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I have both a latest generation Thinkpad P1 Gen5 and Macbook Pro 16 inch M1 pro and while it is true that Macbook comes pretty close to being a perfect laptop,

I have both a latest generation Thinkpad P1 Gen5 and Macbook Pro 16 inch M1 pro and while it is true that Macbook comes pretty close to being a perfect laptop, I still miss the productivity of a Linux laptop (for backend dev work). From what hardware POV you are correct, I wish though Apple would adopt Carbon Magnesium chasis that thinkpad uses. For same 16inch size, Thinkpad is noticeably lighter. I can happy lug my P1 Gen5(16 inch) model anywhere, whereas 16inch macbook pro is hefty.

sem000 4y ago
What is your Linux laptop giving you that your MBP doesn’t? And how does it hurt your productivity? Genuinely curious as I don’t see how it can be any different.
- justahuman74 4y ago
  Presumably that it's running Linux and can be customized as wanted. Also docker runs without a VM, so the networking and storage performance is good
- smoldesu 4y ago
  For me: - No nagware (no Apple Music pop-ups, advertisements for safari, login nag in settings, et. al) - Built-in package manager - Having (relative) parity between production and development Between those three, you probably couldn't pay me to go back to MacOS. Adding my own package manager, disabling ads and making my Mac into a Linux-equivalent machine is possible, but it's a lot of work to maintain and set up. If I was a creative and used Adobe/Microsoft tools, I might be a little nicer to MacOS. As a programmer though? I haven't felt the desire to use a Mac since Mojave existed.
  - mfer 4y ago
    I have an M1 Pro MBP and Linux running on a Framework laptop. The Linux built in package manager is only ok. It often lags behind in versions of things I need. I ended up using Homebrew on both Mac and Linux. For the cases the Linux built-in package manager is too out of date I use Homebrew. It's not perfect on either system. > - Having (relative) parity between production and development For certain classes of development this is a big deal. For my container work it doesn't really matter. I'm running Rancher Desktop and doing container based dev in the VM. Windows, Linux, or Mac doesn't matter as the host. > - No nagware (no Apple Music pop-ups, advertisements for safari, login nag in settings, et. al) I must have learned to ignore this as I've had Macs for a couple decades now. On the flip side, a lot of business software I must use for work isn't available on Linux. I think this is the biggest problem for GNU/Linux as a general OS. There's some biz software that just doesn't run there.
    - counttheforks 4y ago
      > The Linux built in package manager is only ok. It often lags behind in versions of things I need No such thing. What distributions did you have experience with? And what distributions are you running on your production systems?
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      I have a 13" Macbook Pro and a Thinkpad model I forget the name of. Homebrew is down-right bad. There are certainly worse Linux package managers (pacman... looking at you), but if you're using MacOS I'd highly recommend giving Nix a try. Less muss-and-fuss, and stopped me from sending my Macbook on a swim in the local river. > For my container work it doesn't really matter. That's fine, it doesn't really for me either. The nice part (for me) is the native Docker and fantastic filesystem support. Whereas MacOS feels like a product I'm turning into a tool, Linux systems tend to feel like a tool out-of-box. Different strokes for different folks though, it really just depends on what you want out of a computer. > I must have learned to ignore this I must have learned to appreciate living without it, then. It's pretty jarring returning to a monetized OS like Windows 11 or Monterey for me. > a lot of business software I must use for work isn't available on Linux Oh yeah, for sure. Like I said in my previous comment, I wouldn't use Linux if I was a lawyer or a video editor. That being said though, pretty much everything I've used in the modern enterprise is browser-based. You don't need a native Jira app or a custom .DMG to run git. Arguably, everything you need is shipped right with most Linux distros. I won't (and haven't) argued that Linux is perfect, but MacOS is converging with the Windows and Google school of desktop design. It worries me, and it's part of why I left MacOS in the first place. Photoshop is nice, but living on a computer that feels like a rented hotel room isn't very satisfying to me. Again, different strokes.
      - travisgriggs 4y ago
        > Homebrew is down-right bad. Curious why? I used to dabble with it and others. A few macs ago (maybe around 2017), I switched to a strategy of “either the AppStore or brew”. I’ve never had a problem with anything from brew since. I install some productivity tools, standard OS tooling (Inkscape, Gimp, Libre), everything I need to develop for Python, Android, various embedded arm platforms, Elixir/Erlang. I even add some extra tools for Swift development.
  - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
    For me: I have a Macbook Air M1 2020 and a Thinkpad X1 Carbon 7th Gen (4 years old!) running Linux Mint. I have upgraded the Thinkpad's Battery, RAM (16GB), and SSD (500GB) for the cost of the parts. I will not be able to do that on the Macbook. Ever. For what I do (browsing, videos, some writing and research) the only benefit to the Macbook is slightly better battery life. I have more software option on the Thinkpad for sure and it does not want to control everything I do. I paid WAY less for the thinkpad and I get pretty much the same performance for my needs. The THRUTH is that most people are being way oversold computing power and paying a premium for it because they are locked into the platform. And just yesterday for some reason Safari vanished and re-arranged my bookmarks for no reason. Getting my MacBook ready to sell as a matter of fact. In my mind it is stupid (and poor marketing) that the linux community is not crushing Apple with cheap, fast laptops.
    - manuelabeledo 4y ago
      > In my mind it is stupid (and poor marketing) that the linux community is not crushing Apple with cheap, fast laptops. That is not how the economics of laptops work. Most people don't want a Linux laptop. Call it inertia, but it is a fact that most people buy Windows laptops. Most of the premium market consumers prefer Apple. And most people who prefer Linux aren't paying a premium right now. So you have three sets that do not overlap, and there is nothing the community can do about that in the short to medium term, anyway.
  - Lio 4y ago
    Apple nagware is a pain in the arse. On my old MBP I get regularly nagged to update to Monterey. Despite it not being supported. On my iPhone it wouldn't stop nagging me to accept changes to the iCloud T&Cs. There was no permanent opt out. You could say no for a bit and then it would go back to nagging you. Same with Apple Music. Currently my iPhone nags me to disable background running of Garmin Connect, so that I loose integration with my Garmin watch. None of this endears Apple to me and is definitely a consideration for my next purchase.
- dbeley 4y ago
  Thinkpads will always have better keyboards, better connectivity and the trackpoint for them.
- lynndotpy 4y ago
  For my experience, as a longtime Linux user who got a MBP: I really miss the desktop environments available on Linux. KDE is great, and even Gnome beats MacOS. You can't even move windows between desktops with a keyboard shortcut on MacOS. The desktop experience on MacOS is a "death by a thousand cuts" situation. E.g. Popup dialogues will rearrange your windows (e.g. if the popup is wider than your window, to remain centered, it will move the underlying window and I'm not joking.) E.g. Mouse acceleration can't be turned off, which makes MacOS pretty awful for any mouse-centric workflows. E.g. Blocking animations that fundamentally can't be turned off. That's on top of things that aren't necessarily faults with MacOS, such as getting used to different keyboard shortcuts. On Linux, I get native Docker, up-to-date coreutils (they're different on MacOS), more precompiled versions of software I use, and having the Linux desktop software that I prefer. (Finder is frustrating, Gedit or Kate for text editing is great, GIMP is much nicer on Linux, etc.) I also miss KDEConnect. I don't use Xcode, but as I understand, updating it messes with git and python. But the battery life really is amazing enough to make it worth it. I'm really excited for Asahi to progress to a point that I'm comfortable using it.
  - TheKnack 4y ago
    Apps like Keyboard Maestro or BetterTouchTool can resolve almost every Macos usability complaint that I've heard. Keyboard Maestro can move windows between desktops with a keyboard shortcut, for example, and there are multiple ways to disable mouse acceleration. For almost every missing feature or annoyance in Macos, someone else has had the same thought and developed a solution. https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/move-frontmost-window-to-a-different-space/10512 https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/move-frontmost-window-to...
    - gspencley 4y ago
      Can it resolve me not being able to use MATE as the desktop environment? My biggest gripe with Mac OS X is the window manager. I want to be able to ALT+right-click anywhere on a window to be able to move it around, alt+left-click anywhere on a window to resize it. I want to be able to click the dock icon for an app I'm using and have the most recently used window of that app come to the foreground instead of however it makes that decision. I'd love to get preview thumbnails of windows when hovering over icons in the doc so that I can select the window I want. Right-click plus reading window titles takes longer to find the window I need. I want to be able to customize my fonts because I have a hard time reading text on my QHD external monitor. I want a terminal that doesn't suck (and yes I use iterm2, it still sucks because I can't quickly jump to the end / beginning of a line to edit a command). I want to be able to select text to copy to clipboard and use my middle mouse button to paste and I want that to work for all programs. I want to be able to hold ctrl plus use the mouse wheel to zoom in / out of web pages on chrome ... something Linux and Windows both do out of the box but it just doesn't work on Mac OS X. I want to be able to customize all of this and not feel like I'm locked in to "the Apple way" of doing things. I lot of this is just familiarity and getting really used to a particular DE over decades of use and taking little things for granted. If all you've ever used is a Mac then I'm sure you've figured out how to be hyper-productive on that DE. I just find it strange that, from a company that somehow positioned itself as UX leaders ... I find that I'm 1/10th as productive on my work Macbook as I am on any nix device (and while Mac might use a heavily modified NetBSD kernel IIRC and have zsh and bash ... it feels very different from a nix machine to me).
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
  >32gb of ram
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  Others have filled in some of the productivity benefits, but it also avoids a thousand little papercuts. It doesn't have uninstallable crapware like Apple News.
- nequo 4y ago
  A ThinkPad X1 Carbon is cheaper, lighter, has a better keyboard, and on Linux I can run the DE that has the defaults/customizations and keybindings that I am used to. I also don't have to worry (or at least I think that I don't) that the Linux kernel or my distro silently introduces a hack for their programs to bypass my firewall and VPN because they couldn't fix some bugs by the company-mandated release date: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/apple-nixes-feature-that-let-apps-bypass-vpn/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/apple-nixes-...
- gnufied 4y ago
  I work on container stuff, so may be my POV is bit different but: 1. I had hard time fighting openssl installed by Homebrew and getting Python to use it. On Linux - this is never an issue. In general IMO using homebrew is fairly tedious. 2. Debugging of stuff running on Linux. Sometimes logging is not enough and while remote debugging can be made to work (I mainly use Goland), it is pretty fiddly and does not work reliably. I am not new to Mac or anything tbh. I used to use Mac about 5 years ago exclusively and then Linux for next 5 years and now using Mac again. IMO for kind of work I do - Linux is just leaps ahead of Mac.
- rkangel 4y ago
  There are some really weird things. The only sustained usage of Macs I've had is a Mac Mini (x86) that I had for app development. Even just plugging in a plain old UK layout USB keyboard (not an Apple one) and having it behave itself and give me the right characters was surprisingly difficult.
- dpz 4y ago
  Biggest things for me - I've never found a good WM that can replace what bspwm can do. - Something as useful as pacman, brew is no where near as good. - Full control over my system. Plus I can run my set up on a £30 chromebook and be nearly as efficient as my ~£1800 Work laptop.
- Leimi 4y ago
  Some workflows on a linux system can be totally different than what is possible on a mac. Even with apps like BetterTouchTool, Hammerspoon, Amethyst and others. Customizing window management, advanced keyboard shortcuts, general system behavior in mac is going against the tide. It kinda works, but never as good as you'd want because you can't really get rid of the default window manager and default global behavior. Some window manager in linux are more like window manager frameworks, like AwesomeWM, that lets you customize its behavior via lua scripting. It's extremely powerful and allows you to get exactly the behavior you want. But this part of linux is pretty niche stuff for sure though haha. I wouldn't say I'm more productive thanks to this, but I'm way happier using a system I can set up so that it behaves how I want, instead of having to follow rules I don't agree with and can't change.
- somethingreen 4y ago
  - window management that is either sane (i.e. restores minimized windows when alt/cmd+tab'ed to) or can be customized - desktop environment that is either sane (i.e. doesn't center align panels with variable number of controls like dock does) or can be customized - keyboard without missing buttons, with actual button travel yet not touching the screen when closed - option of a screen that doesn't double as mirror
interpol_p 4y ago
I have the same complaint about weight I upgraded from the 13" M1 Air to the 14" MacBook Pro M1 Max While Blender performance (rendering especially) is much faster, I sorely miss the MacBook Air's portability. The 14" is built like a brick. Compile times are faster, video editing is nicer with more RAM in the Pro, but it's a really tough call given just how different the weight is
- Kognito 4y ago
  Agreed, a high end machine in the Air form factor would be great. The M2 is more than enough compute-wise for my SWE workflow, but it's not a great deal once you start bumping the RAM and adding storage when compared to the base 14 inch (+ the extra benefits you get with the 14" screen, etc).
- walthamstow 4y ago
  I just got my work machine upgraded to the 14in Pro from the 13in M1 Air recently. I think overall the extra screen pixels are worth the weight tradeoff. It's only a little heavier and I don't really notice it on my back when I'm cycling I did love the M1 Air though! Probably the best laptop I've ever used pound-for-pound.
_fzslm 4y ago
iTerm2 and lima [1] with a ARM64 Linux virtual machine w/ Rosetta (so I can still run x86_64 Linux code!) enabled me to fall in love with my MacBook Pro in this regard. i feel more productive than on a Linux machine now. MacOS is not without its developer power tools, if you dig around enough! [1] https://github.com/lima-vm/lima https://github.com/lima-vm/lima
- xtracto 4y ago
  For me MacBookPro with M2 chips would be perfect if the 13in model allowed 64GB RAM. My workflow requires me to run Docker (intel images) heavily with several containers. Having a virtualization layer is pretty resource consuming. Usually the Docker + containers I use take around 5GB RAM alone. Under that configuration I've found 32GB to be just within the limit of usability. 16GB are just not enough. Also, for some virtualized Docker workflows, there is that known issue of slow File interaction through the Mac/virtualized file system, which makes working with say Magento, Drupal or simlar software REALLY slow. As a comparison, I've also got a 2011 intel MacBookPro with 16GB RAM. That one is running Linux Mint. Docker performance is almost transparent, and the system runs pretty snappy for development.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    What software are you using that doesn't have ARM versions available? I think it goes without saying that a machine with an ARM processor is not going to be ideal if you're frequently working with x86-specific software.
    - mbreese 4y ago
      I've needed some scientific software that still doesn't have ARM64 libraries available, so thus are stuck on x86. RStudio, for example, has a lot of dependencies and only recently starting offering experimental support for aarch64 on Linux.
  - outcoldman 4y ago
    Really don't understand why Apple still selling 13" MBP, as MBP 14 is much better, and you can get it with up to 96GB of memory now. I would assume they keep 13" just for people who still likes TouchBar.
api 4y ago
A VM on the Mac will run longer on battery with less heat than a Linux installation on a native Linux x64 laptop. Of course if you need to have your laptop be x64 to match cloud architecture then that's different. Or you could just use ARM in the cloud and save even more carbon emissions.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Exactly. My strategy for this for my personal projects is mostly ARM VMs. In a couple of cases I have to run x86, and I run a used HP thin client at home as what I call a “physical VM”. I then use tailscale to connect from anywhere.
- hra5th 4y ago
  If you need to interact with connected peripherals from the linux environment a VM is still usually a much less productive experience. I do a lot of embedded development, and while it is often possible to do USB passthrough to connected boards, lots of things don't work the same as they do when running Linux natively, and I have never found it to be a seamless experience (on VirtualBox or VMWare)
jackosdev 4y ago
I have Asahi Linux installed on mine, it works great including the GPU, I’m mainly developing for ARM64 AWS Lambdas now as well so it’s nice having the same arch. Some things are still missing like webcam, microphone and speakers, but the headphone Jack works and Bluetooth is OK just a bit choppy, incredible project.
- counttheforks 4y ago
  So it works great except half the hardware doesn't work and it's entirely unsupported by Apple, to whom you paid a significant premium for the hardware?
  - smith7018 4y ago
    That tends to be how Linux works outside of standard platforms, yes. It takes time for developers to write drivers.
    - counttheforks 4y ago
      It works great on my custom built PC, and my store bought laptop. Both are perfectly normal pieces of hardware, not apple's weird stuff.
  - grozzle 4y ago
    It's a work in progress, users are generally confident that the remaining hardware will gain Asahi support sooner or later. The fact that Asahi is such a popular project is a pretty strong indicator of how much room for improvement MacOS has, to put it as politely as I can. Personally, I wouldn't even consider buying a new Mac if there wasn't any good alternate native OS available.
  - deleted 4y ago
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- throwaway2037 4y ago
  I know this isn't an Asahi Linux thread, but I cannot help to ask about it. Plus I am big fan of Alyssa Rosenzweig's work (and Justine Tunney), so I pay close attention to Asahi Linux (and LibCosmo/politan) progress. First, it's great to hear from Real World people like you about their Asahi Linux experience. It sounds like the baseline is done and now they will pick away at the remaining pieces. Real question: What is the driver for Asahi Linux to exist at all? Please don't think I am trolling when I ask this question. At 10,000ft, any sane person would say: "Why? It's Apple. Let them do them: Mac OS X." I expect Asahi Linux folks to reply: "Well, duh: Because." Is it unlocking the insane performance per watt of Apple Mx chips for Linux? Is it enabling the world's greatest laptops for Linux? Is it the pure technical challenge of reverse engineering a closed hardware system? Is it everything? I am really curious to hear what people think.
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isolli 4y ago
What really pushed me towards Apple is that Lenovo offers a very limited set of configurations to us Europeans. No way to get the best machine from them, even if we're willing to pay for it.
- yoavm 4y ago
  I have an X1 Yoga that I got here in the Netherlands, and I had plenty of choices when configuring it, including OS. What are you missing exactly?
  - bogantech 4y ago
    When I was looking at getting an X1 Carbon, the US site had better options for things like the screen etc
  - isolli 4y ago
    I was looking to buy a Lenovo Thinkpad T14 Gen 3, and I could not get a better screen resolution than 1920 x 1200. I just checked and 3840 x 2400 is now available. They may have had supply chain issues. But it's too late for me. Also, their ARM laptop is only available with Windows.
    - citilife 4y ago
      Almost everyone with thinkpad gets the windows version and just puts linux on it. It's relatively easy, depending on your distro.
- Foobar8568 4y ago
  I have seen the contrary... But for parts, we are screwed.
- stonecharioteer 4y ago
  I had the same problem with Lenovo here in India. I bought an Asus instead. got a Ryzen 9 6800 machine with 32gb ram and a 3050ti. amazingly good with Fedora.
CobaltFire 4y ago
I had a P1 Gen 4 and went to a 14” M1 MBP and agree. Screen was a bit better in most ways, keyboard was massively better, and the 16” was lighter (barely) than my 14”. That said, I ran Win11 (my work environment requires Win) and MacOS is a straight upgrade to that IMO. I do miss that machine though.
firstSpeaker 4y ago
Could you elaborate what is preventing it from being the perfect backend dev laptop?
- klodolph 4y ago
  I’m not the person you asked—but a ton of developer tooling just runs better on Linux. Installation is usually easier too—on a Mac, there’s Homebrew, but Homebrew doesn’t have the best user experience. All the GUI productivity apps run better on a Mac—image editors, IDEs / text editors, apps like Slack or Zoom or whatever.
  - recuter 4y ago
    What specific developer tooling runs better on linux? If you're one of those Nix masochists I hear that runs on the Mac as well.
    - rgrmrts 4y ago
      Fwiw you can use nix (the package manager) and the nixpkgs package repository without ever learning or writing a single line of nix (the language). My introduction was to use nix instead of brew and ignore the whole "declarative configuration" aspect. It took me a while to get comfortable enough with that part of the ecosystem, but that's irrelevant to my point. Give nix a try, use it like you'd use brew. Ignore the declarative configuration stuff for a bit.
      - recuter 4y ago
        What benefit would joining your cult bestow upon me that brew does not already? My brew list is intentionally very short and my faffing about desire is limited. Generally I use brew to pull in asdf (https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf) to install programming languages/tooling, it works flawlessly. I use Pipx (https://github.com/pypa/pipx https://github.com/pypa/pipx) to install python thingies (such as yt-dlp) as a cli. Go and Rust handle binaries in their languages beautifully and without issues.
StreamBright 4y ago
As a heavy Linux user for two decades I disagree. You can't even talk about Linux vs MacOS because the actual distribution you use matters a lot more than the kernel when you talk about productivity. Using Mint, Elementary or whichever GUI distribution you would like to use with the Linux kernel has completely different tradeoffs in terms of GUI, which implies different productivity levels. There is more. Even with the best case scenario you need to customise the GUI much more than you need to customise MacOS, for example energy management is a bit a of problem for most Linux based distros. This simply happens because Apple owns the whole vertical from HW to GUI and they focus on the user. They have done this for decades. There is no such entity in the non-Apple world and this means there is more work for the user when trying to create a working environment.
- jonnycomputer 4y ago
  I've been finding that the Budgie desktop is pretty great. Very Mac-like.
  - StreamBright 4y ago
    I wasn't aware. Thanks for recommending it.
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  And Linux keeps failing because of companies like System76 which cannot seem to build, or partner with a company, to be this competition. Lenovo would crush Apple if it partnered with the Linux Community and made a cheap (in price!) everyday laptop for the consumer and focused on privacy and no lock in.
  - kkielhofner 4y ago
    “Lenovo would crush Apple if it partnered with the Linux Community” No it wouldn’t. Users (the 99%) don’t care about privacy, tech, etc. They happily give their data up to TikTok (the CCP), Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. The Snowden revelations were met with a shrug or “I have nothing to hide”. This is well beyond established at this point (these platforms have billions of users). They also don’t care about lock in - they just want stuff that works and adds as much as it can to their lives in as little effort as possible. The Apple ecosystem is incredibly successful because it does this exceedingly well. They view lock in as a positive - “All my stuff just works together - here’s more money Apple”. The average person cares as much and is as involved in all of this as I am in understanding how my light switch is related to the function and operation of a nuclear reactor. The amount of care, time, thought, and energy I put into that is the cumulative total of the three seconds I spend interacting with light switches everyday. I’m not disparaging users. I use the nuclear reactor analogy because I don’t care, I don’t need to care, and I shouldn’t have to care. I, (like most people) have only so much bandwidth for time, energy, and passion. I leave worrying and caring about all of that up to everyone from the people who mine uranium to the electrician that wires up the switches. On HN we're the uranium miners, nuclear physicists, power companies, linemen, and electricians. We're the few people who do know and care about any of this "tech stuff".
cpuguy83 4y ago
I doubt the chassis is adding that much weight. MacBooks are largely battery. The MacBook Air is also significantly lighter than a pro despite having the same basic chassis.
- gnufied 4y ago
  I am not sure. The Thinkpad has 90WH battery and Macbook has 99WH, it is bigger but not 362gm heavier.

sem000 4y ago

What is your Linux laptop giving you that your MBP doesn’t? And how does it hurt your productivity? Genuinely curious as I don’t see how it can be any different.

justahuman74 4y ago
Presumably that it's running Linux and can be customized as wanted. Also docker runs without a VM, so the networking and storage performance is good
smoldesu 4y ago
For me: - No nagware (no Apple Music pop-ups, advertisements for safari, login nag in settings, et. al) - Built-in package manager - Having (relative) parity between production and development Between those three, you probably couldn't pay me to go back to MacOS. Adding my own package manager, disabling ads and making my Mac into a Linux-equivalent machine is possible, but it's a lot of work to maintain and set up. If I was a creative and used Adobe/Microsoft tools, I might be a little nicer to MacOS. As a programmer though? I haven't felt the desire to use a Mac since Mojave existed.
- mfer 4y ago
  I have an M1 Pro MBP and Linux running on a Framework laptop. The Linux built in package manager is only ok. It often lags behind in versions of things I need. I ended up using Homebrew on both Mac and Linux. For the cases the Linux built-in package manager is too out of date I use Homebrew. It's not perfect on either system. > - Having (relative) parity between production and development For certain classes of development this is a big deal. For my container work it doesn't really matter. I'm running Rancher Desktop and doing container based dev in the VM. Windows, Linux, or Mac doesn't matter as the host. > - No nagware (no Apple Music pop-ups, advertisements for safari, login nag in settings, et. al) I must have learned to ignore this as I've had Macs for a couple decades now. On the flip side, a lot of business software I must use for work isn't available on Linux. I think this is the biggest problem for GNU/Linux as a general OS. There's some biz software that just doesn't run there.
  - counttheforks 4y ago
    > The Linux built in package manager is only ok. It often lags behind in versions of things I need No such thing. What distributions did you have experience with? And what distributions are you running on your production systems?
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    I have a 13" Macbook Pro and a Thinkpad model I forget the name of. Homebrew is down-right bad. There are certainly worse Linux package managers (pacman... looking at you), but if you're using MacOS I'd highly recommend giving Nix a try. Less muss-and-fuss, and stopped me from sending my Macbook on a swim in the local river. > For my container work it doesn't really matter. That's fine, it doesn't really for me either. The nice part (for me) is the native Docker and fantastic filesystem support. Whereas MacOS feels like a product I'm turning into a tool, Linux systems tend to feel like a tool out-of-box. Different strokes for different folks though, it really just depends on what you want out of a computer. > I must have learned to ignore this I must have learned to appreciate living without it, then. It's pretty jarring returning to a monetized OS like Windows 11 or Monterey for me. > a lot of business software I must use for work isn't available on Linux Oh yeah, for sure. Like I said in my previous comment, I wouldn't use Linux if I was a lawyer or a video editor. That being said though, pretty much everything I've used in the modern enterprise is browser-based. You don't need a native Jira app or a custom .DMG to run git. Arguably, everything you need is shipped right with most Linux distros. I won't (and haven't) argued that Linux is perfect, but MacOS is converging with the Windows and Google school of desktop design. It worries me, and it's part of why I left MacOS in the first place. Photoshop is nice, but living on a computer that feels like a rented hotel room isn't very satisfying to me. Again, different strokes.
    - travisgriggs 4y ago
      > Homebrew is down-right bad. Curious why? I used to dabble with it and others. A few macs ago (maybe around 2017), I switched to a strategy of “either the AppStore or brew”. I’ve never had a problem with anything from brew since. I install some productivity tools, standard OS tooling (Inkscape, Gimp, Libre), everything I need to develop for Python, Android, various embedded arm platforms, Elixir/Erlang. I even add some extra tools for Swift development.
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  For me: I have a Macbook Air M1 2020 and a Thinkpad X1 Carbon 7th Gen (4 years old!) running Linux Mint. I have upgraded the Thinkpad's Battery, RAM (16GB), and SSD (500GB) for the cost of the parts. I will not be able to do that on the Macbook. Ever. For what I do (browsing, videos, some writing and research) the only benefit to the Macbook is slightly better battery life. I have more software option on the Thinkpad for sure and it does not want to control everything I do. I paid WAY less for the thinkpad and I get pretty much the same performance for my needs. The THRUTH is that most people are being way oversold computing power and paying a premium for it because they are locked into the platform. And just yesterday for some reason Safari vanished and re-arranged my bookmarks for no reason. Getting my MacBook ready to sell as a matter of fact. In my mind it is stupid (and poor marketing) that the linux community is not crushing Apple with cheap, fast laptops.
  - manuelabeledo 4y ago
    > In my mind it is stupid (and poor marketing) that the linux community is not crushing Apple with cheap, fast laptops. That is not how the economics of laptops work. Most people don't want a Linux laptop. Call it inertia, but it is a fact that most people buy Windows laptops. Most of the premium market consumers prefer Apple. And most people who prefer Linux aren't paying a premium right now. So you have three sets that do not overlap, and there is nothing the community can do about that in the short to medium term, anyway.
- Lio 4y ago
  Apple nagware is a pain in the arse. On my old MBP I get regularly nagged to update to Monterey. Despite it not being supported. On my iPhone it wouldn't stop nagging me to accept changes to the iCloud T&Cs. There was no permanent opt out. You could say no for a bit and then it would go back to nagging you. Same with Apple Music. Currently my iPhone nags me to disable background running of Garmin Connect, so that I loose integration with my Garmin watch. None of this endears Apple to me and is definitely a consideration for my next purchase.
dbeley 4y ago
Thinkpads will always have better keyboards, better connectivity and the trackpoint for them.
lynndotpy 4y ago
For my experience, as a longtime Linux user who got a MBP: I really miss the desktop environments available on Linux. KDE is great, and even Gnome beats MacOS. You can't even move windows between desktops with a keyboard shortcut on MacOS. The desktop experience on MacOS is a "death by a thousand cuts" situation. E.g. Popup dialogues will rearrange your windows (e.g. if the popup is wider than your window, to remain centered, it will move the underlying window and I'm not joking.) E.g. Mouse acceleration can't be turned off, which makes MacOS pretty awful for any mouse-centric workflows. E.g. Blocking animations that fundamentally can't be turned off. That's on top of things that aren't necessarily faults with MacOS, such as getting used to different keyboard shortcuts. On Linux, I get native Docker, up-to-date coreutils (they're different on MacOS), more precompiled versions of software I use, and having the Linux desktop software that I prefer. (Finder is frustrating, Gedit or Kate for text editing is great, GIMP is much nicer on Linux, etc.) I also miss KDEConnect. I don't use Xcode, but as I understand, updating it messes with git and python. But the battery life really is amazing enough to make it worth it. I'm really excited for Asahi to progress to a point that I'm comfortable using it.
- TheKnack 4y ago
  Apps like Keyboard Maestro or BetterTouchTool can resolve almost every Macos usability complaint that I've heard. Keyboard Maestro can move windows between desktops with a keyboard shortcut, for example, and there are multiple ways to disable mouse acceleration. For almost every missing feature or annoyance in Macos, someone else has had the same thought and developed a solution. https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/move-frontmost-window-to-a-different-space/10512 https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/move-frontmost-window-to...
  - gspencley 4y ago
    Can it resolve me not being able to use MATE as the desktop environment? My biggest gripe with Mac OS X is the window manager. I want to be able to ALT+right-click anywhere on a window to be able to move it around, alt+left-click anywhere on a window to resize it. I want to be able to click the dock icon for an app I'm using and have the most recently used window of that app come to the foreground instead of however it makes that decision. I'd love to get preview thumbnails of windows when hovering over icons in the doc so that I can select the window I want. Right-click plus reading window titles takes longer to find the window I need. I want to be able to customize my fonts because I have a hard time reading text on my QHD external monitor. I want a terminal that doesn't suck (and yes I use iterm2, it still sucks because I can't quickly jump to the end / beginning of a line to edit a command). I want to be able to select text to copy to clipboard and use my middle mouse button to paste and I want that to work for all programs. I want to be able to hold ctrl plus use the mouse wheel to zoom in / out of web pages on chrome ... something Linux and Windows both do out of the box but it just doesn't work on Mac OS X. I want to be able to customize all of this and not feel like I'm locked in to "the Apple way" of doing things. I lot of this is just familiarity and getting really used to a particular DE over decades of use and taking little things for granted. If all you've ever used is a Mac then I'm sure you've figured out how to be hyper-productive on that DE. I just find it strange that, from a company that somehow positioned itself as UX leaders ... I find that I'm 1/10th as productive on my work Macbook as I am on any nix device (and while Mac might use a heavily modified NetBSD kernel IIRC and have zsh and bash ... it feels very different from a nix machine to me).
hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
>32gb of ram
lern_too_spel 4y ago
Others have filled in some of the productivity benefits, but it also avoids a thousand little papercuts. It doesn't have uninstallable crapware like Apple News.
nequo 4y ago
A ThinkPad X1 Carbon is cheaper, lighter, has a better keyboard, and on Linux I can run the DE that has the defaults/customizations and keybindings that I am used to. I also don't have to worry (or at least I think that I don't) that the Linux kernel or my distro silently introduces a hack for their programs to bypass my firewall and VPN because they couldn't fix some bugs by the company-mandated release date: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/apple-nixes-feature-that-let-apps-bypass-vpn/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/apple-nixes-...
gnufied 4y ago
I work on container stuff, so may be my POV is bit different but: 1. I had hard time fighting openssl installed by Homebrew and getting Python to use it. On Linux - this is never an issue. In general IMO using homebrew is fairly tedious. 2. Debugging of stuff running on Linux. Sometimes logging is not enough and while remote debugging can be made to work (I mainly use Goland), it is pretty fiddly and does not work reliably. I am not new to Mac or anything tbh. I used to use Mac about 5 years ago exclusively and then Linux for next 5 years and now using Mac again. IMO for kind of work I do - Linux is just leaps ahead of Mac.
rkangel 4y ago
There are some really weird things. The only sustained usage of Macs I've had is a Mac Mini (x86) that I had for app development. Even just plugging in a plain old UK layout USB keyboard (not an Apple one) and having it behave itself and give me the right characters was surprisingly difficult.
dpz 4y ago
Biggest things for me - I've never found a good WM that can replace what bspwm can do. - Something as useful as pacman, brew is no where near as good. - Full control over my system. Plus I can run my set up on a £30 chromebook and be nearly as efficient as my ~£1800 Work laptop.
Leimi 4y ago
Some workflows on a linux system can be totally different than what is possible on a mac. Even with apps like BetterTouchTool, Hammerspoon, Amethyst and others. Customizing window management, advanced keyboard shortcuts, general system behavior in mac is going against the tide. It kinda works, but never as good as you'd want because you can't really get rid of the default window manager and default global behavior. Some window manager in linux are more like window manager frameworks, like AwesomeWM, that lets you customize its behavior via lua scripting. It's extremely powerful and allows you to get exactly the behavior you want. But this part of linux is pretty niche stuff for sure though haha. I wouldn't say I'm more productive thanks to this, but I'm way happier using a system I can set up so that it behaves how I want, instead of having to follow rules I don't agree with and can't change.
somethingreen 4y ago
- window management that is either sane (i.e. restores minimized windows when alt/cmd+tab'ed to) or can be customized - desktop environment that is either sane (i.e. doesn't center align panels with variable number of controls like dock does) or can be customized - keyboard without missing buttons, with actual button travel yet not touching the screen when closed - option of a screen that doesn't double as mirror

interpol_p 4y ago

I have the same complaint about weight I upgraded from the 13" M1 Air to the 14" MacBook Pro M1 Max While Blender performance (rendering especially) is much faster, I sorely miss the MacBook Air's portability. The 14" is built like a brick. Compile times are faster, video editing is nicer with more RAM in the Pro, but it's a really tough call given just how different the weight is

Kognito 4y ago
Agreed, a high end machine in the Air form factor would be great. The M2 is more than enough compute-wise for my SWE workflow, but it's not a great deal once you start bumping the RAM and adding storage when compared to the base 14 inch (+ the extra benefits you get with the 14" screen, etc).
walthamstow 4y ago
I just got my work machine upgraded to the 14in Pro from the 13in M1 Air recently. I think overall the extra screen pixels are worth the weight tradeoff. It's only a little heavier and I don't really notice it on my back when I'm cycling I did love the M1 Air though! Probably the best laptop I've ever used pound-for-pound.

_fzslm 4y ago

iTerm2 and lima [1] with a ARM64 Linux virtual machine w/ Rosetta (so I can still run x86_64 Linux code!) enabled me to fall in love with my MacBook Pro in this regard. i feel more productive than on a Linux machine now. MacOS is not without its developer power tools, if you dig around enough! [1] https://github.com/lima-vm/lima https://github.com/lima-vm/lima

xtracto 4y ago
For me MacBookPro with M2 chips would be perfect if the 13in model allowed 64GB RAM. My workflow requires me to run Docker (intel images) heavily with several containers. Having a virtualization layer is pretty resource consuming. Usually the Docker + containers I use take around 5GB RAM alone. Under that configuration I've found 32GB to be just within the limit of usability. 16GB are just not enough. Also, for some virtualized Docker workflows, there is that known issue of slow File interaction through the Mac/virtualized file system, which makes working with say Magento, Drupal or simlar software REALLY slow. As a comparison, I've also got a 2011 intel MacBookPro with 16GB RAM. That one is running Linux Mint. Docker performance is almost transparent, and the system runs pretty snappy for development.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  What software are you using that doesn't have ARM versions available? I think it goes without saying that a machine with an ARM processor is not going to be ideal if you're frequently working with x86-specific software.
  - mbreese 4y ago
    I've needed some scientific software that still doesn't have ARM64 libraries available, so thus are stuck on x86. RStudio, for example, has a lot of dependencies and only recently starting offering experimental support for aarch64 on Linux.
- outcoldman 4y ago
  Really don't understand why Apple still selling 13" MBP, as MBP 14 is much better, and you can get it with up to 96GB of memory now. I would assume they keep 13" just for people who still likes TouchBar.

api 4y ago

A VM on the Mac will run longer on battery with less heat than a Linux installation on a native Linux x64 laptop. Of course if you need to have your laptop be x64 to match cloud architecture then that's different. Or you could just use ARM in the cloud and save even more carbon emissions.

Spooky23 4y ago
Exactly. My strategy for this for my personal projects is mostly ARM VMs. In a couple of cases I have to run x86, and I run a used HP thin client at home as what I call a “physical VM”. I then use tailscale to connect from anywhere.
hra5th 4y ago
If you need to interact with connected peripherals from the linux environment a VM is still usually a much less productive experience. I do a lot of embedded development, and while it is often possible to do USB passthrough to connected boards, lots of things don't work the same as they do when running Linux natively, and I have never found it to be a seamless experience (on VirtualBox or VMWare)

jackosdev 4y ago

I have Asahi Linux installed on mine, it works great including the GPU, I’m mainly developing for ARM64 AWS Lambdas now as well so it’s nice having the same arch. Some things are still missing like webcam, microphone and speakers, but the headphone Jack works and Bluetooth is OK just a bit choppy, incredible project.

counttheforks 4y ago
So it works great except half the hardware doesn't work and it's entirely unsupported by Apple, to whom you paid a significant premium for the hardware?
- smith7018 4y ago
  That tends to be how Linux works outside of standard platforms, yes. It takes time for developers to write drivers.
  - counttheforks 4y ago
    It works great on my custom built PC, and my store bought laptop. Both are perfectly normal pieces of hardware, not apple's weird stuff.
- grozzle 4y ago
  It's a work in progress, users are generally confident that the remaining hardware will gain Asahi support sooner or later. The fact that Asahi is such a popular project is a pretty strong indicator of how much room for improvement MacOS has, to put it as politely as I can. Personally, I wouldn't even consider buying a new Mac if there wasn't any good alternate native OS available.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway2037 4y ago
I know this isn't an Asahi Linux thread, but I cannot help to ask about it. Plus I am big fan of Alyssa Rosenzweig's work (and Justine Tunney), so I pay close attention to Asahi Linux (and LibCosmo/politan) progress. First, it's great to hear from Real World people like you about their Asahi Linux experience. It sounds like the baseline is done and now they will pick away at the remaining pieces. Real question: What is the driver for Asahi Linux to exist at all? Please don't think I am trolling when I ask this question. At 10,000ft, any sane person would say: "Why? It's Apple. Let them do them: Mac OS X." I expect Asahi Linux folks to reply: "Well, duh: Because." Is it unlocking the insane performance per watt of Apple Mx chips for Linux? Is it enabling the world's greatest laptops for Linux? Is it the pure technical challenge of reverse engineering a closed hardware system? Is it everything? I am really curious to hear what people think.

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isolli 4y ago

What really pushed me towards Apple is that Lenovo offers a very limited set of configurations to us Europeans. No way to get the best machine from them, even if we're willing to pay for it.

yoavm 4y ago
I have an X1 Yoga that I got here in the Netherlands, and I had plenty of choices when configuring it, including OS. What are you missing exactly?
- bogantech 4y ago
  When I was looking at getting an X1 Carbon, the US site had better options for things like the screen etc
- isolli 4y ago
  I was looking to buy a Lenovo Thinkpad T14 Gen 3, and I could not get a better screen resolution than 1920 x 1200. I just checked and 3840 x 2400 is now available. They may have had supply chain issues. But it's too late for me. Also, their ARM laptop is only available with Windows.
  - citilife 4y ago
    Almost everyone with thinkpad gets the windows version and just puts linux on it. It's relatively easy, depending on your distro.
Foobar8568 4y ago
I have seen the contrary... But for parts, we are screwed.
stonecharioteer 4y ago
I had the same problem with Lenovo here in India. I bought an Asus instead. got a Ryzen 9 6800 machine with 32gb ram and a 3050ti. amazingly good with Fedora.

CobaltFire 4y ago

I had a P1 Gen 4 and went to a 14” M1 MBP and agree. Screen was a bit better in most ways, keyboard was massively better, and the 16” was lighter (barely) than my 14”. That said, I ran Win11 (my work environment requires Win) and MacOS is a straight upgrade to that IMO. I do miss that machine though.

firstSpeaker 4y ago

Could you elaborate what is preventing it from being the perfect backend dev laptop?

klodolph 4y ago
I’m not the person you asked—but a ton of developer tooling just runs better on Linux. Installation is usually easier too—on a Mac, there’s Homebrew, but Homebrew doesn’t have the best user experience. All the GUI productivity apps run better on a Mac—image editors, IDEs / text editors, apps like Slack or Zoom or whatever.
- recuter 4y ago
  What specific developer tooling runs better on linux? If you're one of those Nix masochists I hear that runs on the Mac as well.
  - rgrmrts 4y ago
    Fwiw you can use nix (the package manager) and the nixpkgs package repository without ever learning or writing a single line of nix (the language). My introduction was to use nix instead of brew and ignore the whole "declarative configuration" aspect. It took me a while to get comfortable enough with that part of the ecosystem, but that's irrelevant to my point. Give nix a try, use it like you'd use brew. Ignore the declarative configuration stuff for a bit.
    - recuter 4y ago
      What benefit would joining your cult bestow upon me that brew does not already? My brew list is intentionally very short and my faffing about desire is limited. Generally I use brew to pull in asdf (https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf) to install programming languages/tooling, it works flawlessly. I use Pipx (https://github.com/pypa/pipx https://github.com/pypa/pipx) to install python thingies (such as yt-dlp) as a cli. Go and Rust handle binaries in their languages beautifully and without issues.

StreamBright 4y ago

As a heavy Linux user for two decades I disagree. You can't even talk about Linux vs MacOS because the actual distribution you use matters a lot more than the kernel when you talk about productivity. Using Mint, Elementary or whichever GUI distribution you would like to use with the Linux kernel has completely different tradeoffs in terms of GUI, which implies different productivity levels. There is more. Even with the best case scenario you need to customise the GUI much more than you need to customise MacOS, for example energy management is a bit a of problem for most Linux based distros. This simply happens because Apple owns the whole vertical from HW to GUI and they focus on the user. They have done this for decades. There is no such entity in the non-Apple world and this means there is more work for the user when trying to create a working environment.

jonnycomputer 4y ago
I've been finding that the Budgie desktop is pretty great. Very Mac-like.
- StreamBright 4y ago
  I wasn't aware. Thanks for recommending it.
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
And Linux keeps failing because of companies like System76 which cannot seem to build, or partner with a company, to be this competition. Lenovo would crush Apple if it partnered with the Linux Community and made a cheap (in price!) everyday laptop for the consumer and focused on privacy and no lock in.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  “Lenovo would crush Apple if it partnered with the Linux Community” No it wouldn’t. Users (the 99%) don’t care about privacy, tech, etc. They happily give their data up to TikTok (the CCP), Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. The Snowden revelations were met with a shrug or “I have nothing to hide”. This is well beyond established at this point (these platforms have billions of users). They also don’t care about lock in - they just want stuff that works and adds as much as it can to their lives in as little effort as possible. The Apple ecosystem is incredibly successful because it does this exceedingly well. They view lock in as a positive - “All my stuff just works together - here’s more money Apple”. The average person cares as much and is as involved in all of this as I am in understanding how my light switch is related to the function and operation of a nuclear reactor. The amount of care, time, thought, and energy I put into that is the cumulative total of the three seconds I spend interacting with light switches everyday. I’m not disparaging users. I use the nuclear reactor analogy because I don’t care, I don’t need to care, and I shouldn’t have to care. I, (like most people) have only so much bandwidth for time, energy, and passion. I leave worrying and caring about all of that up to everyone from the people who mine uranium to the electrician that wires up the switches. On HN we're the uranium miners, nuclear physicists, power companies, linemen, and electricians. We're the few people who do know and care about any of this "tech stuff".

cpuguy83 4y ago

I doubt the chassis is adding that much weight. MacBooks are largely battery. The MacBook Air is also significantly lighter than a pro despite having the same basic chassis.

gnufied 4y ago
I am not sure. The Thinkpad has 90WH battery and Macbook has 99WH, it is bigger but not 362gm heavier.