5 ms·

I always ask about battery consumption... Apple seems to be on another galaxy right now. I decided to stop waiting and installed Parallels to run Ubuntu there..

by wslh 2y ago

I always ask about battery consumption... Apple seems to be on another galaxy right now. I decided to stop waiting and installed Parallels to run Ubuntu there... I really wish the best for Asahi Linux.

winocm 2y ago
The M3 Max laptops can cross-build FreeBSD at a fraction of the time of the ThinkPad, being at around 791 seconds for `make -j17` versus the T14s being at 3210 seconds (with `make -j12`) according to the post above. No idea about power consumptions. It still scares me.
- redundantly 2y ago
  Do you have more details or a source on this? I'd like to learn more about the build process and timings.
  - winocm 2y ago
    Sure. I basically did the following on trunk: $ CPP=/usr/bin/clang MAKEOBJDIRPREFIX=/private/var/tmp/obj ./tools/build/make.py TARGET=arm64 TARGET_ARCH=aarch64 --host-compiler-type clang --debug -j17 --clean buildworld You probably can follow build(5) from FreeBSD hosts instead. NetBSD is similar, but you need to edit `tools/llvm/Makefile` and make sure that you use the following target for `support-modules` instead: support-modules: module-test.cpp Makefile - if ${HOST_CXX} -stdlib=libc++ -c -fmodules -fcxx-modules -fmodules-cache-path=./module.cache \ - ${.CURDIR}/module-test.cpp 3> /dev/null 2>&1; then \ - echo HOST_SUPPORTS_MODULES=yes > ${.TARGET}; \ - else \ - echo HOST_SUPPORTS_MODULES=no > ${.TARGET}; \ - fi + # Just don't use modules pre for C++20 targets. Some compilers cannot support them. + echo HOST_SUPPORTS_MODULES=no > ${.TARGET}; You can further speed up NetBSD builds by editing `share/mk/bsd.sys.mk` and removing the workaround for SunPro's cc. The repeated invocation of /bin/mv for each object file really does add up. I have not tried cross builds of OpenBSD from other operating systems.
    - winocm 2y ago
      Word of warning, I ended up getting a lot of strange compiler segfaults within xgcc when using when using `MKGCC=yes` instead `MKLLVM=yes` with NetBSD, specifically with floating point heavy code. I never did end up finding out why that happens.
- Sardtok 2y ago
  One is $1000 and the other is around $3000. So performance per dollar looks about right.
  - wslh 2y ago
    Not only performance per dollar but also battery duration/consumption.
    - gjsman-1000 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - sgerenser 2y ago
        Not so on the M3 generation (nor the newer M4s). M3 Pro was particularly hobbled in this regard with only 6 performance cores vs 10 on the Max.
        liprais 2y ago
        my m4 pro has 10 p cores as m4 max has ,get your facts right at least.
        microtonal 2y ago
        You can get the M4 Max with 12 performance cores.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        sgerenser 2y ago
        Comparing unbinned to unbinned, you get 10 P cores on the M4 Pro and 12 on the M4 Max. Regardless the original comment was regarding the M3 series, where there was an even larger difference between the M3 Pro and M3 Max (6 vs 10 P cores).
      - 2y ago
neveroddoreven 2y ago
Any issues or things you wish you had known with your current Parallels/Ubuntu set up? Asking since I've been considering doing the same thing
- cnst 2y ago
  I'm actually thinking of switching from a Mac back to the PC, since everything is done in a browser anyways, regardless of the system, but the lack of the fanless laptops in the PC world isn't promising. ThinkPad X13s Snapdragon was fanless, but it's a bit old now, plus, only 2x USB-C, without any USB-A ports, and a screen that doesn't open 180°, unlike any other ThinkPad, meh.
  - fggdt 2y ago
    Windows sucks nowadays. For work Ive had to come back.... it's gotten bad. Ads everywhere. Search bar that sucks. Weird hand gestures that empties your screen. What happened? Win7 is probably the best UX ever. Now its unusable.
  - E39M5S62 2y ago
    The x13s is still quite quick and useable - especially since you can pick them up for a song on the used market. The display only opening to ~135 degrees is a bummer though.
  - authorfly 2y ago
    One small tip I didn't appreciate for far too long with "mac-peer" laptops that have fans is to use them unplugged. My laptop almost never spins up fans when it is unplugged, and I can get a good batch of work done with the battery levels of today and fast charge over lunch. It's still not quite as ideal nor as long a battery life as Mac. But it feels so beautiful. For the first time on Linux I feel better, like I am not just making sacrafices for values but like the actual whole all-around experience is better in most ways compared to my work Mac (M2 Pro so fans abound and not as aesthetically pleasing as the Airs IMO). It's instantly snappy, I have a nice large SSD, I've already swapped out RAM, no issues with key software, I have a theme with a desktop experience I prefer over the Mac one, and I can go to a presentation and type without fans stressing me out. As someone in AI for a while, personally, I don't value GPUs or NPUs, but that would be a difference. That's really leaps and bounds over Linux from 2016 or 2010 on Laptops.
madars 2y ago
I have an M3 but the battery life is not that great -- because you still want to run a Linux VM for actual engineering.
- dagmx 2y ago
  “Actual engineering” is incredibly subjective. Arguably, more people do “actual engineering” on macOS and windows.
  - boomskats 2y ago
    Really? Could you please arguably name something that you'd subjectively consider to be "actual engineering" and that you'd want to do on macOS or windows rather than on Linux? (the comment you replied to was clearly arguing quality rather than quantity, so that's what I'm asking too)
    - slyn 2y ago
      Autocad doesn’t even have a Linux version.
      - bobmcnamara 2y ago
        Used to have AutoCAD UNIX, but died around 2000.
    - addaon 2y ago
      I much prefer MacOS for documentation and web browsing. All of my requirements engineering work is in documentation tools and web browsers.
    - dagmx 2y ago
      Anything graphics programming related. D3D and Metal are significantly more prevalent than OpenGL or Vulkan. Anything CAD related, because there’s next to no professionally used CAD software on Linux. Audio stuff. How many DAWs have a significant Linux user base? And even beyond that, how many website devs are on Linux? Most people making product pages aren’t on Linux because not a lot of the designers work on Linux and it’s better to have a mono culture of devices for office management. And your question is what one would rather do on macOS/Windows rather than Linux which again is subjective even if I scope it to stuff you can do on both Linux and macOS and windows. Flip that around, why would someone use Linux to develop when they could use macOS? Can you give a non-subjective answer? Then try the opposite. Even if you’re developing for Linux deployments, you can still do most of it local and then spin up docker in the VM on demand. The number of software developers who need to run a Linux VM on their Mac/Windows are a vast minority.
raegis 2y ago
Using the Ubuntu experimental image on the T14s Gen 6, the screen brightness is not adjustable, so for me it is stuck on high. Nevertheless, Gnome claims 12+ hours remaining when near 100%. In Windows where I can adjust the brightness, the battery lasts longer. Battery life is much better than any other x86 Thinkpad I've ever owned. The CPU is pretty fast as well. I did no real benchmarks, but C++ std::sort() on the Snapdragon runs just 10-20% slower than on my 4 year old Ryzen 5 5600X desktop. Also, the base model T14s comes with 32G of memory, which is very nice. On the other hand, I dropped mine in the street, damaging the upper right corner of the display (physically intact, but dead pixels in the corner). Even though the case material is nice, the laptop seems to be more fragile than older Thinkpads. (I've dropped my T480 and T450 numerous times, and never had issues other than cosmetic.) So the $35 accidental damage protection was worth it.
- binkHN 2y ago
  > ...the $35 accidental damage protection was worth it. That does seem rather inexpensive! How did the process go filing a claim?
  - raegis 2y ago
    I filled out the form online, and they immediately sent me a FedEx mailer. I sent it in, but they're estimating Dec 2 for the return. So that's more than a three week turnaround, which is longer than I wished. I'm in southern California and the repair center I mailed it to is in Texas. It was slow ground shipping. They have two different higher tiers of protection for "next day" repairs. I'm thinking about upgrading.
vid 2y ago
Do you need to be in that galaxy? I easily get 8h with this $1400 64GB RAM AMD Thinkpad with an OLED screen running unoptimized Ubuntu (yes it looks 90s anonymous). An equivalent notebook for most practical purposes from Apple would be at least 3.5× more expensive.
- binkHN 2y ago
  Which ThinkPad is this? The OLED uses a ton of battery life, so either you're not pushing the system very hard or you have a very big battery.
  - vid 2y ago
    P16s gen 2, with the larger battery. OLED can use less power if you can keep things dark, but I don't put a lot of work into it.
  - bobmcnamara 2y ago
    > The OLED uses a ton of battery life I'm curious what you mean by that? Just that it's usually a large fraction overall? At least it's apt per pixel instead of blasting LED strips and subtracting the light we don't want with LCDs.
jeroenhd 2y ago
Based on the reviews I've seen, Snapdragon + Windows seems to equal to the M3 generation of Apple ARM laptops in terms of longevity and performance (both devices winning and losing some benchmarks). Snapdragon didn't pull off their promises of consistently beating Apple, but they're extremely close, for a much lower price. If Qualcomm continues to actually work on Linux, rather than let enthusiasts do all of the work for them like Apple, I think ARM on Linux is going to be all Qualcomm with Macs yet again being a second citizen in the Linux world. For Windows, it's already a choice of "do I want to be forced into using Windows for a couple hundred dollars of savings".

by wslh 2y ago

winocm 2y ago

The M3 Max laptops can cross-build FreeBSD at a fraction of the time of the ThinkPad, being at around 791 seconds for `make -j17` versus the T14s being at 3210 seconds (with `make -j12`) according to the post above. No idea about power consumptions. It still scares me.

redundantly 2y ago
Do you have more details or a source on this? I'd like to learn more about the build process and timings.
- winocm 2y ago
  Sure. I basically did the following on trunk: $ CPP=/usr/bin/clang MAKEOBJDIRPREFIX=/private/var/tmp/obj ./tools/build/make.py TARGET=arm64 TARGET_ARCH=aarch64 --host-compiler-type clang --debug -j17 --clean buildworld You probably can follow build(5) from FreeBSD hosts instead. NetBSD is similar, but you need to edit `tools/llvm/Makefile` and make sure that you use the following target for `support-modules` instead: support-modules: module-test.cpp Makefile - if ${HOST_CXX} -stdlib=libc++ -c -fmodules -fcxx-modules -fmodules-cache-path=./module.cache \ - ${.CURDIR}/module-test.cpp 3> /dev/null 2>&1; then \ - echo HOST_SUPPORTS_MODULES=yes > ${.TARGET}; \ - else \ - echo HOST_SUPPORTS_MODULES=no > ${.TARGET}; \ - fi + # Just don't use modules pre for C++20 targets. Some compilers cannot support them. + echo HOST_SUPPORTS_MODULES=no > ${.TARGET}; You can further speed up NetBSD builds by editing `share/mk/bsd.sys.mk` and removing the workaround for SunPro's cc. The repeated invocation of /bin/mv for each object file really does add up. I have not tried cross builds of OpenBSD from other operating systems.
  - winocm 2y ago
    Word of warning, I ended up getting a lot of strange compiler segfaults within xgcc when using when using `MKGCC=yes` instead `MKLLVM=yes` with NetBSD, specifically with floating point heavy code. I never did end up finding out why that happens.
Sardtok 2y ago
One is $1000 and the other is around $3000. So performance per dollar looks about right.
- wslh 2y ago
  Not only performance per dollar but also battery duration/consumption.
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - sgerenser 2y ago
      Not so on the M3 generation (nor the newer M4s). M3 Pro was particularly hobbled in this regard with only 6 performance cores vs 10 on the Max.
      - liprais 2y ago
        my m4 pro has 10 p cores as m4 max has ,get your facts right at least.
        microtonal 2y ago
        You can get the M4 Max with 12 performance cores.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        sgerenser 2y ago
        Comparing unbinned to unbinned, you get 10 P cores on the M4 Pro and 12 on the M4 Max. Regardless the original comment was regarding the M3 series, where there was an even larger difference between the M3 Pro and M3 Max (6 vs 10 P cores).
    - 2y ago

neveroddoreven 2y ago

Any issues or things you wish you had known with your current Parallels/Ubuntu set up? Asking since I've been considering doing the same thing

cnst 2y ago
I'm actually thinking of switching from a Mac back to the PC, since everything is done in a browser anyways, regardless of the system, but the lack of the fanless laptops in the PC world isn't promising. ThinkPad X13s Snapdragon was fanless, but it's a bit old now, plus, only 2x USB-C, without any USB-A ports, and a screen that doesn't open 180°, unlike any other ThinkPad, meh.
- fggdt 2y ago
  Windows sucks nowadays. For work Ive had to come back.... it's gotten bad. Ads everywhere. Search bar that sucks. Weird hand gestures that empties your screen. What happened? Win7 is probably the best UX ever. Now its unusable.
- E39M5S62 2y ago
  The x13s is still quite quick and useable - especially since you can pick them up for a song on the used market. The display only opening to ~135 degrees is a bummer though.
- authorfly 2y ago
  One small tip I didn't appreciate for far too long with "mac-peer" laptops that have fans is to use them unplugged. My laptop almost never spins up fans when it is unplugged, and I can get a good batch of work done with the battery levels of today and fast charge over lunch. It's still not quite as ideal nor as long a battery life as Mac. But it feels so beautiful. For the first time on Linux I feel better, like I am not just making sacrafices for values but like the actual whole all-around experience is better in most ways compared to my work Mac (M2 Pro so fans abound and not as aesthetically pleasing as the Airs IMO). It's instantly snappy, I have a nice large SSD, I've already swapped out RAM, no issues with key software, I have a theme with a desktop experience I prefer over the Mac one, and I can go to a presentation and type without fans stressing me out. As someone in AI for a while, personally, I don't value GPUs or NPUs, but that would be a difference. That's really leaps and bounds over Linux from 2016 or 2010 on Laptops.

madars 2y ago

I have an M3 but the battery life is not that great -- because you still want to run a Linux VM for actual engineering.

dagmx 2y ago
“Actual engineering” is incredibly subjective. Arguably, more people do “actual engineering” on macOS and windows.
- boomskats 2y ago
  Really? Could you please arguably name something that you'd subjectively consider to be "actual engineering" and that you'd want to do on macOS or windows rather than on Linux? (the comment you replied to was clearly arguing quality rather than quantity, so that's what I'm asking too)
  - slyn 2y ago
    Autocad doesn’t even have a Linux version.
    - bobmcnamara 2y ago
      Used to have AutoCAD UNIX, but died around 2000.
  - addaon 2y ago
    I much prefer MacOS for documentation and web browsing. All of my requirements engineering work is in documentation tools and web browsers.
  - dagmx 2y ago
    Anything graphics programming related. D3D and Metal are significantly more prevalent than OpenGL or Vulkan. Anything CAD related, because there’s next to no professionally used CAD software on Linux. Audio stuff. How many DAWs have a significant Linux user base? And even beyond that, how many website devs are on Linux? Most people making product pages aren’t on Linux because not a lot of the designers work on Linux and it’s better to have a mono culture of devices for office management. And your question is what one would rather do on macOS/Windows rather than Linux which again is subjective even if I scope it to stuff you can do on both Linux and macOS and windows. Flip that around, why would someone use Linux to develop when they could use macOS? Can you give a non-subjective answer? Then try the opposite. Even if you’re developing for Linux deployments, you can still do most of it local and then spin up docker in the VM on demand. The number of software developers who need to run a Linux VM on their Mac/Windows are a vast minority.

raegis 2y ago

Using the Ubuntu experimental image on the T14s Gen 6, the screen brightness is not adjustable, so for me it is stuck on high. Nevertheless, Gnome claims 12+ hours remaining when near 100%. In Windows where I can adjust the brightness, the battery lasts longer. Battery life is much better than any other x86 Thinkpad I've ever owned. The CPU is pretty fast as well. I did no real benchmarks, but C++ std::sort() on the Snapdragon runs just 10-20% slower than on my 4 year old Ryzen 5 5600X desktop. Also, the base model T14s comes with 32G of memory, which is very nice. On the other hand, I dropped mine in the street, damaging the upper right corner of the display (physically intact, but dead pixels in the corner). Even though the case material is nice, the laptop seems to be more fragile than older Thinkpads. (I've dropped my T480 and T450 numerous times, and never had issues other than cosmetic.) So the $35 accidental damage protection was worth it.

binkHN 2y ago
> ...the $35 accidental damage protection was worth it. That does seem rather inexpensive! How did the process go filing a claim?
- raegis 2y ago
  I filled out the form online, and they immediately sent me a FedEx mailer. I sent it in, but they're estimating Dec 2 for the return. So that's more than a three week turnaround, which is longer than I wished. I'm in southern California and the repair center I mailed it to is in Texas. It was slow ground shipping. They have two different higher tiers of protection for "next day" repairs. I'm thinking about upgrading.

vid 2y ago

Do you need to be in that galaxy? I easily get 8h with this $1400 64GB RAM AMD Thinkpad with an OLED screen running unoptimized Ubuntu (yes it looks 90s anonymous). An equivalent notebook for most practical purposes from Apple would be at least 3.5× more expensive.

binkHN 2y ago
Which ThinkPad is this? The OLED uses a ton of battery life, so either you're not pushing the system very hard or you have a very big battery.
- vid 2y ago
  P16s gen 2, with the larger battery. OLED can use less power if you can keep things dark, but I don't put a lot of work into it.
- bobmcnamara 2y ago
  > The OLED uses a ton of battery life I'm curious what you mean by that? Just that it's usually a large fraction overall? At least it's apt per pixel instead of blasting LED strips and subtracting the light we don't want with LCDs.

jeroenhd 2y ago

Based on the reviews I've seen, Snapdragon + Windows seems to equal to the M3 generation of Apple ARM laptops in terms of longevity and performance (both devices winning and losing some benchmarks). Snapdragon didn't pull off their promises of consistently beating Apple, but they're extremely close, for a much lower price. If Qualcomm continues to actually work on Linux, rather than let enthusiasts do all of the work for them like Apple, I think ARM on Linux is going to be all Qualcomm with Macs yet again being a second citizen in the Linux world. For Windows, it's already a choice of "do I want to be forced into using Windows for a couple hundred dollars of savings".