4 ms·

I think quite a lot of Windows laptop works fine with Linux nowadays? Perhaps not out-of-the-box, but they works fine after installing the OS manually (which do

I think quite a lot of Windows laptop works fine with Linux nowadays? Perhaps not out-of-the-box, but they works fine after installing the OS manually (which doesn't really take much time TBH). I'm not sure what software you need for work, but if they are open source they are usually fine with Linux (iirc Mac exclusive projects usually have alternatives) . For cloud stuff, I don't know what you are using so can't really comment about it.

scarface74 4y ago
As long as you don’t care about things like battery life, heat, or your laptop sounding like a 747 under load.
- pca006132 4y ago
  I'm using a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 with a Ryzen 7, which works fine, battery lasts for more than 6 hours if I am not doing computationally intensive work, not as good as a Mac but works for me. The heat is also fine, the fan is not too loud and it doesn't run usually. I think you just have to avoid gaming notebook.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    6 hours of battery life is less than one third of the low end MacBook Air. Unfortunately, because of the prevalence of Electron apps like Teams and Slack. It doesn’t take much to tax an x86 based laptop. Chrome is also a notorious battery hog. It’s nice to be able to treat my laptop like I’ve been treating iPads for a decade - a portable device that you don’t have to worry about running out of battery during a day of normal use.
- ornornor 4y ago
  Not true at all. It does require a bit more semi manual tweaking but you’re being overly dramatic.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    So you can “manually tweak” an x86 laptop to have 20+ hours of battery life and not to get hot and loud under load?
    - ornornor 4y ago
      You can tweak a laptop’s energy settings so that it has comparable battery life whether it’s running windows or Linux. But no, a laptop that has 8h of runtime in windows won’t magically get 20h in Linux.
      - glowingly 4y ago
        I would be lucky if my Thinkpad X1C6 would get the same battery life in Linux as it did in Windows. It usually does well, if I don't open the web browser. As such, despite running 5.18, Wayland, Firefox, "latest nonfree version of ffmpeg with actual 264 codecs," etc etc etc, GPU accelerated decoding of videos is still too much to ask for in FF or MPV. VLC sometimes does it. Sometimes - usually after making sure I have a version of ffmpeg that actually supports the codecs I want to decode. I'm still following an ever deeper series of guides on how to enable ASIC decoding for videos. This is across a few distros (Pop_OS, Fedora Silverblue [using both the bundled FF and the flatpak variant from flathub - not just the Fedora flatpak], Tumbleweed), and it has long been the same story. On my desktop, I have simply regressed to letting FF/MPV/VLC take an extra 15W of power to render a video. On my laptop, I still am trying to find a solution, since it can hardly spare that extra power consumption.
        pca006132 4y ago
        What codec did you try? I'm using Firefox on Linux as well, but hardware decoding seems fine, power consumption reported by powertop is not too high (1.5W?).
        glowingly 4y ago
        On tumbleweed, I've tried the VLC repo's ffmpeg for h264, packman, and now opi codecs. The first and third seem to work for VLC. On Silverblue, I don't recall the exact steps, only that I gave up and just used "enhanced h264ify" to disable h264, in favor of vp9. This still breaks many other websites that use h264, but at least youtube mostly works. Mpv flatpak works, so I just use mpv to render the h264-only videos that youtube still has. Of course, this is one area where snaps has the edge of flatpak, IMO - nice default aliases in the terminal, instead of 'flatpak run io.Mpv.mpv https://youtu.be/watch https://youtu.be/watch.......' or having to create my own, or having to use another program to do it.

scarface74 4y ago

As long as you don’t care about things like battery life, heat, or your laptop sounding like a 747 under load.

pca006132 4y ago
I'm using a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 with a Ryzen 7, which works fine, battery lasts for more than 6 hours if I am not doing computationally intensive work, not as good as a Mac but works for me. The heat is also fine, the fan is not too loud and it doesn't run usually. I think you just have to avoid gaming notebook.
- scarface74 4y ago
  6 hours of battery life is less than one third of the low end MacBook Air. Unfortunately, because of the prevalence of Electron apps like Teams and Slack. It doesn’t take much to tax an x86 based laptop. Chrome is also a notorious battery hog. It’s nice to be able to treat my laptop like I’ve been treating iPads for a decade - a portable device that you don’t have to worry about running out of battery during a day of normal use.
ornornor 4y ago
Not true at all. It does require a bit more semi manual tweaking but you’re being overly dramatic.
- scarface74 4y ago
  So you can “manually tweak” an x86 laptop to have 20+ hours of battery life and not to get hot and loud under load?
  - ornornor 4y ago
    You can tweak a laptop’s energy settings so that it has comparable battery life whether it’s running windows or Linux. But no, a laptop that has 8h of runtime in windows won’t magically get 20h in Linux.
    - glowingly 4y ago
      I would be lucky if my Thinkpad X1C6 would get the same battery life in Linux as it did in Windows. It usually does well, if I don't open the web browser. As such, despite running 5.18, Wayland, Firefox, "latest nonfree version of ffmpeg with actual 264 codecs," etc etc etc, GPU accelerated decoding of videos is still too much to ask for in FF or MPV. VLC sometimes does it. Sometimes - usually after making sure I have a version of ffmpeg that actually supports the codecs I want to decode. I'm still following an ever deeper series of guides on how to enable ASIC decoding for videos. This is across a few distros (Pop_OS, Fedora Silverblue [using both the bundled FF and the flatpak variant from flathub - not just the Fedora flatpak], Tumbleweed), and it has long been the same story. On my desktop, I have simply regressed to letting FF/MPV/VLC take an extra 15W of power to render a video. On my laptop, I still am trying to find a solution, since it can hardly spare that extra power consumption.
      - pca006132 4y ago
        What codec did you try? I'm using Firefox on Linux as well, but hardware decoding seems fine, power consumption reported by powertop is not too high (1.5W?).
        glowingly 4y ago
        On tumbleweed, I've tried the VLC repo's ffmpeg for h264, packman, and now opi codecs. The first and third seem to work for VLC. On Silverblue, I don't recall the exact steps, only that I gave up and just used "enhanced h264ify" to disable h264, in favor of vp9. This still breaks many other websites that use h264, but at least youtube mostly works. Mpv flatpak works, so I just use mpv to render the h264-only videos that youtube still has. Of course, this is one area where snaps has the edge of flatpak, IMO - nice default aliases in the terminal, instead of 'flatpak run io.Mpv.mpv https://youtu.be/watch https://youtu.be/watch.......' or having to create my own, or having to use another program to do it.