is a much larger device (better cooling). The 13z ruined me ever buying another Dell. I really wanted to love that laptop and NOT buy a $3k macbook. I really want the 2n1 feature.
    - aenis 4y ago
      My wife has one of those things for work. She had to downclock the CPU in order to prevent it from running the fans at full speed for her workflows. After that, it was OK, slow, but at least no longer too loud to have a conversation next to it.
  - Lio 4y ago
    8 hours is amazingly good for an XPS13 in my experience. My XP13 9370 running Fedora lasts maybe 2 hours at a push. I'm actually considering moving back to a 14" MacBook Pro because of the battery life. Rumours of an imminent M2 upgrade are about the only thing stopping me now.
    - swozey 4y ago
      I got the 14" Max when they first came out and it's an absolutely fantastic laptop. I love it. The Max battery life is quite a bit worse than the regular M1, if thats your main concern go with the non-Max.
    - 4y ago
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Different strokes for different folks. My Macbook collects dust whenever I'm home because I'd vastly prefer to do my work on a desktop Linux box. I don't have to spend my time updating coreutils, fighting Homebrew, fixing my screen sharing permissions for the 6th time this month, or really much of anything. My desktop and the systems we deploy to have almost complete parity.
  - password4321 4y ago
    > fighting Homebrew I switched to MacPorts when Homebrew moved on from macOS Mojave... now I wish I had done so much sooner!
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      MacPorts is pretty unstable (in my experience). Felt like 2011-era Arch Linux all over again... Honestly, Nix is the only package manager I really like on Mac.
      - password4321 4y ago
        Appreciate the anecdata! Have they straightened out the issue(s) with a read-only root directory, and installation / uninstall? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30917354#30918593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30917354#30918593 > seems to be an issue of macOS and the root dir being read-only > Took me a month to finally remove Nix from my macOS https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/6206#issuecomment-1059381471 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/6206#issuecomment-105938...
        smoldesu 4y ago
        I believe that's fixed upstream. Afaik, those issues stem from some strange FileVault/APFS inconsistencies, and have patches coming to fix it (in it's current incarnation). I don't dev on Macs unless I have to though, so I really couldn't say for sure.
- freeopinion 4y ago
  If I pay for shipping, would you part with the XPS?
  - swozey 4y ago
    I'll sell it for cheap, ie 1kish but it's going to my mom next week otherwise
- princevegeta89 4y ago
  How does M1 play with an external 4K monitor? I have a 2020 Mac with the highest fucking configuration (32GB RAM and i7 8-core 10th gen) and the fans on it are always going off. I figure a laptop with a discrete GPU can handle external screens and graphics much better than integrated, but was wondering what your take on the M1 mac for this would be.
  - swozey 4y ago
    I use a 49" Samsung monitor that does 4k and like you mentioned my Intel work macbook pro is constantly spinning fans/hot. The M1 I honestly haven't noticed it making any noise while plugged into it. It also runs a lot better, less graphic glitches and weirdness. I don't like having to use my work mbp at all anymore.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - princevegeta89 4y ago
      To the commenter above this, is the M1 able to handle a 4k resolution on well its own ground?
      - matwood 4y ago
        I had an M1 MBA and it ran my 4k monitor fine. I would use it and the laptop screen at the same time. Great machine. I ended up giving it to my wife and getting an M1 MBP because I needed more than 16gb RAM for my workflows.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
lazyier 4y ago
Apple keyboards are miserable. I don't know why people keep saying that it's so wonderful. I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing. As an Emacs user I find the whole concept of a "touch screen esc key" as deplorable and regressive. And this is on top of the poor reliability and high cost of repair.
- Unbeliever69 4y ago
  The new macs are (for me) a return to the pre-2015 era but on steroids. My M1 Macbook Air is a blazing fast dev machine for what I do (dockerized full-stack web dev). I do sympathize with all the mac hate during the dreaded 2016-2020 era. I'm glad I held out and skipped that era entirely.
- tmh88j 4y ago
  >Apple keyboards are miserable > I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing. You have an older version made sometime between 2016-2019. They got rid of the butterfly keyboard for the 2020 models.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    The keys on the new ones still have pretty short travel though. Much shorter than the pre-butterfly generation, which wasn’t very deep in the first place. I can well understand that people who like / want deep key travel would dislike them.
    - tmh88j 4y ago
      I hate the butterfly keyboard too, but most importantly the worthless touchbar is gone and the physical escape key is back.
      - 4y ago

omginternets 4y ago

Right, but the parent poster is presumably going to spend most of his time under linux, at which point a native linux box seems like the reasonable choice.

brimble 4y ago

The OS and first-party software are at least 50% of the reason I buy Mac hardware, personally. Safari (+20% battery life), Notes (missing a couple features I'd like, but has also never crashed or glitched on me in a decade of use, so...), Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Digital Color Meter, Preview (I love Preview), the excellent and remarkably low-latency Terminal, Mail, et c. Take those away and I'd just go back to buying used Windows laptops on Ebay, putting Linux on them, and being sad.

moreira 4y ago
> Take those away and I'd just go back to buying used Windows laptops on Ebay, putting Linux on them, and being sad. Same. It's also interesting to think of this in terms of the real $ value of the OS. If I had to choose between a $1000 Windows laptop or a $2000 macOS laptop, I'd still go for the macOS laptop, even if they had the same specs. The specs of a laptop matter far less to me than the OS and surrounding ecosystem. Same as how a $10K Mac Studio would still be useless for gaming. Could have the world's best GPU, and it would still have no value to anyone looking for a gaming computer.
- brimble 4y ago
  I'm really, really not happy about there not being a single OS I consider comparable, when it comes to getting work done. It's like the rest are all competing with each other and macOS is just off doing its own (better) thing, while they don't even try to compete with it. I'm tentatively hopeful that Google's new OS will be good enough to compete—after a couple decades of using desktop Linux full-time, then off-and-on, I think its GUI model (and by extension those of the BSDs) is just fundamentally not capable of producing something really good. Too fragmented for mostly-bad reasons, whole stack's too big and creaky and Wayland doesn't seem to be helping with that very much, having it not just separable from but very separate from the base OS causes lots of support-related trouble if you try to target it as a platform, and so on. BeOS was nice. Windows could be nice but they decided to make it adware and spyware and completely ruin the settings screens for no good reason. Sigh.
boringg 4y ago

mort96 4y ago

So are you suggesting getting a 3+ year old Intel model then? Since the ARM models aren't really supported yet.

ho_schi 4y ago

This will come with a lot of problems and requires extra work. Apple Hardware is not intended by the manufacturer to be used as general purpose computer but to run MacOS.

lazyier 4y ago
No kidding. I can walk into any office store, plop down 350 dollars, and get a laptop that will probably work very well with Linux. Any problems I end up hardware-wise is probably going to be the same sort of problems I would run into if I was running Windows. With plenty of companies providing great support for Linux I don't know why anybody would want to deal with Evil Corp Apple and then spend day struggling to get a mostly working system. Apple are the people who make a living on creating and pedaling spyware ffs.
- ho_schi 4y ago
  Not my words but yes. Giving a corporation money encourages them to keep going that direction further. I would spend more money on Linux certified computers from (e.g. Lenovo, Dell, Purism, System76, Tuxedo...) which hopefully encourages this companies to keep going and improving. A single customer of course doesn't change much but 10.000 do.

chociej 4y ago

YMMV. Linux on the 2019 16" MBP has a lot of issues that make it irritating. It works, but not perfectly by any stretch. And yes the machine is nice, except for the keyboard, which is probably one of the most important parts!