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Yes, linux geeks can school Apple on systems engineering when they can deliver laptops with a better battery life than Macs get. As for this latest release, wha

Yes, linux geeks can school Apple on systems engineering when they can deliver laptops with a better battery life than Macs get. As for this latest release, what, adding a new systems programming language and a whole new graphics API isn't enough? At least my Mac recognizes and uses a second monitor when I plug it in, unlike the bloody Fedora 19 box that I use at work. And don't get me started on that second graphics card that the system can't figure out how to use! And the wifi Just Works(tm), unlike the Ubuntu laptop that I had before that.

danford 12y ago
> deliver laptops with a better battery life than Macs get Well Linux gets better battery life on my laptop than OS X. (11 hours with ubuntu gnome 14.04). > my Mac recognizes and uses a second monitor when I plug it in Not mine. And this is a common problem: http://www.imore.com/os-x-mavericks-problems-drive-me-nuts-how-about-you http://www.imore.com/os-x-mavericks-problems-drive-me-nuts-h... Also, I had issues with sound going out and not returning until after a reboot on OS X. This drove me nuts. Thing is your points only apply to OS X if you run it on Apple hardware. If you get ubuntu certified hardware you will have no problem running ubuntu either. Ubuntu is going to run on more devices with less issues simply because the linux kernel is designed to target more hardware than the OS X kernel.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- cmiles74 12y ago
  This is a fair point: Apple has carefully selected the hardware that OS X runs on. Most people interested in Linux expect it to support, without issue, whatever laptop happens to be lying around.
- the_hangman 12y ago
  > Also, I had issues with sound going out and not returning until after a reboot on OS X. This drove me nuts. This one bothers me endlessly. I got my first Macbook in '09 and have had two others since, and every single one of them has had this problem. I just don't get it.
- Teovald 12y ago
  I had the sound issue as well. When I close my laptop lid with an headset plugged in (and especially if I unplug it before opening the lid), Mavericks totally looses track of audio and behave erratically. I have been able to make sound work again by killing the coreaudiod process. it is very brutal, but it works.
wting 12y ago
My 15" rMBP running Mavericks randomly reboots on occasion, and to this day still requires me to manually disable / enable WiFi almost every time I open the lid. Meanwhile Homebrew is a poor substitute for aptitude and PPAs, multi-monitor support is relatively poor (xmonad excels here), and the Apple keyboard is missing a bunch of keys I use on a regular basis.
- pling 12y ago
  Same with mine and audio. coreaudiod just shits itself 5 times a day. I'm now on Debian 7 with XFCE on an old Think Pad. Life is better here.
- coob 12y ago
  There's a fix for the Wifi issue - trashing your bluetooth prefs. Solved it for me: http://www.imore.com/how-fix-mavericks-wi-fi-zapping-bluetooth http://www.imore.com/how-fix-mavericks-wi-fi-zapping-bluetoo...
  - untog 12y ago
    That's still awful, though. Why should I have to go to imore.com to fix an issue in my OS? This has been in OSX since launch and Apple hasn't fixed it. Mad.
  - wting 12y ago
    Thanks! I've tried finding a solution multiple times but I guess my Google-fu wasn't up to the task.
- untog 12y ago
  There was a time, not that long ago, when I saw a kernel panic maybe once in a year at most. These days I see them every few weeks.
- kyle_t 12y ago
  This. People sing to the heavens of how stable OSX is and how it just works. I've had as many if not more issues than with my Windows 7 Samsung laptop. Wifi constantly needs manually disabling/enabling, Bluetooth Audio crashes are common, I average one full system crash per month, display settings reset themselves magically and Finder is infuriating. I should be keeping a log of all the issues I have. This is on a 2014 Macbook Pro.
shaan7 12y ago
Dell XPS Ultrabook with Kubuntu 14.04 here, without any patches or extra settings. 11W consumption with medium screen brightness, works for ~5 hours with normal browsing (occasional compiling) Recognizes all monitors and projectors (even the ones Macs fail at) at my work place. The WiFi just works (TM). You are not using a "Ubuntu laptop". As danford said, just pick a Ubuntu certified machine* and things will just work (TM). And, you will still have more choice than OSX ;) * http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/ http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/
- apendleton 12y ago
  Sorry, but 5 hours on an ultrabook is not competitive. Current Macbook Airs are rated for 12 hours with normal use, and third-party testing has found 10 to be realistic. demallien is right. Nobody on the Linux side has done this kind of aggressive power engineering for consumer-oriented x86 hardware. Google might, for Chromebooks, but it's not clear how portable that will be to the rest of the ecosystem.
  - pling 12y ago
    I get 5 hours on a 5 year old ThinkPad with a 5 year old battery on Debian 7. I reckon it can be done.
    - marincounty 12y ago
      I have a MBP(2 years old) and a Mac desktop(4 years old), but I spend most of my time on a decade old Toshiba Satellite 025-S607 using xp.
  - serf 12y ago
    It just depends on the 'linux side of things' group your talking about. My T420s runs a full featured GNOME desktop on Arch at 5.5w idle, 7w browsing, 10w loaded. 136 watt hours total battery capacity with three batteries. "Hours" is a really poor way to gauge these things, because while it may seem practically applicable , we're really comparing apples and oranges. My T420 before my T420s had a battery run-time of 15 hours. I could fail to mention that it had a slice battery and an ultrabay on top of the primary battery and tell everyone that the particular model and OS ran for 15 hours straight, but that would be disingenuous. If I was a marketer I could run the processor at lower voltages, dim the screen unread-ably, turn WiFi off, etc etc until I got whatever numbers I wanted. As i'm not a marketer, I also feel as if the claims people make about Apple's hardware being better at power management are also somewhat dishonest. They are a company that has ultimate say in their hardware platform and software ecosystem. No other computer company locks down production that much in an effort to increase the individual experience of each consumer. That lock-down allows for an amount of control that would be unrealistic to expect from the FLOSS community, as they have little power or say in production and ultimately must code to support a wider range of people rather than a narrow set of known hardware packages that are available. My point : optimizing narrowly for a single platform is much easier than the opposite; a more fair comparison of battery life would be watts-per-hour usage during a standardized testing/benchmarking suite of some sort, along with the watt hours of battery capacity(although historically handset manufacturers have sidestepped that issue by having the software recognize when it's being benchmarked..). "Hours of use" could be practical if it wasn't arbitrarily inflated or deflated by uncommon usage profile testing and specialty optimizations for the sake of marketing a bigger number. It's not impossible to get good numbers out of a Linux build, it's just fairly difficult for someone unfamiliar with the system (and sometimes impossible without doing the work yourself with certain hardware stacks). There exists a whole subspecies of Linux users that are somewhat akin to hypermillers who turn this kind of dilemma into a game and compete for lowest wattage.
johnchristopher 12y ago
> At least my Mac recognizes and uses a second monitor when I plug it in, unlike the bloody Fedora 19 box that I use at work. And don't get me started on that second graphics card that the system can't figure out how to use! And the wifi Just Works(tm), unlike the Ubuntu laptop that I had before that. For what it's worth my debian wheezy laptop detects second monitor just fine (and I am using awesome-wm) while my 2007 iMac randomly lose internet though it's connected to my routeur via wifi. So... data points.
dalanmiller 12y ago
I have but one upvote to give you sir in distinguishing the reality of high quality Apple products vs Linux fanboyism.
dmix 12y ago
> At least my Mac recognizes and uses a second monitor when I plug it in This is mostly a solved problem in linux these days. Macbooks have consistent and quality hardware. It's no surpised they work well. If you use a mainstream laptop or PC parts, it will 100% work with Linux. Using cheap noname parts or manufacturers with poor software support then you'll have issues. For example, Macbooks + Fedora 19 work perfectly. So does the 3 Lenovos I tried and a Dell XPS.
peedy 12y ago
> At least my Mac recognizes and uses a second monitor when I plug it in, unlike the bloody Fedora 19 box that I use at work. And don't get me started on that second graphics card that the system can't figure out how to use! And the wifi Just Works(tm), unlike the Ubuntu laptop that I had before that. You can write a udev rule for that
- raverbashing 12y ago
  > You can write a udev rule for that Yes, please, let me spend time fixing distro BS instead of, you know, working. I don't remember any time when Wifi worked out-of-the-box in my previous Linux laptop. It worked if I did things manually (wpa-supplicant and stuff), the NM widget? Never worked and made things harder Another issue: opening and closing the lid doesn't have a consistent result, and sometimes it just keeps the laptop running. This is for the basic functionality, and sometimes even things that worked before stop working. Older distros had to be more manually configured, but when that was done it was good to go, today it is even harder to shut down the non-working stuff. So yeah, it's Mac for me from now on. Recovery from Time Machine needed some "Linux style hacking" once, but apart from that it's a breeze
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
sergiosgc 12y ago
My Thinkpad X1 Carbon draws something between 6W and 16W between idle and moderate use. I never measured it at full load. Perfectly acceptable, and way competitive with the equivalent Macbook Air, which draws 25W idle. So, I guess, per your definition, that Linux geeks can school Apple today.
- eatfish 12y ago
  Stop pulling numbers out your ass. The specs for the MBA are online and it draws 6.5W with the display on.
  - sergiosgc 12y ago
    Numbers reported by powertop
chanced 12y ago
Lucky you. A lot of us were left with massive paperweights after 10.9.2 dropped: https://www.google.com/search?q=osx+10.9.2+monitor+site:discussions.apple.com&espv=2&biw=1680&bih=912 https://www.google.com/search?q=osx+10.9.2+monitor+site:disc...

danford 12y ago

> deliver laptops with a better battery life than Macs get Well Linux gets better battery life on my laptop than OS X. (11 hours with ubuntu gnome 14.04). > my Mac recognizes and uses a second monitor when I plug it in Not mine. And this is a common problem: http://www.imore.com/os-x-mavericks-problems-drive-me-nuts-how-about-you http://www.imore.com/os-x-mavericks-problems-drive-me-nuts-h... Also, I had issues with sound going out and not returning until after a reboot on OS X. This drove me nuts. Thing is your points only apply to OS X if you run it on Apple hardware. If you get ubuntu certified hardware you will have no problem running ubuntu either. Ubuntu is going to run on more devices with less issues simply because the linux kernel is designed to target more hardware than the OS X kernel.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
cmiles74 12y ago
This is a fair point: Apple has carefully selected the hardware that OS X runs on. Most people interested in Linux expect it to support, without issue, whatever laptop happens to be lying around.
the_hangman 12y ago
> Also, I had issues with sound going out and not returning until after a reboot on OS X. This drove me nuts. This one bothers me endlessly. I got my first Macbook in '09 and have had two others since, and every single one of them has had this problem. I just don't get it.
Teovald 12y ago
I had the sound issue as well. When I close my laptop lid with an headset plugged in (and especially if I unplug it before opening the lid), Mavericks totally looses track of audio and behave erratically. I have been able to make sound work again by killing the coreaudiod process. it is very brutal, but it works.

wting 12y ago

My 15" rMBP running Mavericks randomly reboots on occasion, and to this day still requires me to manually disable / enable WiFi almost every time I open the lid. Meanwhile Homebrew is a poor substitute for aptitude and PPAs, multi-monitor support is relatively poor (xmonad excels here), and the Apple keyboard is missing a bunch of keys I use on a regular basis.

pling 12y ago
Same with mine and audio. coreaudiod just shits itself 5 times a day. I'm now on Debian 7 with XFCE on an old Think Pad. Life is better here.
coob 12y ago
There's a fix for the Wifi issue - trashing your bluetooth prefs. Solved it for me: http://www.imore.com/how-fix-mavericks-wi-fi-zapping-bluetooth http://www.imore.com/how-fix-mavericks-wi-fi-zapping-bluetoo...
- untog 12y ago
  That's still awful, though. Why should I have to go to imore.com to fix an issue in my OS? This has been in OSX since launch and Apple hasn't fixed it. Mad.
- wting 12y ago
  Thanks! I've tried finding a solution multiple times but I guess my Google-fu wasn't up to the task.
untog 12y ago
There was a time, not that long ago, when I saw a kernel panic maybe once in a year at most. These days I see them every few weeks.
kyle_t 12y ago
This. People sing to the heavens of how stable OSX is and how it just works. I've had as many if not more issues than with my Windows 7 Samsung laptop. Wifi constantly needs manually disabling/enabling, Bluetooth Audio crashes are common, I average one full system crash per month, display settings reset themselves magically and Finder is infuriating. I should be keeping a log of all the issues I have. This is on a 2014 Macbook Pro.

shaan7 12y ago

Dell XPS Ultrabook with Kubuntu 14.04 here, without any patches or extra settings. 11W consumption with medium screen brightness, works for ~5 hours with normal browsing (occasional compiling) Recognizes all monitors and projectors (even the ones Macs fail at) at my work place. The WiFi just works (TM). You are not using a "Ubuntu laptop". As danford said, just pick a Ubuntu certified machine* and things will just work (TM). And, you will still have more choice than OSX ;) * http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/ http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/

apendleton 12y ago
Sorry, but 5 hours on an ultrabook is not competitive. Current Macbook Airs are rated for 12 hours with normal use, and third-party testing has found 10 to be realistic. demallien is right. Nobody on the Linux side has done this kind of aggressive power engineering for consumer-oriented x86 hardware. Google might, for Chromebooks, but it's not clear how portable that will be to the rest of the ecosystem.
- pling 12y ago
  I get 5 hours on a 5 year old ThinkPad with a 5 year old battery on Debian 7. I reckon it can be done.
  - marincounty 12y ago
    I have a MBP(2 years old) and a Mac desktop(4 years old), but I spend most of my time on a decade old Toshiba Satellite 025-S607 using xp.
- serf 12y ago
  It just depends on the 'linux side of things' group your talking about. My T420s runs a full featured GNOME desktop on Arch at 5.5w idle, 7w browsing, 10w loaded. 136 watt hours total battery capacity with three batteries. "Hours" is a really poor way to gauge these things, because while it may seem practically applicable , we're really comparing apples and oranges. My T420 before my T420s had a battery run-time of 15 hours. I could fail to mention that it had a slice battery and an ultrabay on top of the primary battery and tell everyone that the particular model and OS ran for 15 hours straight, but that would be disingenuous. If I was a marketer I could run the processor at lower voltages, dim the screen unread-ably, turn WiFi off, etc etc until I got whatever numbers I wanted. As i'm not a marketer, I also feel as if the claims people make about Apple's hardware being better at power management are also somewhat dishonest. They are a company that has ultimate say in their hardware platform and software ecosystem. No other computer company locks down production that much in an effort to increase the individual experience of each consumer. That lock-down allows for an amount of control that would be unrealistic to expect from the FLOSS community, as they have little power or say in production and ultimately must code to support a wider range of people rather than a narrow set of known hardware packages that are available. My point : optimizing narrowly for a single platform is much easier than the opposite; a more fair comparison of battery life would be watts-per-hour usage during a standardized testing/benchmarking suite of some sort, along with the watt hours of battery capacity(although historically handset manufacturers have sidestepped that issue by having the software recognize when it's being benchmarked..). "Hours of use" could be practical if it wasn't arbitrarily inflated or deflated by uncommon usage profile testing and specialty optimizations for the sake of marketing a bigger number. It's not impossible to get good numbers out of a Linux build, it's just fairly difficult for someone unfamiliar with the system (and sometimes impossible without doing the work yourself with certain hardware stacks). There exists a whole subspecies of Linux users that are somewhat akin to hypermillers who turn this kind of dilemma into a game and compete for lowest wattage.

johnchristopher 12y ago

> At least my Mac recognizes and uses a second monitor when I plug it in, unlike the bloody Fedora 19 box that I use at work. And don't get me started on that second graphics card that the system can't figure out how to use! And the wifi Just Works(tm), unlike the Ubuntu laptop that I had before that. For what it's worth my debian wheezy laptop detects second monitor just fine (and I am using awesome-wm) while my 2007 iMac randomly lose internet though it's connected to my routeur via wifi. So... data points.

dalanmiller 12y ago

I have but one upvote to give you sir in distinguishing the reality of high quality Apple products vs Linux fanboyism.

dmix 12y ago

> At least my Mac recognizes and uses a second monitor when I plug it in This is mostly a solved problem in linux these days. Macbooks have consistent and quality hardware. It's no surpised they work well. If you use a mainstream laptop or PC parts, it will 100% work with Linux. Using cheap noname parts or manufacturers with poor software support then you'll have issues. For example, Macbooks + Fedora 19 work perfectly. So does the 3 Lenovos I tried and a Dell XPS.

peedy 12y ago

raverbashing 12y ago
> You can write a udev rule for that Yes, please, let me spend time fixing distro BS instead of, you know, working. I don't remember any time when Wifi worked out-of-the-box in my previous Linux laptop. It worked if I did things manually (wpa-supplicant and stuff), the NM widget? Never worked and made things harder Another issue: opening and closing the lid doesn't have a consistent result, and sometimes it just keeps the laptop running. This is for the basic functionality, and sometimes even things that worked before stop working. Older distros had to be more manually configured, but when that was done it was good to go, today it is even harder to shut down the non-working stuff. So yeah, it's Mac for me from now on. Recovery from Time Machine needed some "Linux style hacking" once, but apart from that it's a breeze
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

sergiosgc 12y ago

My Thinkpad X1 Carbon draws something between 6W and 16W between idle and moderate use. I never measured it at full load. Perfectly acceptable, and way competitive with the equivalent Macbook Air, which draws 25W idle. So, I guess, per your definition, that Linux geeks can school Apple today.

eatfish 12y ago
Stop pulling numbers out your ass. The specs for the MBA are online and it draws 6.5W with the display on.
- sergiosgc 12y ago
  Numbers reported by powertop

chanced 12y ago

Lucky you. A lot of us were left with massive paperweights after 10.9.2 dropped: https://www.google.com/search?q=osx+10.9.2+monitor+site:discussions.apple.com&espv=2&biw=1680&bih=912 https://www.google.com/search?q=osx+10.9.2+monitor+site:disc...