Memory leaks are a feature of a software, not hardware. I read the article and while the Apple and Adobe software can be blamed, there is nothing in this post that it would pin this on the new hardware and the author does not seem to be technical enough to understand this.
Totally agree. I read the article as, when I am on my M1 I often experience memory pressure related issues. Not, because of my M1 I often experience memory pressure related issues.
It's very likely future software updates can help address these issues.
Honestly, the machines haven't had wide deployment in the field for all that long for Applications as huge as Photoshop. It takes time to discover, fix, and redeploy things like Photoshop. And it's not like Photoshop never leaked memory on an x86.
It's obvious you haven't read the article and are reacting to the headline. In fact, the author highlights that the issue is probably with the system software (macOS):
That’s extremely similar to the MacBook Pro and Monterey issues I’ve read this week—except I’m still running Big Sur ... It’s possible that macOS isn’t managing this unified memory structure properly, and will continue to allocate RAM beyond what is available without freeing up RAM that is no longer needed. This is commonly referred to as a “memory leak.” Performance gradually deteriorates until you need to either wait for the RAM to clear, force-quit the app, or restart the machine ... it’s entirely possible that Apple fixes it in a future version of macOS without ever addressing the issue publicly. That’s what happened with the excessive SSD usage earlier this year, though that Apple says that was a “data reporting error” and not an actual problem. The memory bug is an actual issue that needs to be fixed as soon as possible.
The big thing is that M1 chips have RAM in the same package, which allows for performance improvement if the software takes advantage of the new architecture. It turns out that the system they came up with offers good performance but doesn't tolerate memory leaks very well.
It is made worse by the fact M1 MacBooks are limited to 16 GB of RAM, non upgradable of course.
So yes, it is a software problem, and it will get better, but the M1 is particularly sensitive to it.
It is just a wild guess based on the article, but the unified architecture is mentioned. So maybe each subsystem (system RAM and GPU in particular) all have direct access and therefore more of a tendency to fight for resources and maybe also complex and therefore more error prone locking patterns over shared memory.
Why doesn’t it tolerate memory leaks very well? The fact that the system remains responsive and able to close the application indicates that it does tolerate it well. I’d say macOS in general tolerates memory leaks much better than Linux does, which if you don’t have a swap disk and you run out of memory the entire system just stops functioning.
I recently got an m1 mini, just on principles the 16GB version, and did already get the RAM usage warning once, with my browser going into large memory usage. So there may be something to this story, will watch for it.
Huh I have an 8GB air and I run Kubernetes locally and develop a fairly complex system with Skaffold on it (~10 services). Thing is a beast, had no problems at all, but one does need to be aware one is not on the 128GB-of-RAM workstation :P
I mean how much demand will a locally hosted dev service generally have? Nothing about K8s inherently denotes high ram usage.
Browsers are generally the biggest culprits for memory usage. Random tabs will leak memory and before you know it some news article page is using 1GB, your GMail is using 1GB, etc.
I feel like this claim was made largely by nontechnical YouTube influencers and some Mac fanatics talking about how fast the swap on the SSDs is and equating that to not needing more RAM.
I don’t think it’s a wholly unfair assessment. You can get away with more when the memory management stack is smart and fast, but in the end if you need 9gb of ram and only have 8gb you’re going to know it. Most people just don’t (at one time).
Interesting hypothesis that it’s because MacOS doesn’t handle the memory structure well. I would have expected this to have manifested under either arch or neither.
These situations are interesting. My M1 13” will occasionally get a stuttering cursor that only goes away with a restart. I haven’t had this problem in over a decade on any computer.
I know I’m not unique in this because of the number of threads on the Internet on the issue.
Interesting to see the odd interactions between software and hardware. Though this sort of bug does put me in mind of how in Minecraft when Notch fixed light transmission through glass, it would start raining through it too.
Funny. The last time I had this was in 2014 or something when I had too little RAM and the system started swapping. Linux GUIs perform poorly under memory pressure. Way worse than windows or MacOS for some reason.
Been a constant experience for me from 2001 when I first started using.
My Intel-based iMac (32GB) has been struggling in Safari lately (more than usual) with stutters and general poor performance; there was a Safari update not too long ago, right?
Been using an M1 mac and Big Sur on the daily for a year and have never experienced this, and I have the 8GB model where I would notice it. My Control Center is using 29 megabytes.
I think this specific memory leak is only in Monterey. I definitely have to manually kill Control Center every few days otherwise it'll be using 20GB+ of RAM. Supposedly it's fixed in the 12.1 beta though, so hopefully Apple releases a fix for it soon.
The author specifically mentions that he is using macOS Big Sur: "That's extremely similar to the MacBook Pro and Monterey issues I’ve read this week — except I’m still running Big Sur."
It really highlights the value of the fleet-wide profiling that ChromeOS enjoys. There’s a dashboard somewhere of what’s using all the space (and time) for ChromeOS users in the wild. But HN just actually hates telemetry more than it hates memory leaks.
I'm running 12.0.1 and Control Center is using ~65 MB, with an uptime of 12 days. This is on an M1 MBA. What type of machine do you have? I wonder if there's some specific software that causes/exacerbates the issue.
for all of apples issues, i really respect their continued commitment to a personal assistant that doesn’t collect all of your data. as opposed to Am & Alph.
This is technically true, but only in a pointlessly narrow sense. They do not sell your data; they hoard it, and sell ad targeting services that use it. They also provide it to the government, for free, as required by law.
But does anybody actually care about this distinction?
it’s tiresome to you because you are a liar fighting a tide of truth. if google pays your bills i can’t say that you should definitely be ashamed of yourself, but otherwise you should definitely be ashamed of yourself for trying to mislead people and be as duplicitous as possible at the top of your lungs. i find cultists really tiring.
It’s significantly better for battery life, it’s a tiny bit more integrated into the OS, and as a bonus it doesn’t send every aspect of my entire browsing history back to Google.
Battery life, better responsiveness, less google spying. If you're not an extension power user and don't mind it's tab overflow behavior, it's pretty good.
That's an interesting point. I notice that the person who wrote the blog post is running Safari, too. Is this a Safari problem? The activity monitor screenshot makes it looks like Safari is eating up big chunks of memory for each tab. I don't often use Safari, and my M1 MBP has been problem-free.
Lightroom Classic (latest version) is unpleasant on my wife's M1 and even crashes. Last night I moved it over to my gaming PC which is pretty old, but performs much better.
It ran on her 2012 Intel MBP and whatever dayjob MBP I had in the past.
First, thank you for your reply. I am curious, after this experience, would your next machine be also an Apple with M1 (or the next iteration of it), assuming nothing else goes wrong?
It could also be that x86 has better SIMD support by a considerable margin, which can make repetitive memory access/serialized workloads a lot faster. I'm not super well intimated with those extensions, but I know that the NEON SIMD implementation in ARMv8 leaves quite a bit to be desired. It's a tricky situation, and one I don't see resolving in a nice clean way. It's stuff like this that makes me hopeful for RISC-V though, where we could theoretically have our cake and eat it too, with dynamic instruction pipelines and incredibly low power usage. Only time will tell, I suppose.
Throughput is not an issue on the M1, with 4x 128-bit SIMD units.
Neon is certainly not a bad SIMD ISA, it's a quite orthogonal one.
You also have the AMX extension at hand, which is more special purpose but allow to deliver very high throughput. (on a regular M1: 350Gflops DGEMM, 1.2Tflops SGEMM, without leveraging anything other than the CPU)
LR CC runs much much better on my M1 MBA than my prior 2017 MBP. I wonder if Adobe is just dragging their feet on updating classic since they want everyone moved to CC?
I've had my 14" M1 Pro for just over a week now. It has performed amazingly. But I also don't install tons of random apps and let them run in the background. I never restore from backups, I manually transfer files from my user folder over to my new setup. I always check whether an app has native M1 support before downloading, though I understand this isn't an option for everyones workflow yet. In cases where the app is literally a wrapper for a website like discord, I just use the website. Or in the case of zoom where I just don't trust the app to be on my computer and the website is sufficient. If something I used previous doesn't have native support I look for an alternative and a couple times I have found something better and/or open-source. I understand rosetta 2 has some issues with overusing swap, so I would rather avoid degrading my ssd and experience.
So far this has worked for me, and I'm able to get two full day's of battery life. I'm away from my desk far more frequently now.
Edit: My control center is using around 1GB of memory. Low enough that it wasn't causing issues but still concerning. It appears there is a memory leak somewhere, hoping a bug-fix is pushed out soon.
If such an issue were to occur on iOS without a crash, would anyone even notice? There's no real way to monitor RAM usage, and the failure mode is less clear (slowdown, issue with responsiveness, followed by likely reboot).
iOS would likely kill the app as soon as it got out of hand, and rely on the state restoration hook to bring back the state as the user left it. Normal macOS apps don't have that, though.
If the leak was in some part of the system, maybe a problem, but I'm sure they test pretty rigorously, and get enough crash reports to figure things out fast with that many devices in the wild, all in pretty constant use.
I did notice that CalendarAgent uses around 350MB which is ridiculous to just sync my Google Calendar. When you kill it, it restarts itself goes down to 15MB but gradually goes up. Doesn't seem to go above 400MBish, but still... Other than that, no complaints. Other apps seem to manage memory rather well.
Rather than working with Activity Monitor open 24/7, just install iStat Menus. Makes it really easy to monitor your system.
Sounds very similar to the macOS 10.15.6 release, which had a horrible kernel memory leak. It was especially visible when running virtual machines. After a few hours the kernel memory pressure was so high that it would oom kill every usermode process one by one, including critical system processes.
That one had me yearning for a linux grub menu entry for "previous kernel".
It's fundamentally the same thing, but when the kernel is refuses to deallocate memory you can't just terminate the process, you have to reboot the system.
What a trainwreck! I'm so glad I switched to Windows 10, and now Windows 11. It's hard to "invent your own" CPU, and think that you know better than experts who have been doing it for decades.
The wreck comes to all trains eventually. It’s only a question of how well any vendor’s interest being aligned with customer’s that they are avoided and remedied.
Attacking another user like this is explicitly against the site guidelines and will get you banned here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this again. Note this rule—it's there for good reason:
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The CPU is a groundbreaking piece of technology. The OS / runtime can be patched. It's not like Intel or Microsoft release flawless hardware and software. And obviously, competition is at the heart of capitalism.
For people who are experiencing a leak on macOS 12: Check if you have set a custom cursor color in the system accessibility preferences. Resetting the cursor color to the default may fix it.
Having worked at Apple adjacent to the likely responsible teams, the relevant details are: overworked engineering teams, insufficient QA investment, and most of all a yearly macOS major release schedule that persists primarily to benefit the egos of Apple's upper management.
Until you see a WWDC that doesn't announce a major release of macOS, expect more of the same.
To any involved Apple folks here, I feel your pain, and I'm sorry.
And this is why I have completely stopped using all Apple products. I used to be a massive Mac fanboy. But the software quality is absolute shit now and has been for at least the past 5 years. I don't understand why anyone puts up with it.
I speak only for myself, but after Catalina I started transitioning to Linux and couldn't be happier. Being able to set up my entire computer with a single Github repo is a godsend for productivity, all it takes are a few keystrokes and I've got a fully configured desktop with all my dotfiles, keybinds and applications.
I've been a Linux user for some 10 years, but have also had to use a Macbook Pro for a while due to work. There's nothing stopping you from fully configuring macOS through a single repository similar to how you do Linux. For a while my dot files were aimed at Linux (primarily), macOS, and Windows as I anticipated to have to use both macOS and Windows down the line, though I've since removed much of the multiplatform code.
Things may be different now as I haven't used a mac since about 2015, but depending on what tools you needed you couldn't escape the GUI completely (for a fully automated setup). At this point I don't remember all that was wrong, but one of the biggest required installing xcode or something like that before I could get git to work.
You don't even need --cask anymore. You can also use `brew bundle dump` to synchronize what you've installed via brew, and it also can sync mac app store installs too.
It's a bit annoying getting macOS system preferences synced still although.
How are you managing the desktop (gnome) files? I swear every time I try to move them to a new system or account all I get is grief; weird bugs, application crashes, dbus weirdness. I would love to see your recipe :) . All I can usually do is bring over app config files like emacs/vim/etc/personal scripts.
I don't use GNOME on any of my systems anymore (the 40 update destroyed all hope I had for the desktop going forwards), but I'm convinced you can get some settings transferred by poking around in your ~/.local directory. Having written a few GTK applications in the past, it seems like the rationale for this is because of GNOME's settings API, and how they define compliance with the GNOME spec. I find it to be a total clusterfuck, and if I had any confidence in the desktop's current management team I'd probably open a few pull requests/RFCs to try and fix it. I might sound a little heavy-handed here, but the "my way or the highway" rhetoric that GNOME's developers are pushing right now makes it really hard for me to take their desktop seriously, or blame anything but the developers themselves for their lack of features.
In any case, I can assure you that behavior is perfectly "normal" to them, unfortunately.
That sounds really neat is it some thing you can share? I recently setup a new machine which didn't take very long, but I have run into a few things I forget so would like to set up something similar.
I basically just run an install script which does a few different things. I start by updating the repos and regenerating my mirrors so I get the fastest downloads possible. After that, I install shell utilities (my editor, shell of choice, base-devel, etc.) and then I enable the AUR so I can grab the rest of my desired apps. The rest of it is decidedly basic, it just copies my tracked config files to ~/.config/ and moves my wallpaper to /usr/share/wallpapers. I run a few rain dances automatically too, like `sudo chmod a+wr /opt/spotify` (which lets me automate my Spotify theming process) and installing/unzipping a Steam theme.
To install, I run `git clone https:github.com/username/repo && ./repo/install.sh`, and I'm off to the races. I really reccommend writing one for yourself, as it's a great way to learn shell scripts.
For me there's a trade-off, depending on how often I setup a new machine. Value of automating with a procedural script vs taking the opportunity to try a leaner (or more modern) toolchain.
Currently upgrade about every 2-3 years, so I do tend not to need a bunch of things each iteration, and might upgrade OS. But I'd like a backup in case e.g. hardware failure, laptop lost or stolen.
Some declarative workstation config like terraform or Ansible would be interesting.
I've been seeing this exact same comment for over a decade now.
The first couple of releases of OSX are always a little rough around the edges. And then by the end of the cycle everyone proclaims how wonderful this release is.
Except the bugs have continued to get worse and worse. For me the deal breaker was the blank page in iOS Safari[1]. After fighting that one constantly, I threw in the towel. I've been so much happier. Btw I was an Apple user from System 7 through to 2019.
Back in the days OS X was a dumpster fire in terms of overall reliability until the very late releases of every major version. Some versions like Lion had pure crashes until the end.
Even looking a few years before, we had the root user password bug and other pretty severe issues way worse than what we’re seeing now.
I did say over the past 5 years, so things like the root password issue I include in that. I'm also utterly convinced airdrop is just a long running joke at Apple, I've gotten it to work like twice.
Snow Leopard was as solid as OSX ever got in my estimation. Man I miss those days. Snow Leopard's primary goal was just to harden Leopard and not really have too many new features. Apple really needs to bring that kind of thinking back. I'm happy to see their hardware is back on track, now if they could just get the software to do a U turn...
What I don't get about apple, with a compensation policy that is less than the other big techs, because they can't get over the late 90s, team sizes that are usually smaller and being one of the largest market cap companies in the world, why don't they hire more?
Hiring more people isn't going to make them more money. Improving their products/services isn't going to make them more money. Providing more value to customers isn't going to make them more money.
Charging $300 for a screen replacement will make them more money. Selling bluetooth headphones with non-replaceable batteries will make them more money. Collecting taxes on developers will make them more money. etc etc
They got popular because of their commitment to quality. "It just works" is and in many ways still is a key to their popularity. They whittle away at their "quality credit rating" the less and less they invest in these things, until their quality credit rating becomes low enough for a competitor exploit that and make them lose market share very quickly. It does make them money.
I can see the business side of the permanent upgrade hype, constant new features, etc. But aren't we supposed to be reaching some kind of detente with Apple where they realize that power users drive the Mac market, and the release schedule should be built around hardware and stability, rather than endless retreads and new consumer features we'll never use? I'm still on El Capitan and pretty much everything since then looks like bloat to me.
Ah yes, our visit from Just the Magical Wizard, who in this case tells us "just set your cursor color back to default if you run out of memory", as if we should have already known :)
You're right, I've just checked and when I set my cursor to be a custom color in accessibility settings suddenly my Firefox started to eat up memory as crazy :D. This went away as soon as I reset the cursor to default colors.
I just ordered the M1 Max with 64GB RAM because I'm constantly getting the "Your system has run out of application memory." popup while working on Lunar[1] in Xcode.
Every time this happens, Xcode uses about 4GB of RAM (probably because of the monolithic UI storyboard of Lunar) but it should still leave enough memory for my other non-memory hungry apps.
But then I open Activity Monitor and I see WindowServer using ~80GB of memory [2]
The only remedy is either `killall WindowServer` or a full reboot.
I've been using an M1 MacBook Pro and Monterey since the first developer beta but this only became an issue in the last 2 months or so.
It is virtual memory, the real memory size is usually sub 1GB. But I just can’t find any other culprit, and killing WindowServer is the only thing that helps.
I have no idea how to troubleshoot this and don’t really have time for it when working on hotfixes, I just want to get back in a state where I’m not facing an imminent system lock up where I can’t even save my recent work.
Do you tint your mouse cursor (new Monterey accessibility setting)? I noticed this in the last handful of developer betas, and it definitely shipped out in 12.0.1: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1735345
Although that particular issue will show in application footprint, not WindowServer. I see WindowServer buildup on one of my M1s still, even in 12.1 beta :(
Activity Monitor shows a "memory footprint", rather than just a simple sum of virtual memory usage. Among other things, this number splits memory usage for resources shared across multiple processes (e.g. system libraries) and attributes a fraction to each of them.
I too have the problem with WindowServer although for me it seems to happen with just regular usage. I have not rebooted in 48 days, and currently it is using 10GB RAM (I have a MacBook Air with 16GB). I have seen some people claim it has to do with using a display scaling setting other than the default (I use 1280x800).
Yes, I agree, but it is a memory leak. It doesn’t START at 10GB. Also closing windows does not help much at all.
To answer your question, I have a total of 73 windows open at the moment. 11 of them are from applications with a single window open, 8 are from iTerm, and 54 are from Sublime Text. I am aware that is quite a lot for Sublime, but that is just how I use it.
Regardless, I just quit Sublime Text, and the memory usage only dropped to 8.9GB still absurdly high for having 19 windows open.
Hmm, that is interesting. You have lots of unaccounted for memory, which is not normal at all. Would you happen to have the full footprint output? Trying to see how the 200K individual VM_ALLOCATE regions are distributed in side.
I have been seeing all of the above problems on my 16GB M1 MacBook Air for probably at least 6 months now.
WindowServer has consistently been the main culprit but occasionally other apps like to chip in where they can too. Often that means there isn’t one single process which I can kill to reclaim enough memory to continue working without being promoted again or having MacOS forcibly close all my applications on me. As a result, reboots appear to be the only real solution for me.
Interestingly though, in the past few weeks I have been working with similar numbers of open Sublime Text windows as yourself and I can confirm that since then, ST4 has been a regular and serious offender when it comes to memory usage in Activity Monitor.
Great to see you pop up on HN. I discovered Lunar a couple of weeks ago after wondering whether something like it existed and it's been a great tool so far. Solves one thing and solves it well. Keep up the great work!
If you use say Proxmox and create your own macOS image and compile your own Opencore then you should be OK. You can do same on VirtualBox. (On a PC, cause I doubt older MBPs have the necessary stuff like VT-d.)
Of course, once Apple kills off x86-64 macOS it is going to become more complicated.
That won't be for a very long time. There's a lot of Mac Pros out there. They're still supporting the 8-year old 2013 Mac Pro, the trashcan one. They sold a lot of the revised Mac Pro to animation studios and such. I wouldn't count on support for those being dropped for at least ten years.
That seems like another symptom of the same problem.
Apple locked me into their ecosystem...but that is their right, after all it is their platform.
Apple sold me faulty hardware/software but I have to buy more Apple products (new hardware, support) since I am locked in and cannot do my work on non-Apple hardware.
Their behavior may not be illegal (IANAL) but I find it quite user hostile.
The main problem I see with all this is that since Apple is getting away with it, more and more companies are trying the same tactics and normalizing user lock-in and charging extra to fix faulty hardware and software.
As someone who hasn't been in the Mac ecosystem since his and his mom's iMac both broke in the same way in high school, how does the Mac ecosystem lock you in?
As far as I know you need to use Xcode to distribute the software, or to write macOS-native software. I have written plenty of Java Swing apps without touching Xcode at all.
You can use alternative toolchains like like cctools-port[1] and xcbuild[2]. See, for example, this article [3] on how to build Swift UI apps for iOS using Linux.
It's very weird to be talking about "windows, mac or linux" developers.
Desktop application development today is maybe about 1-5% of all development, while overwhelming majority of backend development - the largest category - targets Linux.
Percentage of the way to being as good as all desktop operating systems ought, at a minimum, to be:
Windows: 70%
Linux: 20-80% depending on your hardware, what you're doing with it, and how lucky you got with the current kernel & libraries your distro is running.
MacOS: 90%
So when Apple fucks up really bad and MacOS temporarily drops to 70%, no, I still don't switch. Every desktop operating system is shitty, but there are degrees of shitty.
Probably because other brands don’t do anything novel to warrant such loyalty. Apples hardware and software stack is undeniably unique which in turn makes it a brand that people will put up with issues because well, it has things other systems don’t.
These issues notwithstanding, the total user experience of owning a Mac laptop is far superior to any Linux or Windows machine I've tried, at least in the past 3 years or so.
Two concrete examples: trackpad feels like shit on both Windows and Linux, installing or updating drivers and some apps on Windows constantly switches back to legacy modes to display the installers (with different fonts, no subpixel smoothing etc.). If it's not a deal breaker, it is annoying as hell and something that almost never happens on my Mac.
yea it takes time but eventually open software will be better, just look at how well Blender is doing and even Darktable is way way better then Adobe Lightroom can't understand why anyone uses that anymore while a free alternative that is better is out there.
^ This. It's not that I don't want to switch to a different company, it's just everything else is a worse, overall experience.
I'm on Windows every week or so, and while it feels much faster than Mac, on the same hardware, there are just too many little things that annoy me. (have tried a few Linux flavours too, not really a contender for my use case)
OP was describing very high-spec hardware which locks up and becomes unresponsive under their normal workload, potentially losing work or wasting their time. That seems like a much more significant issue than inconsistent font display or the feel of the input device.
Your experience must differ, but if I spent $2000+ on a device only to find that was locking up (due to poor memory management in a standard component!) under my standard workload, I would be livid. I would probably return it, and then tell the next 10 people I meet about my poor experience.
That said, I have run across a Windows 7 bug where the font manager would repeatedly fail and leave its cache/log on disk, only to restart and repeat until the hard disk was just about full. Complaints about the poor state of software engineering as a discipline go back to the beginning.
As a counterpoint, I was a Linux user for ~20 years (eventually with a macOS dev machine on my desk as well).
I got so sick of troubleshooting issues myself, I switched to Windows 7 and have never had to troubleshoot my OS since then. I don't google Windows issues, I don't have crashes, nothing.
It's nice to have a machine that I can just work on and not constantly debug.
(I 100% expect privacy advocates to admonish me for this, but I use hardware I assembled myself and block MS telemetry.)
In a world without MacOS, I'd probably be running Linux on a really beefy Windows machine under virtualization, for work. Desktop Linux is so much more stable and pleasant to use in a VM with Windows or MacOS handling the actual hardware. Still a bit unstable, but not nearly as bad.
> These issues notwithstanding, the total user experience of owning a Mac laptop is far superior to any Linux or Windows machine I've tried, at least in the past 3 years or so.
That.
I don't love Apple. They're a corporation, so at best our interests temporarily align. Loving them would be absurd. I really really want them to have strong competitors. I'd love to be back on an open source OS full-time, like I was for many years.
Unfortunately, they're so far ahead of the competition, that they screw up, sometimes even in a few ways at the same time, and people come out saying "LOL and Apple fanboys won't switch to Linux even now", and that's true... but it's because I'd be trading a few problems for a few score problems.
I ran Linux on laptops and desktops for about a decade, as my main computers. Ubuntu near the end, Gentoo for about five years, Mandrake really early on, a little time with Fedora somewhere in there, a sprinkling of Debian. I still try it out every year or two! I wish it weren't, but it's still much, much worse, and in the best case slows me down and gets in my way more than a "bad" Apple machine with a "bad" version of an OS X / MacOS, barring actual faulty hardware.
Tesla. So many people seem to have problems with the cars/lack of quality only to say “still love the car” or “it’s my xxx number Tesla and they’re still doing [problem]”
It’s really something, isn’t it? I’ve never regretted my decision to switch from macOS to Linux over a decade ago. Having to restart a 64GB machine constantly because it runs out of memory? Meanwhile my 4GB Linux computer shows a 38-day uptime (only because I accidentally unplugged it last month) and my two Linux servers have uptimes of over a year.
Just to be clear: This perfectly fine experience you describe is also exactly the experience of 99% of Apple users, including me. You only hear the ones that complain.
The ones that don’t complain have low standards. When I switched, although OSX was pretty solid, it was trading frequently spinning beachballs for the first consistently responsive computer I’d ever used. I had come to regard macOS sluggishness as normal, as do most Mac users, because they haven’t experienced anything better.
Is this sort of sweeping generalization really necessary? I can tell you that it's not true in any case. I'm one of those Mac users that doesn't complain about performance, because I rarely see the spinning beach ball.
I haven't seen a spinning beachball on MacOS in years. I'm not even sure it still exists anymore. But also only rarely have a sluggish system, with or without a spinning beachball.
That doesn't mean linux is any better. I built a brand new ryzen x5800 machine late last year, running linux mint. When I first built it, the computer has had duplicate unremovable mouse cursors appearing on the screen. And my trackpad sometimes randomly became unresponsive (or one time, the up and down directions flipped!). And neither suspending nor hybernating worked - the machine wouldn't come back up.
All these problems have since gone away thanks to software updates and (importantly) a BIOS update. It turned out my USB controller wasn't being configured correctly by the motherboard. If I didn't happen to check for BIOS updates, I'd still have lots of problems.
And that was still a better experience than the HP laptop I bought a couple of years ago. That laptop had so much HP crap preinstalled that it sat on 30% CPU usage at all times out of the box. The biggest offender was some HP process doing microphone noise reduction. It ran all the time regardless of whether or not the microphone was being used - and utterly demolished the machine's battery life.
Apple is far from perfect, but they have a better reputation than most vendors for a reason. And their technical support is are excellent. I've had thousands of dollars of free hardware repairs & replacements over the years when things have broken in my apple machines. I wish they didn't break so much; and I wish they prioritised fixing software bugs over adding features internally. (APFS aside, I would trade the last 5 years of macOS features for better stability and performance in a heartbeat.) But there's a reason they're so well liked on HN. They're still pretty excellent in comparison to the competition.
Huh? What point are you trying to make? I don't care how well macOS runs on my machine. I care how well any given computer gets out of the way and lets me get my work done. Today that means intellij, the rust compiler, firefox and nodejs. I want to spend my day working. Not futzing around with HP bloatware. Not rebooting due to apple memory leaks. And not guessing why my keyboard needs to be reconnected.
In your story, you built a machine, and Linux didn’t work well on it at first. Later, it worked fine. Meanwhile, macOS never did and probably never will run on it. And you introduce this story as an illustration of how “Linux isn’t any better.” So, to borrow your words: Huh? What point are you trying to make?
In my story linux didn't work well at first. Then with some time and work, it worked fine. An HP windows laptop didn't work well at first - but after I spent some time removing the HP bloatware, it worked "fine". This article says that mac laptops aren't working well because of memory leaks. But in a few months Apple will probably fix their software bugs and they'll work fine too.
You said:
> The [mac users] that don’t complain have low standards
I agree with you. I'd go even further and say most users have low standards, because the out-of-the-box experience with most modern computers is pretty bad. Apple users should absolutely complain more when the out-of-the-box experience with their computer isn't perfect. We all should.
Apple customers keep buying apple computers despite their issues not because we have low standards. We do it because the alternatives are even worse.
As an avid linux user I can tell you. Linux users aren't "trained" to have low expectations. They are trained to be masochists that enjoy pain. The raw amount of configuration, fixes and setup work that has to go into making some linux distros work is astronomical.
If nonlinux users are trained to have low expectations, Linux users are trained to rape themselves constantly.
I see your point of view a lot but I don't think configuring a system is that hard and I think it's preferable, compared to have tons of complexity preconfigured without your knowledge.
Here's my experience with Arch Linux:
1) You install what you need to install
2) You read the doc and configure to your liking, learning what the system can and cannot do and how it works with everything else
3) Things generally work as documented and you go your merry way
4) When something break or doesn't work, you have the knowledge or a general idea of what to fix
Compared to proprietary systems where there is no documentation and little configuration, when things break or misbehave you're essentially screwed. Will you wait for an official fix or look online for reverse engineers?
You bought a black box and you can't just open it and fix it.
I'd rather spend a day learning about my system during the installation and having it work for years, instead of buying yet another black box I can't open.
>I'd rather spend a day learning about my system during the installation and having it work for years, instead of buying yet another black box I can't open.
Learning linux doesn't take a day. Second off those black boxes statistically are more reliable than linux EVEN when you account for all the things you talked about.
The reason for this is simple. Microsoft has a business advantage and unfairly strong arms hardware manufacturers to make their stuff work with windows. This unfair advantage makes the windows user experience better and more reliable than GNU linux whos' developers constantly have to play catch up with hardware.
In the last 20 years PC hardware has become ridiculously faster - and yet the user experience seems to have changed little.
I saw an article ages ago whereby Microsoft apparently had a dependencies approval gateway. If you made any change based on Windows you had to remove/reduce your dependencies or make a good case for not doing so.
The point he's trying to make is linux on a Ryzen isn't as good as MacOS on an M1. The user experience is inferior. That is his point and his point is fact. Hope you understand now.
user experience is inferior? how so? what nonsense, i have heard countless stories on dumb things Apple forces on its users while on Linux you can just use Vulkan... Imagine if your app can't contact Apple servers they don't launch or take minutes to open...and when they do work they are recording information... why on earth do people still use closed source software. Now we have to deal with Safari crap... like we used to deal with IE5, having to have workarounds for browser standards Apple refuses to follow or implement.
Don't waste your breath, let them be 'happy' in their little cult.
I think Apple users are often mad because subconsciously they know they are taken a fool.
It's not a cult. I use all three operating systems and I'm highly proficient using linux. My distro of choice is Manjaro and NixOS and I have a lot of experience with debian and ubuntu as well.
Each operating system has benefits and downsides. For user experience linux is definitively the worst. Definitively. The differences are so large that it's almost comical how someone on this planet can't see the difference. If you can't see this then you are the one that is part of a cult.
- Hidpi support is spotty (its getting better but still a bit spotty)
- Smooth scrolling in applications is inconsistent at best
- The keyboard shortcuts for moving the text cursor around are inconsistent between programs
- Hardware support is much more of a crap shoot. Linux has a harder job than macos in trying to support every combination of janky hardware out there. But as a user, I don't really care. I just know that if I buy a mac, the OS will work perfectly with the hardware on offer. That isn't true on linux.
- Lots of useful software isn't available on linux. Eg, I love Monodraw, but thats macos only.
- App distribution on Linux is a mess. Apt? RPM? Snap? Flatpack? Etc etc. I have 2 copies of discord installed for some reason, and I have no idea what the difference is between them.
Etcetera..
Linux gives you the choice and freedom to spend an unlimited number of hours customizing everything. With linux I'm in complete control and I love that. On macos, things usually just work out of the box. I love that too.
No OS is perfect. There's tradeoffs with everything. If you don't understand other people's preferences, that doesn't make you right. It makes you ignorant.
He's obviously comparing a linux PC experience with an apple OSX experience. It's a completely valid comparison but you're just being mean an inappropriate.
Tell that to my tech lead who spent more than 8k buying and repairing his macbook due to constant motherboard issues.
I love macs but don't dare to try them due to soooo many people in my circles seem to have very frequent HW issues with them. It seems to be either in the shop being repaired or having issues with connecting bluetooth stuff.
I'm used to Thinkpad reliability so not looking forward to trade that up for some pretty pixels.
My lenovo laptops had 0 issues in the past ten years. Zero.
But now I'm web development and I need a mac for Safari to test locally.
I manage a fleet of macs. I have not seen any issues like that. I'd ask what your friends are doing to their computers to be seeing such a disproportionate amount of hardware issues.
> The ones that don’t complain have low standards.
Wow, well, thanks a lot. I've been developing on both the Mac and Linux for years and I don't have this issue on any of the multiple MBPs I use, including my personal 2013 model. I'm not saying I have no problems on the Mac, but they're not worse than the issues I had with Linux, especially on laptops.
I switched to a 13" M1 after having a Dell XPS 15 as my daily driver. I had high standards and Apple blew them out of the water. I see some beach ball on occasion, but I slam the machine hard. (8gb ram). It has been more reliable than the XPS 15.
Better than a Dell XPS 15 is no standard at all. The Dell XPS 15 is an utterly terrible laptop that breaks if you close the lid and put it in your bag when you get up from your seat. It's a portable desktop falsely advertised as a laptop due to its many flaws. If the best that can be said for apple is better than Dell XPS 15, that is a really, really damning review. I hope it's vastly better than that for you.
> Better than a Dell XPS 15 is no standard at all.
so what is the laptop that would meet this standard for which you're making a judgement?
So far, apple hardware has been superior to any other manufacturer, even with their warts, and their anti-consumer practises (of not having replaceable batteries, etc).
Not OP, but I have to chime in here- Dell's XPS line somehow got a reputation that it absolutely did not deserve as a good laptop to run linux on (or a good laptop at all).
I've been perfectly happy with a surface book 2, and various Lenovo and HP laptops. They each have better and worse product lines. Currently rocking an HP elitebook for personal use and a MB Pro for work.
The hardware quality is more or less the same on both. With the pro, you get a moderately better touchpad, a bit thinner and metal chassis. On the other hand, crap keyboard and the abomination that is the touch bar, and no legacy ports.
Personally, I don't think I would buy Apple for myself ever again, but that's just me.
The fact that we even have to debate about which laptop is good for Linux or not makes me not want to bother. I switched to Mac 12 years ago, and I never had to bother thinking about choosing hardware since. It just works.
No one will ever convince me that a laptop with a web cam whose position is limited to looking straight up your nose is quality.
I primarily navigate by keyboard, so the difference between an acceptable and amazing trackpad is pretty minimal for my preferences. On the other hand, port wonkiness, temperamental wifi, okay keys, mediocre battery, driver issues and an utterly useless webcam convinced me to ditch the XPS the first chance I got. It's amazing I used it nearly 18 months.
>So far, apple hardware has been superior to any other manufacturer, even with their warts, and their anti-consumer practises (of not having replaceable batteries, etc).
Milage may vary with other manufacturers, it doesn't look like you would change to another manufacturer. Which is ok.
Check business notebooks, from HP or Lenovo. (I forgot one particular Dell series.)
Ok... so what's the laptop that can compete with the new 14 and 16 Macbook Pros then and doesn't have some stupid flaw? The issue with waking up in bags seems to be caused by Modern Standby which is on most new Windows laptops?
I would go with a Lenovo or HP machine before a Dell. Even if they all have the sleep issue (I don't know if that's the case), both Lenovo and HP have better build quality.
I've had multiple Asus laptops (UX305, UX330 and most recently S435UA) and all of them ran Fedora flawlessly out of the box. Granted, none of them had Nvidia GPUs which is the usual pain point of desktop Linux.
I have had the opposite experience. Switched from a MB Pro that kept getting progressively worse over the course of a year (keys giving, overheating, lock ups) requiring rather annoying applecare interactions to an XPS 15. Granted it is not quite as pretty look at, but blows the mbpro out of the water performance and stability wise.
> The ones that don’t complain have low standards.
> they haven’t experienced anything better.
I don't want to gratify this pointless flame any more than to say that I have used all of Windows (XP, Vista, 8, 8.1, 10), Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and macOS as my daily driver at one point or another, and I currently use macOS because I have yet to experience anything better. There is a simple explanation for your problems here: something is wrong with your system (or you are overtaxing it) if it beachballs constantly. This is not typical macOS behavior, especially not since they switched to SSDs. I actually haven’t seen a beachball in years.
More like "specific enough" instead of "high enough". Use Apple all you want but don't lie to yourself by saying Windows isn't a better, more powerful, more stable operating system.
It just isn't as polished, and even that's debatable.
You are confusing your own personal experience for the standard experience of macOS users. Personally, beachballs are so rare for me in the past few years that I'm always amazed when I see one.
This has been my experience as well. I've had an M1 MacBook Pro since they came out and I've never had to reboot my machine outside of software updates that required me to. It has always just run.
I use my computer to write Elixir code, write music with Logic and Studio One, and edit photos/videos. Maybe none of those tasks trigger the problems other people are having.
I don’t know what you’re doing on a 4GB machine but I promise most workloads that create significant memory pressure would start creating problems for you, just like on macOS.
I use a dual xeon, 64GB Linux desktop which performs reasonably well.
A colleague runs a Linux machine with 16GB of ram. Compiling the same project can cause OOM issues for him and the kernel starts whacking processes.
Even if he closes all non-essential processes, his builds run 10x as long as mine due to memory constraints.
My main point here - let’s not pretend your 4GB machine is being used to do any intense local work.
The inverse of this is seen on my Intel MacBook Air and my colleague’s M1 MacBook Air. The compilation time for our code is 35 minutes or more on my machine and only 3 minutes on the M1.
> My main point here - let’s not pretend your 4GB machine is being used to do any intense local work.
That depends entirely on what you consider intense local work. Just because you are not compiling doesn’t mean running your 15 microservice stack locally is not intense.
Memory intensive work wasn't the topic of conversation. GGP's comment was about how often he had to reboot his laptop despite it's immense memory budget, not about how much faster it was at performing memory-intensive tasks.
4 GB is maybe small nowadays, but memory-intensive is relative.
I'd argue that _most_ programmers or even data analysts don't need more than 8 GB to perform their actual work.
But realistically they need 16+ anyway because of opening 200 browser tabs, memory-heavy IDEs, etc. 32 or 64 is nice for sure, but definitely not needed for actual "work" workloads for the most part.
Of course it will run out of memory if it's taking more than 16GB of ram.
Most Linux distro suggest you to setup swap so instead of crashing it could use the swap.
I personally don't use swap, because if something is consuming too much ram I most likely want it dead.
I don't know what are you compiling, but requiring more than 16GB of ram for compiling something sounds lazy and unneeded.
Likewise you can use a browser extension which reclaims ram from unused tabs.
I can understand the need to have 64gb to do video editing or rendering, but most of the times we need that much ram is because our software is badly written and we don't want to face the problem, not because of the complexity of what we're doing.
I never regretted moving from Linux to Mac also a decade ago. Mac has been fairly smooth for me, still on a 2013 mbp that just needed a battery replacement. Linux, however, was pain, quite often.
its a lot different now, unless your running it on proprietary hardware without official driver support, like the random stuff laptops have these days, but now we have many companies making laptops for Linux so it has improved a lot. Why give money to a company to use their software when you can use open software and help fix and improve something everyone can use for free.
Maybe not constantly but I have to restart my 64 GB Linux machine because it runs out of memory. Linux's OOM killer is terrible. I literally have to wait half an hour while my desktop is frozen for the OOM killer to kick in. And no, spamming the key combo for invoking the OOM killer once this happens doesn't help.
Use earlyoom or another oom daemon for a 1000x better experience and consider figuring out what is leaking. Do you use gnome? It used to have a bad leak that was supposed to have been fixed.
I think it's mostly firefox just holding things in memory since so much is free. Eventually it just all adds up and eventually I try to compile something and then it will run out of memory.
Yes, I can go setup an oom daemon, but Linux should handle this for me out of the box (ideally with some sort of logic to avoid killing something like X taking down every single program I have open). Getting stuck for half an hour or longer is just not acceptable to let happen.
While the tooling and system stability are better, the desktop and app experiences are far worse. It’s buggy, half-baked, and crash.
I regularly hop distributions and do clean installs to see if that will fix it but they’re all the same — pop!_os might be slightly more stable in that regard.
I’ve been using Linux since 1992. I’ve had several year periods in the 90s and early 2000s where Linux was all I used.
I can ditch GNOME, KDE, and XFCE and go back to twm or i3 or fvwm or Window Maker, but I’ve moved beyond thoses experiences. I want a more functional desktop.
But, I see now why I paid more to put up with Apple.
Can you please explain what exactly you get from the Apple desktop you don't with any of those options? I'm currently forced onto a mac for work and I find it lacking in almost every way other than an ever so slight advantage in beauty.
So besides dpi-scaling issues linux is known for, whats the draw? Some hotkey that does a thing? Some visual candy? Smoothness in transitions?
Whatever it is, it's hard for me to imagine it being worth the tradeoff. I can't even name desktop workspaces on a Mac!
I'm reviewing the "new features" section on Monterey: https://www.apple.com/macos/monterey/features/ and I'm not seeing much other than a few known areas (multi-device support if you bought fully into the apple ecosystem, etc).
With most "I tried linux desktop" people it's a problem of DE/WM, but you seem to be beyond that so I'm genuinely curious.
> Can you please explain what exactly you get from the Apple desktop you don't with any of those options?
A more cohesive experience across the desktop and applications, eg.:
- The look and feel is uniform. Admittedly somewhat less so, these days now that the Apple Human Interface Guidelines are largely ignored.
- Mac apps and generally more stable.
- Mac apps generally have more features.
- The Mac apps I use generally tend to tie into the hardware (hw acceleration, drivers, etc) much better. The benefit of controlling the vertical, I suppose.
- The keyboard shortcuts both exist and are the same across apps.
- The design patterns.
- The AppleScript/x-callback-url, etc).
- Third party apps generally tend to fit well into the above.
On Linux, almost everybody seems to have their own ideas on how an app should be arranged. With full desktop environments, like GNOME and KDE lessen this, but it's still really, really common.
That said, my money is still on Linux and other open source OSes, because I don't want a single company telling me what I can and can't do.
Not OP but I have extensive experience as a user of all three major desktop systems. Aqua, the macOS desktop, is by far the most stable and consistent, and in my experience the most usable and powerful as well.
A few things that stand out about it to me vs GNOME 3, KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXDE, and whatever the Windows interface is called:
- The consistency of the menu system, and being able to search and use the menus of any app from the keyboard with shift-cmd-?. This is like having Emacs M-x or Sublime/VSCode shift-cmd-P in every desktop app.
- Being able to assign custom keyboard shortcuts for any menu option in any app.
- Emacs keybindings for editing text in every text field (including on the web). I believe GNOME Tweaks is supposed to do this, but I could never get it to work reliably and universally like macOS.
- Native app ecosystem. Third-party Mac software is generally the most polished, though not quite as much exists as for Windows.
- System animations. This is a small one, but it makes things more fun and makes the whole system feel fluid and “organic,” for lack of a better term.
Linux works fine for me, but I don’t use a desktop. I totally agree with you that they are disasters, with poor documentation and multiple conflicting ways to make settings.
Firefox crashing is probably a Firefox problem.
You can set the scaling to be anything you want on X, just set the Xft.dpi number in your .Xresources file.
One problem with your Hackintosh install is that it’s closed source, no? As far as you know it’s exfiltrating your financial information to China.
macOS still crashes, has weird bugs and every 6 months they go and change a bunch of shit that either deprecates functionality, causes conflict with how things work or takes another handful of your privacy.
Grass isn't always greener.
Edit for an example, I'm stuck on Catalina because they tried deprecating functionality my firewall uses. And the window shifter shortcut key program I use won't work in Big Sur.
> and every 6 months they go and change a bunch of shit that either deprecates functionality, causes conflict with how things work or takes another handful of your privacy.
No, that's Microsoft Windows. Apple only does it annually.
Windows has some of the best backwards compatibility around. Stuff from the 90s still works on Windows. Meanwhile macOS deprecated all 32 bit programs.
The kinds of things the post above complained about breaking on macOS—third-party software that messes with system internals in unsupported ways—also break frequently on Windows. To say nothing of the first-party breakage of Microsoft constantly moving around settings, re-enabling or re-installing annoyances you turned off, and removing your ability to easily get rid of them, and adding new ones behind your back.
Microsoft really only tries to preserve basic compatibility for well-behaved applications that aren't tightly integrated with any OS components or specific hardware/drivers and aren't doing anything that Microsoft disapproves of. Anything that strays outside those boundaries will run into trouble, and a lot of software ends up falling outside those boundaries even if it didn't really need to.
Both operating systems are pretty bad at letting you wield control over your own computer. But macOS doesn't try as hard to obscure the BS or obstruct your attempts to tame it, and macOS actually lets you refuse updates that you don't want.
Yes and many of the major Linux distros have discontinued or plan to discontinue official 32-bit/multilib support. Why? A lot of 32-bit libraries have serious vulnerabilities that no one is fixing. Essentially most of the world has transitioned to 64-bit except for a few key areas that are still trying to run libraries that are decades old.
Sure, macOS still crashes, I didn't claim it doesn't. But macOS crashes with a lot less regularity for me.
I use Linux as my daily driver and the apps I use (GNOME Terminal, other terms, Spotify, Slack, Brave and Firefox, and the GNOME desktop itself) crash multiple, sometimes several times a day on my two (work, personal) machines.
This happens across diverse machines, as well as across multiple distributions (though again, pop!_os, so far seems much less trashy for whatever reason).
what are you doing to cause these crashes or what hardware?? i use manjaro and pop_o, makes no sense since i get less crashes then windows and my computer is on for days without anything crashing, other then me writing a bug and crashing my own stuff :) i do lots of work and gaming on them so i don't know why your experience is so different.
Desktop Linux is easily the least-stable OS I use with any regularity. It was my main OS from something like '01-'10, but after I finally gave OS X a try, and since Windows got its shit together some time late in the WinXP service pack cycle (or, arguably, Win2k, but that wouldn't run my games) and stopped crashing all the time, it's really hard to justify using desktop Linux.
Does the OS hard lock or completely crash? No... unless you have graphics drivers issues, which isn't unlikely. Then, oh man, yes, lots. X/Wayland crashes that restart the window server? Yep. Applications crashing pretty regularly or glitching out so badly they have to be restarted, including the basic applications distributed with the heavier DEs? Yep. And it turns out that your windowing environment crashing or the main program you're currently using crashing is really close to as bad as the whole machine blue-screening in Windows, from the perspective of the user. Using Linux makes me anxious, even though I very much know WTF I'm doing with it. MacOS and even (spits) Windows don't do that to me, any more. Now that I've experienced not feeling that way, I can't go back. I go years between work-lost crashes of any sort at all on MacOS. Linux, one month without such a thing would be miraculous.
If you build up from almost nothing and keep things very minimal and have very boring and stable old hardware, and do as much as possible from the command line, it can be kinda OK, but it's a lot of work to set something up like that, and ongoing effort every time you do something manually that'd be automatic or trivial on a more full-featured GUI desktop. If you start with something like Ubuntu or Fedora standard desktop installs, though, there's just too much that can go wrong, and it will, with some frequency.
I could tolerate some hardware or workflows not working and things generally being a little less convenient, maybe, if it were rock solid, but it's very far from that. The main problems seem to be that its entire graphics stack is incredibly fragile (Wayland doesn't seem to have done much, if anything, to fix that) and it's way too easy for a glitchy driver to screw up the whole system.
I've switched to Linux from Mac OS about 2 years ago, being frustrated by memory consumption, slowdowns and freezes. After trying a couple of distributions / DEs, I've settled on Manjaro (Arch based) and KDE. Delighted with flexibility, features and general performance and stability. While, before, I was constantly tempering with the environment and changing stuff and there was always "something missing", I've found myself not needing to touch configuration or change anything in my workflow for more than a year now...I did have some glitches and CPU usage issues when playing YT videos on Intel-based graphics, but have since been using Lenovo laptops with Ryzen 4000 and 5000, and it's been flawless without any tempering. P14s Gen 2 AMD (5850U + 32GB RAM) is the best laptop I have ever used (software development), and I change them A LOT...
AMD graphics on Linux nowadays are vastly more stable than anything else. NVIDIA is proprietary crap and Intel Graphics still have cross-platform bugs so often is almost comical.
The experience you are describing is more akin to what I remember being Linux in the '00s than nowadays. I run a machine with arguably a buggy Ryzen 1st gen motherboard (it's quite buggy on Windows too), and I have a very stable desktop experience with Arch Linux and KDE Plasma. The real game changer has been AMDGPU, I'm yet to have any sort of graphical issue with an RX 580 on Linux, and Plasma is arguably quite solid nowadays.
The only issue I had recently were audio issues which were both due to my buggy soundcard and a bug in Pipewire. Excluding that, I've had almost no issues with desktop Linux since 2017.
I think your experience is not universal. I would say windows has been far less reliable than linux on my thinkpad machine, but overall I have to say that I have yet to use an OS that never crashed on me, all software of this complexity is buggy.
Funny, I moved from Linux to Mac because I got so sick of no good laptops with full support for Linux and it's never ending subsystems for audio, webcams, trackpads, etc. And not like Linux UIs are known for being efficient and memory friendly either.
On the other hand my Linux computer struggles to go 10 days without a reboot due to the graphics driver bugging out, while my old MBA basically never needed rebooting.
Stop trying to spin it Apple's illegal behavior. The change was clearly unnecessary because once they rolled it back the phones kept on functioning just fine.
Stop trying to spin it Apple's illegal behavior. The change was clearly unnecessary because once they rolled it back the phones kept on functioning just fine.
Modern hardware can and should last ten years. Accept no excuses.
I find the defense of Apple in this case absolutely fascinating.
You know how I can tell that Apple made that change not with the user in mind?
By the fact that until a 3rd party proved Apple was throttling older phones, Apple never publicly stated they were doing this. I’m fact, they vehemently denied it.
I saw this on a personal level, where my mother who took 2 trips abroad about a year apart, with the same phone (and she had a lot of disk space in both trips and she hardly installs any apps) found the phone an absolute pleasure to take pictures during the first trip, kept missing shots while waiting for the camera app to load in the second one.
And on taking the phone to the Genius Bar multiple times, she was gaslighted each time as the Genius showed her their diagnostic results which showed that no, her phone was in perfect health (minus a slight degradation in battery life).
Of course, a few months later the entire world learnt that, in fact, her phone had slowed down, and Apple was lying. What’s interesting is that Apple diagnostics tools (which should probably have a speed test?) also reported everything as being just fine.
Also: users were not warned about this "feature", many (most?) didn't know why their phones slowed down, and there was no way to disable the behaviour.
And I already mentioned in my initial comment that they didn't notify users. That's what the lawsuit in France was over, the lack of notice. I believe an OS update did eventually let users switch off the behaviour, and view their battery health.
why not just allow replacing batteries like phones did before?... seems like a dumb excuses to get people to buy a phone every year, make it impossible to replace the parts and slow down the phone. glue, solder, hardware lock parts etc etc until the phone is not even your property anymore.
If the goal was to increase product longevity why did Apple only admit this wonderful measure only after it was proven by a 3rd party?
If this was such an altruistic measure why would the geniuses at the Genius Bar deny that my mothers phone had slowed down and throw diagnostic tests at our faces? Why was the exasperated Genius, who could clearly tell that the phone was slow indeed but his successful diagnostics meant there was nothing he can do, reduced to swiping up all the apps on the phone to kill them, when we both knew that if iOS was working properly that should do nothing?
Apple has few and long-lived product identifiers; as such it is possible for specific problems to become well known.
It's extraordinary to find more than a handful of anecdotes about any particular model number of consumer Windows laptop that happens to be on sale at Best Buy today. There are so many, and they cycle so rapidly.
I want to buy a 16" M1 Max because it looks awesome...but my base-model 13" M1 is a beast of a machine and I use it every day for dev work. It has only 8gb of ram but it still chews through everything. And I got it for a great price brand new considering how much I've been using it since launch. In my own experience so far, if I buy that expensive 16" M1 Max it will be because I want it.
Note that I've had Dell XPS laptops that were configured with the same price point as a Macbook and while nice...those devices definitely didn't have the same attention to quality that I've experienced with Apple products. So it seems unfair to make such a broad criticism against Apple users at large!
Find me one laptop with a trackpad that works as well as a MacBook and we can talk.
I use a MacBook trackpad to make diagrams, for 3D modeling using Blender and FreeCAD, to draw schematics and route PCBs with KiCAD, and whatever else you’d otherwise do with a mouse, and it just doesn’t get in the way.
Over the years, I’ve been forced to use work supplied top-end Thinkpads, HP, and Dell laptops and none come even close to even the trackpad of my long retired, lowly 2009 MacBook Air 11”.
I don’t really care whether I use macOS, Linux or Windows: they all run the same applications. I also don’t care about the price of a laptop: what does it matter that a tool that I use day in day out for years costs $1000 more?
I care that it’s usable.
MacBooks are usable for things I use them for. The other laptops are not.
This right here, I got a Razer Blade from work last year, and found the touchpad so awful I assumed there must’ve been bad drivers installed. 3 driver installs later and I realized it just wasn’t as good as the MacBook trackpad, and I’d just need to pack a mouse everywhere I bring this laptop.
I love my 2017 mbp and I so want to tell every person posting workarounds for their $2000 brick please return it! Tim Apple won’t fix anything with all the $$$ in his eyes flowing in.
A finance professor once told me “if you don’t vote with your wallet you don’t get to complain”
Not a red herring, just confirming it wasn't a normal application memory leak (it's not, the malloc usage is fine–I think you're hitting the same issue as is mentioned in this article). The next step I would do is run sudo footprint $(pgrep WindowServer), optionally with -v to give you a really detailed list of why the footprint is so high.
> sluggish performance of a 2015 iMac since practically the day we bought it
I wish I had found this website when my MacBook Pro was still alive, maybe Chrome actually killed it after all. The low performance was so bad I moved to Windows 10 ("the last Windows system" they said), but after it notified my system can be upgraded to 11 I quickly moved to Ubuntu. I'm currently experiencing a few hiccups and reduced them with some memory tweaks, but still the experience is much better than Mac and Windows.
I think the way it caches media is bugged right out. I changed the cache size preference from 32gb to 8gb and it eased some of the pressure on swap, but it was still insanely high. I had to switch from the App Store version to the "Desktop" version you download from the website.
Perhaps a coincidence, but Telegram in a Firefox tab also uses a phenomenal amount of ever increasing swapspace. I've seen Firefox reach 67GB with a Telegram tab open, it is distinctly noticable compared to just about everything else I open in the browser.
Maybe there is more than one issue here, but Intel users having the same issue on Monterey where they did not have it before seems telling. Maybe M1 machines had a different OS build or features that caused this issue in Big Sur and now it's universal in Monterey?
MacOS has had intermittent memory leaks for quite some time. Even my 2013 MBP running an old OS version has all the Apple processes slowly leaking memory until I reboot.
I doubt it's directly hardware related, though it's possible it is scoped to special MacOS logic that only is executed on M1. My assumption has been that it's actually coming from shared libraries that Apple-owned processes share, because I usually don't notice it happening for non-Apple processes.
Which OS version? Personally I'm on 2015 MBP with High Sierra 10.13.6 and zero memory leakage. I go months without even turning off the MBP. Granted, sometimes I get memory leakage behavior from Chrome/Firefox. I usually stick to Safari.
Sometimes it just crashes. This has rarely happened on Linux. This sometimes happen on MacOS to the point where I don't trust it. At all. Ever. I have to save everything I'm working on constantly, just in case.
Sometimes apps just stop working. Right now telegram just won't start. No matter what. Never happens on Linux.
Sometimes it won't wake up from sleep. Never on Linux.
Sometimes it loses the keyboard and/or mouse. This never happens on Linux.
Sometimes the screensaver works, sometimes it doesn't.
Grep is slow, waaay slower than on Linux. So are other random CLI things. How? Why?
Docker... don't get me started, and don't make excuses. (~700 people at Mirantis and ~150k at Apple can't figure this out?)
Everything runs slower on MacOS. Every. Thing. grep, sed, awk.
Why don't sed, awk, grep, etc.. all the Linux things work quite right? I need to add something else on macOS to get them to work like they did on Linux. It's always "almost" but never do they work like I'd expect.
I need to remember to turn off my monitor at night, because some nights it just randomly turns on. Never on Linux.
Maybe it'll wake up, maybe not. I figured out if I unplug my headphones and/or webcam I can force it.
All of these super basic things just DON'T work. It sucks. I could forgive Linux, but not an OS and Hardware made by the biggest company on the damn planet.
I get it, this is faster than a 4 year old laptop. But that's not what I'm comparing it to. I'm comparing it to a 5 year old system I built myself from random parts that runs an open system operating system. That's a pretty low bar, and it doesn't win.
So why use OSX? I've been running Linux for over a decade full time. I remember using osx at work and feeling like it was just clunkier, slower, and buggier.
I've gone back and forth between linux and macOS the past 7 years at work. Both get the job done, but there is absolutely no denying (in my experience) that macOS is slower.
Clunkier and buggies depend entirely on which distro you are comparing it with, though I find clunkier at least to be true.
Buggier than linux WMs and desktops is a pretty high bar to beat, as long as you're not including homebrew in the equation (worst, most necessary bit of software for Mac ever).
OSX is great, I love my M1 laptop. I think Linux is better but if you're on the go and not -too- into Linux that it is a fine substitute. All the Linux only coding that I need to do I can do in a terminal with remote login. At home I use Linux but on the go I have a work laptop with OSX and it's a good substitute, especially if you don't have to buy the laptop yourself.
Because last time I tried, I spent days to have fractional scaling on 4k monitors work without screen tearing, blurring etc. And have consistent momentum scrolling on touchbar.
I do not even think about these things on macOS or Windows.
At this point my time is too valuable for that shit. I used to fiddle a lot with my computers when I was 16. Now I want them to work.
Weird, I got an M1 Air recently and it's super fast (the most notably faster seeming new computer I've gotten in a decade) and all these issues are incredibly foreign to me. I just can't relate to this comment at all...
What use case do you have for your Mac? The benchmarks and battery life have been tempting me, but I use Docker a lot which I'm hearing mixed messages for, and to be honest, my Intel-based work Mac is less palatable to use than my personal Ubuntu setup, especially in regards to workspaces, and some weird Bluetooth issues.
I’m on the same boat. Using an intel Mac provided by work. Had an M1 MacBook Pro until a few months ago, and it was great at several things(fast, responsive, quiet, and great battery life) at the cost of crippled Docker use(I needed local docker at that time).
I feel like many many engineers like me would easily get a reliable laptop with MacBook Pro like specs. The problem is that simply does not exist.
Excellent hidpi display.
Ryzen 5000 series CPU with its low power draw.
Good build quality.
Reliable support system.
Non weird components such that a recent release of popular Linux distribution would “just work” without needing manual tweaks.
In my experience, you get 3/5 in the above list at best. Framework laptop hits several of those points but misses out on Ryzen. Another contender on my list is ASUS 14 OLED with Ryzen - I’m worried about their support system though.
If you can compromise on the HiDPI Screen, checkout the HP EliteBook 8X5 Series, they are amazing machines. You can plug up to 64gb of RAM into them if you need it, they run pretty smooth and my colleagues can run Linux on them without any issues.
Wow! Yes, this is exactly what I was looking for. Looks very appealing. I might get one! They're expensive, though. But it might honestly be worth it to me.
I want just to add that I am using a 8x0 g5 elitebook currently (because at the time there was not the 8x5 series which uses amd ryzens) and it's by far the best linux laptop I ever used in my whole life. Also very sturdy and looks great.
Well you know, it's like the standard of the high end for windows laptop, still behind what apple put in their macbooks, but comparable with what you are gonna find on xps and thinkpad x/t.
Looks nice indeed. I have been spoiled by the excellent Retina display on Macs. For something literally in front of my eyes for a big part of the day, it must be good. I cannot see myself compromising to a lower res display :-(
May be for others that are not as nitpicky as me….
Probably not any better either. If you want to run docker on a mac you probably should not, but the second best strategy is probably to bite the bullet and run an actual VM in which you do your docker stuff.
Odds are a proper and well maintained hypervisor you keep running will be a lot better than whatever DfM does.
Fair enough. My Intel Mac gets about a 5x performance penalty doing Webpack builds in Docker versus natively. My coworkers using M1 Macs report similar numbers. What workflows are you seeing M1 Macs getting 6x worse Docker performance than Intel Macs?
Eh, it is worse. Worse to the point that even though I just got a MaxBook, I won’t even conceive of getting rid of my 2020 maxed out Intel iMac. And it’s why I have other x86 machines too for Linux or whatever, because containers on macOS are rough but containers and Docker specifically on the M1 is really rough. It is clearly an ecosystem/use case that Apple doesn’t prioritize.
It makes the case for stuff like GiHub Codespaces or sshing into a remote machine via VS Code a lot more manageable. For everything else, the M1 is a beast, and even emulated, you can get a really good Linux experience (Windows too for that matter — games, obviously not withstanding), but containers? Nah. It’s worse than the already sad state on Intel Macs.
Yeah I'd carefully look at what your expectations are with regard to compatibility. Docker itself seems to run just fine but running X86 (AMD64) containers is pretty slow compared to normal macOS docker which is already slow.
I've loved my M1 MBA but I purchased it specifically knowing I have a primary x86 workstation to fallback on for heavier tasks and I'll often give up trying to install some dep/run some program on the MBA and switch to that. It still works great as a general purpose device and I do some dev on it but if you're looking to do all your dev on it, I'd be cautious.
Def got slightly burned by docker on M1 Pro. Inherited a python project with 250 deps. Building docker image (part of is compiling spacy) used to be ~10 minutes, now it's a whopping 65 minutes.
Apple refuses to ship gpl3 software for seemingly no sane reason (judging by the fact other commercial software vendors including e.g. windows don't have this issue) probably explains the command line issues; apples' tools are an entirely different codebase from the tools in linux distros. And unless you actively compare systems, you might never notice the apple versions are different.
It's been this way since OSX day 1 IIRC, so it's a little surprising the apple versions are still apparently inferior (if the grandparent poster is anything to go by, haven't used em in years), but it's conceivable the CLI just isn't an apple priority.
I wish they'd just give up already and copy as much (of the CLI-relevant stuff) as possible from linux, and accept that they'll need to give up a tiny amount of control over a small sliver of their OS - a sliver that they never wrote in the first place and also can't really change the api of, because that would break all kinds of things, which renders their ability to close source somewhat moot anyhow. And most users never use this stuff! The linux-conventional gnu variants are well maintained and usable in both MS world and linux world - having CLI scripts that are more easily portable across three OS's would be great. Apple's toxic control-freak nature really hurts here, and mostly just their users. I really don't get it.
Anyhow, there are workarounds (but e.g. homebrew is hit and miss), it's mostly just an annoyance they're even necessary.
It’s a perfectly reasonable reason: they were forced to open source their objective-C compiler that was built on gcc and decided they didn’t ever want to be in that position again. The BSD tools are annoying, if you’re used to the Linux versions, but they’re perfectly reasonable implementations of the relevant POSIX utilities (better than busybox, for example).
It didn't help that rms was using it as a "hah hah that time I put one over on Steve Jobs" a decade later when I saw him speak. No idea if he still does.
I sure hope apple has a better reason for shipping unnecessarily impractical software than some pet peeve by a now-deceased CEO. That would be kind of insane.
> They're basically achieving their dream now with Swift, though. I don't expect them to ever release that source. I don't think there is any precedent for Apple releasing source code after the fact.
I wonder, to what degree is this still the case today? Has Apple's position on Open Source changed in the past half+ decade?
I don’t think it’s changed about GPL: GPL3 made things even less friendly to what they want, so they’ve started doing things like switching to zsh instead of bash. LLVM/Swift are open-sourced, but not GPL
And here we should note that LLVM (by its creator who already worked on it at Apple at this point) was offered to GNU and the FSF in 2005 but were ignored/chided [1] until a decade later when GCC/GNU/FSF realized what they had been offered ten years earlier and then had to grapple with what they had rejected, once LLVM had taken hold [2, 3], including proposals to try to refuse LLVM patches to emacs, out of some sense of petty NIH thing [the whole thread 2 and 3 are part of].
Reading those threads makes those decisions seem pretty reasonable to me; this doesn't look like a petty vendetta at all. And while chris sounded optimisitic about including LLVM, he didn't offer to; he offered the glue code to allow the gcc frontend to talk to the separate LLVM backend - and doing so implied a raising a number of fundamental requirements, such as the C vs. C++ bootstrapping issue.
Accepting major changes like that isn't trivial; and a certain amount of NIH is healthy here. I mean, that's kind of apples motto too right? This was a technical patch set with unclear upside (if any), and potentially relevant cost - why would they accept that?
No, GPL2 made them do that, and even so they were ok with it and used to pay people to work on GCC for the Mac in the old days. They rejected GPL3 specifically.
I think the above phrasing is fair, and technically correct. You can closed-source a fork of GPL software. It's extremely common for companies do this while software is in development. It's the moment that someone distributes the software that the license requires source distribution. Some people/companies never distribute their forks. This is why newer revisions like AGPL were written.
Probably because of the 'provide the keys' and not sue for any anti-circumvention tech in the GPL v3. The anti-tivo provision. Not sure if it applies to standalone system utilities, but I bet it is an internal blanket ban on the GPL v3.
Apple is very fond of locking down their hardware. Google took a very strong stance against the AGPL-even banning it from their own public code repo service before they shut it down.
My M1 Air crashes everytime I wake it from sleep and then immediately watch a Youtube video in Firefox. I can reliably reproduce this. If I open the laptop so it wakes up, login, and open a Youtube video it will hard crash close to 100% of the time.
Firefox just changed how their full screen video playing works in the most recent released (version 94). Could be that. Try an earlier version of Firefox.
M1 Air here that I've had for almost a year with zero issues, and I also use Firefox and watch a lot of youtube.
I can't speak to m1 in particular, but BSD grep is known to be very slow regardless of platform. You can just brew install grep to get a fast one, but you'll still always have to always deal with avoiding the slow system grep.
Ripgrep changed how I search my codebases, it’s so damned fast I love it. I almost always use it when I’m trying to find a pattern or a bit of code I vaguely remember but have forgotten where it might be in a large codebase. Still returns almost instantly.
Some mac users seem to be cursed with bad hardware.
It seems to be black and white: users either have no problems, or ALL the problems.
I started to get "the curse" after 8 years with my 2012 MBP. It started randomly turning off. Not crashing, just turning off! I replaced the battery because that was the only warning I was getting. But it can no longer run any macOS. Even mavericks. It crashes randomly. It went from rock solid to fragile as an elderly lady with osteoporosis rollerskating on a cobblestone path.
Now it is my primary Ubuntu machine since the touchpad works so much batter than Ubuntu running on my Lenovo Yoga and it has better performance. Zero turning off problems. It's been on for months running a VNC server.
Yeah, it is very strange. I have an early 2014? MacBook Pro and it still runs today. 0 issues. That being said, it's now slow as hell and likely because of the battery. But the development experience on MacBooks is delightful.
Don't know about others but my M1 Macs are the most stable and performant Apple machines I had in a long time. My previous 16" i9 MBP was a disappointment (laggy/sluggish, running hot) compared to my M1 Mini and MacBook Air.
I have all the issues the parent post is commenting about. I thought I was crazy... but same happens to me. Simple stuff... why doesn't sleep to wake work correctly? Why are my peripherals schizophrenic? My Windows 98 Compaq didn't have these issues... and that was two decades ago.
> Why don't sed, awk, grep, etc.. all the Linux things work quite right? I need to add something else on macOS to get them to work like they did on Linux.
If you mean how they work, like command line arguments and such (and not just speed), that's because macOS is based on BSD and thus using the BSD and not GNU versions. That's not really a "not right" thing, it's just different, and would be the same if you used any other BSD like OpenBSD, FreeBSD, etc.
If you install GNU coreutils from Nix (and maybe some other package managers, idk) you can get them with their normal PATHs, at the cost of some possible incompatibility with macOS-specific scripts that assume the bundled versions.
I used GNU ones without the `g` prefix for a year or two and never ran into trouble because of it.
no, it's definitely "not right" -- mac os ships with ancient, crippled versions of the bsd utilities, afaict simply because it's bad for open source and because they can. E.g. `man sed` then check the date at the bottom
I'll bite and talk about centos, the 'stable' distro.
Take the example of 'tar' that slowly evolved and some time even changed its default behaviour. e.g. what to do when untaring a folder but there's already a symlink with the same name as the folder, do you erase the symlink and create a folder or do you untar the folder in the symlink? Between centos 5 and 7 this changed... Causing me some amount of pain.
hostname stopped supporting '_' in host names. Could have raised a warning, have added a '-pedantic' option but no.
hostname stopped assigning the permanent host name with the 'hostname myhostname' command and now you need to use hostnamectl. Could have left the 'old' feature and make hostnamectl whine instead, but no.
ifconfig the deprecated tool subtly changed the order of fields too and now the MAC address is not in the same place as before, breaking scripts that trusted that not to change.
df changed its syntax, adding or removing a new-line some time ago.
Yeah thinking back we shouldn't have used the standard tools and expected them not to change.
So, now, whenever I see in code review some bash person using 'standard' tools to get info that could be gathered through procfs or sysfs, I instead ask they use procfs, sysfs or ioctls and be done with it.
To be fair, the last two are more from a bad design choice by *nix in general to base everything on passing around unstructured text and hoping each tool's ad-hoc schema won't change.
That 'hope' was true for some time, I guess. Those systems had no problems with previous migrations from early fedoras to centos 5.9... When your last line of compatibility is procfs and sysfs and ioctls or posix calls (statvfs for free disk space), well I know what Linux devs think of their installed userbase's time. Yeah yeah free stuff for free alright. Still, if you'd paid for rhel, same shit. Thank your dogs we provide an /etc/redhat-release, heh.
And if course even Linux procfs is not without its surprises. Adding columns or lines was foreseen but some changes are more fun!
Take the evolution in /proc/meminfo that changed the meaning of some of the lines there over time (WTF?), whilst adding others (which was fine, expected, etc.). Of course I want now to include IO cache (that will be reclaimed if I ever needed to malloc) in my system's free memory indicator! Heh you can still get back the old value with this formula, what are whining about?
The Telegram issue is not specific to M1. I think it's a bug in Telegram, as it simply refuses to start on my Intel based MBP at the moment. Started this evening.
Funny, I've been feeling the same way about my M1 MBA. It's hard to deny that the newer silicon doesn't have my older Linux rig beat for latency, but when it comes to raw performance I was pretty damn disappointed. At risk of offending some people, it was exactly what I feared the M1 would be: a phone CPU shoehorned in to a clamshell body. There are advantages and disadvantages to running a machine like this, but overall I don't really find the development experience to be that much more compelling than a Raspberry Pi.
That being said, Apple still knows their audience. I imagine there will be a lot of chronic Twitter browsers and Pages advocates who fall in love with this machine, and I think that's fine. I do have to wonder what constitutes a "premium" device if not for the hardware though. Everything I do on modern MacOS feels like it's prodding me to go spend $8 on a tool that I'd have for free on Linux or even Windows. Booting up Big Sur makes me long for my old a1502 running Mojave and handling some frankly ridiculous workloads while staying rock-solid in terms of stability. If anything, I applaud Apple for coming straight out and telling me that the future of their devices isn't for me.
> That being said, Apple still knows their audience. I imagine there will be a lot of chronic Twitter browsers and Pages advocates who fall in love with this machine, and I think that's fine.
That is delightfully insulting. Real developers would never use Macs, of course.
If your M1 experience isn't better than a Raspberry Pi (the only issue I have on RPI is speed and memory limits) then something was wrong with your laptop. There is really no comparison, the M1 will destroy it in any performance demonstration.
But when it comes to raw performance I was pretty damn disappointed.
I'm curious what you mean by "raw performance"? I'm no Apple enthusiast, but AFAIK the M1 is the fastest laptop CPU on the market. There are faster desktop CPUs, but I don't think that makes it "a phone CPU shoehorned into a clamshell body" — it beats pretty much any laptop CPU in existence in the benchmarks I've seen.
> Everything I do on modern MacOS feels like it's prodding me to go spend $8 on a tool that I'd have for free on Linux or even Windows.
Yeah, that’s so annoying. Wanna browse a .zip file (not extract it)? Either `brew install file-roller` with its non-macOS UI, or use shady paid shovelware. Wanna record your desktop audio as part of a screencast? It’s so complicated [0] and often involves shady stuff [1] or software that costs $99 [2]. What about Windows? There’s (mediocre) ZIP browsing support in Explorer since Me, 7-Zip is free and trustworthy, and OBS just has a desktop audio input built-in (and I also could do that easily in 2005). Linux? You’ll probably get a working archive tool built-in (file-roller, ark, whatever) and OBS desktop audio just works.
> Wanna record your desktop audio as part of a screencast?
It doesn't have to be a screencast, it's kind of a convoluted process regardless of which operating system you're using [1]. If I'm not mistaken OBS is using the built-in virtual loopback devices available through pulseaudio, but MacOS does not include a virtual loopback device by default, hence requiring a third party one such as Blackhole or loopback.
> ...and often involves shady stuff
...what shady stuff are we talking about here? Blackhole [2] is open source software. It's about as shady as any of the (several) linux audio systems.
Memory management on iPad seemed to be terrible when I used one for a while. An app would start acting up, so you would take a screenshot or video and send to Apple's bug reporting tool right? Every time you switched from the bug reporting tool to any other app (to crop the images of the bug, etc.) it would run out of memory and kill the bug reporting tool, which wouldn't save any of the text you had entered in the forms, deleting all of your work on the bug report.
Also, every browser tab with text entered was a random crap shoot if you were going to lose it by going to another tab to copy something and return to paste. Nothing was predictable, youor work was just constantly lost of the device. Almost no apps seemed to persist things when the OS forced them to shut down, except maybe the highest rated dedicated artist and note taking stuff. But even Apple's own apps (like the bug reporting tool) often didn't bother.
I'm strongly prefer Linux (been using it last 10 years), but I spent last year on macOS in waiting for Asahi to become usable. I still curious about your experience.
Did you actually tried to replace Apple garbage version of command line utils with latest one from GNU? It's kind a obvioius that OOTB version of utils will be much slower since Apple stopped updating GNU versions once license been changed to GPLv3. And BSD version of utils they ship with newer macOS is also usually inferior.
I don't think this is actually super obvious to someone that isn't familiar with macOS and is used to using linux. I do think that if someone finds something peculiar enough to notice and complain about it that they should at least do their due diligence to ascertain why, rather than simply being upset about it.
As much as I would like to get one of those M1 Macs, this is exactly the reason why I will wait for the 2nd generation of their processors. My Intel MacBook runs rock solid and stable. Until the ARM Macs haven't reached that level of stability, I am not willing to make the switch.
This might be the case for some users and basic use cases like surfing the web and text writing. But there are still a lot of issues for pro users and developers. If you rely on such a machine for your daily work, its not mature enough.
Also with various package installer you can sub in all your favorite linux versions of things. I have l.env file that aliases them all to linux equivalent commands.
Because the "linux" versions tend to have more features and better help output? I've never seen anyone install Linux and be like "damn, I wish my coreutils were more obtuse" and install a bunch of non-GNU stuff. Like, I get that Linux is just another unix and the GNU userland isn't somehow more legit than others, but it's not like people are intentionally getting inconvenienced just to be annoying.
That's a developer-perspective issue. You're talking to a user here, and from a user perspective, the GNU utilities are generally strictly superior.
Take the example you provided, of yes(1). Most of the extra code relates to optimizations, and ensuring that the entire argv is echoed back rather than just the first argument. Because of this, even a very simple example like:
"yes hello world"
will behave differently on BSD vs GNU, with the GNU version likely being what users expect.
Because the functionality in this case is a strict superset, regardless of what you're accustomed to.
I didn't grow up on GNU either, but the GNU yes does everything I expect having used other unix systems.
> This isn't something you can quantify and say 'strictly superior' it's all just taste and opinions.
For a complicated tool, sure. But this tool is very simple. The GNU yes(1) accepts 100% of inputs that work on the BSD tool. It does a few additional things too.
Hey, look. As a systems guy myself I understand the aesthetic around clean and simple software. That's a totally reasonable preference.
Here's the thing: GNU userland isn't some poorly designed aberration. It's by far the most popular unix userland in the world and is very commonly ported to systems which may do things differently. Almost every other unix has a distro to supply GNU userland tools on it -- no other unix userland can make the same claim.
Not everyone wants it, sure. Especially people with perspectives broader than the typical user. Of course. But it's the most popular system in the world -- not some weird never-used prototype.
And in the case of yes(1), I think you would have to try very hard to find a reason for a user of the tool to have a negative preference.
If you really want to get technical, Linux is just a kernel. There are certainly implementations of it that are POSIX-compliant, but since most people use it with GNU systems it's a bit of a moot point.
> Docker... don't get me started, and don't make excuses. (~700 people at Mirantis and ~150k at Apple can't figure this out?)
The whole reason Docker exists makes complaining about its performance on non-linux operating systems asinine.
> Why don't sed, awk, grep, etc.. all the Linux things work quite right?
Because MacOS is BSD-based and those tools aren't "Linux" things. You can install the GNU equivalents easily if you dislike them.
> I could forgive Linux, but not an OS and Hardware made by the biggest company on the damn planet.
Software development doesn't particularly care about the fact that Apple is the biggest company on the planet. The pooled resources going into development of linux is quite substantial and yet it too still has plenty of software issues. LTS kernels can have hundreds of patches because software development is hard no matter how many eyes you have looking at it.
Can you distill that into the single whole reason you're referring to? It's unclear to me just reading that marketing page.
If it's "to provide a standardized unit of software that allows developers to isolate their app from its environment, solving the 'it works on my machine' headache", I don't see how it makes expecting good performance asinine.
Linux's ABI is stable, MacOS can definitely implement it... there's nothing in Docker/Linux containers in general, forcing MacOS to incur virtualization overhead.
> When running on Linux, Docker uses the resource isolation features of the Linux kernel (such as cgroups and kernel namespaces) and a union-capable file system (such as OverlayFS)to allow containers to run within a single Linux instance, avoiding the overhead of starting and maintaining virtual machines.[12] Docker on macOS uses a Linux virtual machine to run the containers.
And MacOS is built on Darwin; a hodgepodge of FreeBSD atop Mach and years of iterating on that.
Point being, Apple has zero barriers to making Mach look like an existing interface to userspace a la FreeBSD. They can take advantage of Linux's stable ABI and add the necessary Linux interfaces for native Linux containers support, and it could be performant.
The whole x86 on ARM problem seems like the more difficult one to make performant from where I'm sitting, but there's no shortage of claims to the contrary saying x86 emulation on the M1 is fast enough even for demanding video games.
It truly is a shame we have to choose between quality hardware and a quality OS.
My maxed out 2013 Macbook Pro (the last model that runs linux without issue) has finally worn itself out and I’m in the market for a new laptop, but I can’t find a new laptop worth spending money on. I’m currently doing all my work on my desktop just hoping I don’t have to travel any time soon.
Look at Framework. Really fantastic out of the box Linux support (some WiFi issues depending on kernel version but legit it’s better than what you’ll find on identically specced Dell's right now and you have options about brining your own preferred WiFi card), excellent Windows support, a good community, repairable — I’ve had mine since September and am a huge fan.
I think you convinced me to not get a new MBP. These are the exact kind of issues I had with prior MBPs. Also Emacs was always inexplicably 5x slower than on Linux. It's a shame we can't use alternative OSs on the hardware.
I'd swear I'm hearing myself talking about Windows 20 years back... "I keep saving everything incase it just crashes", "It's slow as hell even for simple tasks", etc.
Has Apple 2021 become Microsoft 2001 ?
What you describe is not a Mac Mini with some OS or HW bug, it's a broken one. Don't know what your issue is, if it is hardware, or it was pwned, or has 2-3 incompatible Rosetta apps wrecking havoc. But I'd get it replaced.
None of these things happen to people, much less altogether.
>Everything runs slower on MacOS. Every. Thing.
The experience of everybody who bought an M1 is everything (or almost) running far snappier.
>Everything runs slower on MacOS. Every. Thing. grep, sed, awk.
So, is it "everything" or is it "grep, sed, awk"? And what is your case exactly? Benchmarked them on the mac and on some Linux system with the same file? Maybe did it on a network attached drive?
>Why don't sed, awk, grep, etc.. all the Linux things work quite right? I need to add something else on macOS to get them to work like they did on Linux.
You seem not to understand this POSIX system or versioning. Apple has older (or BSD) versions of those tools. Use Brew or similar and install the GNU versions, which would be like you know them from Linux. Not that the BSD versions are broken, they're just different.
Expecting the GNU and BSD apps to be identical is certainly understandable, but explaining that they are different is hardly the same as “you’re holding it wrong.” It’s information. If, instead of learning from it, you want to be mad at that information, let alone the messenger, I pity you.
> What you describe is not a Mac Mini with some OS or HW bug, it's a broken one. Don't know what your issue is, if it is hardware, or it was pwned, or has 2-3 incompatible Rosetta apps wrecking havoc. But I'd get it replaced.
> None of these things happen to people, much less altogether.
> The experience of everybody who bought an M1 is everything (or almost) running far snappier.
Especially since there are reports of the same thing as described happening qll over the comments here.
I did not give due credit to the rest of the comment, it was quite well written. I apologize for that coldtea.
Putting aside your dislike for BSD versions of userspace tools, I am confused as to why it hasn’t occurred to you that you may have defective hardware or a defective OS install? Have you undertaken even the most basic troubleshooting steps?
A lot of those weird random things would happen to me on Linux. But I agree with you, I wouldn’t expect a $2K+ vertically integrated, 10th iteration flagship laptop to have these kind of issues. It definitely does suck. I have the 16” base model M1 Pro and I’m also considering a return
> Why don't sed, awk, grep, etc.. all the Linux things work quite right? I need to add something else on macOS to get them to work like they did on Linux.
This is the GNU in GNU/Linux :)
I really like GNU coreutils, and other basic GNU utilities like GNU sed, find, and awk. I know some BSD folks see them as ‘bloated’ and ‘non-standard’, but to me they're plenty fast and they feel complete.
When I used macOS for a while for a job, it surprised me how much I'd come to rely on the features and behavior of certain GNU utilities that are apparently peculiar to them. But I miss 'em when they're gone.
I'm facing the similar issues with my m1 air(8 GB). Recently firefox managed to get to 44GB. I'm closing and re-opening my applications; and checking the memory pressure when things start to feel sluggish. Also unrelated but my speakers have started to sound like garbage.
It's probably worth reminding everyone who is new to the Mac or like most of us keep forgetting. Don't update your OS until at least half way through its update lifecycle e.g. for Monterey wait until 12.0.5.
This happens every single year where there are annoying/serious bugs that takes a while to get fixed as the focus is on P1 showstoppers.
Yup. I upgraded from High Sierra around the time Big Sur rolled out.
To be honest, I’m probably not going to upgrade again at all until the new MBPs seem stable enough for me to buy. Nothing in Big Sur or Monterey seems compelling enough, apart from M1 support and access to iOS apps, for me to risk the disruption.
> Still an option. I updated to 10.15 "Catalina" (released June 2019) about a year ago, and am still on it.
On new hardware released with Big Sur? To be clear, what I was saying is not an option is “downgrading” new hardware to an older major version than the one it was released with.
Hah well with the M1 air I got a few days ago, it helpfully won’t let me upgrade to Monterey! I’ve downloaded the 12GB update three times now and it fails each time it tries. I guess I’ll wait.
I do that as well - I have work Mac and personal one, and I don't want to run them with different OS versions since Apple loves to change things between versions for no reason (last time they renamed "grab" to "screenshot" and needlessly reordered System Preferences) so using two versions of Mac OS is super annoying. And corporate takes a while to get all their crap running on a new version.
Apple Silicon has a lower power draw than any comparable AMD or Intel chip.
I'd like to use one of those Mac Minis as a homeserver/homelab and macOS is the only thing standing in the way. Similarly, I doubt there is a non Apple laptop that matches the M1 Macbook Air's battery life to performance ratio, specially in that form factor.
I know Asahi linux exists but reverse engineered drivers will never be as effective/performant as official drivers. Porting drivers to Linux won't even be expensive for Apple. They refuse to do it just cause theyre Apple.
I don't think there is anything else where you can run that much GPU power on battery as well as wired in a form factor anywhere close and with integrated system/gpu memory. The AMD APUs haven't gotten close yet, but as things start moving to LPDDR5 maybe they will.
I personally haven’t been able to find another laptop with the same battery life, design, trackpad, and screen quality of mac hardware.
I bought an M1 max laptop and I’m almost tempted to go back to my Linux machine because of several issues I have with macOS. There are things that are by design like mandatory animation delays for things like switching spaces and going in/out of fullscreen, which are borderline dealbreakers for me given how often I do those things. And there are also things I suspect are either bugs or straight up performance lapses, such as scrolling through text in a terminal at 4k being slow if you have ligatures enabled.
I could go on, but I think it’s a perfectly valid sentiment (regardless of whether or not they were venting) to wish for mac hardware with a Linux OS.
You might find it helpful to turn on System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > [x] Reduce motion. I go through phases of preferring the fades it applies instead of certain animations, although it still doesn't get it to "instant". For terminal, iTerm offers better choices for you to determine the balance between perf and display settings, incl a GPU renderer.
Please don't post generic-indignant comments, or take HN threads into flamewar, or call names in comments here. That all pushes discussion in the direction we're trying to avoid here.
754 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 442 ms ] threadIt's very likely future software updates can help address these issues.
Honestly, the machines haven't had wide deployment in the field for all that long for Applications as huge as Photoshop. It takes time to discover, fix, and redeploy things like Photoshop. And it's not like Photoshop never leaked memory on an x86.
There is. People have been running ARM macOS for about a year and I haven’t seen this complaint before.
That’s extremely similar to the MacBook Pro and Monterey issues I’ve read this week—except I’m still running Big Sur ... It’s possible that macOS isn’t managing this unified memory structure properly, and will continue to allocate RAM beyond what is available without freeing up RAM that is no longer needed. This is commonly referred to as a “memory leak.” Performance gradually deteriorates until you need to either wait for the RAM to clear, force-quit the app, or restart the machine ... it’s entirely possible that Apple fixes it in a future version of macOS without ever addressing the issue publicly. That’s what happened with the excessive SSD usage earlier this year, though that Apple says that was a “data reporting error” and not an actual problem. The memory bug is an actual issue that needs to be fixed as soon as possible.
It is made worse by the fact M1 MacBooks are limited to 16 GB of RAM, non upgradable of course.
So yes, it is a software problem, and it will get better, but the M1 is particularly sensitive to it.
Can you be more specific here? It seems natural that a system with limited memory doesn't tolerate memory leaks very well.
But I also regularly leave dozens upon dozens of tabs open and use multiple heavy IDEs...
Upgrading to 16GB was enough to fix it instantly and I no longer have the freezing/crashing issues, so I'm surprised 64GB machines are running into it
Browsers are generally the biggest culprits for memory usage. Random tabs will leak memory and before you know it some news article page is using 1GB, your GMail is using 1GB, etc.
I don’t think it’s a wholly unfair assessment. You can get away with more when the memory management stack is smart and fast, but in the end if you need 9gb of ram and only have 8gb you’re going to know it. Most people just don’t (at one time).
So I got it knowing as soon as the 16GB dropped in stores I'd replace it
These situations are interesting. My M1 13” will occasionally get a stuttering cursor that only goes away with a restart. I haven’t had this problem in over a decade on any computer.
I know I’m not unique in this because of the number of threads on the Internet on the issue.
Interesting to see the odd interactions between software and hardware. Though this sort of bug does put me in mind of how in Minecraft when Notch fixed light transmission through glass, it would start raining through it too.
Been a constant experience for me from 2001 when I first started using.
I think even quantifying memory pressure on Linux is relatively new
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Do...
macOS' behavior under high memory pressure is much more graceful IME
Maybe a leak in a Max/Pro-specific kernel component? I assume Control Center depends on some hardware-specific kernel modules.
Apple is no saint in that regard, but at least the data footprint is less.
But does anybody actually care about this distinction?
If people want a catchy snippet perhaps: Google collects too much of your data, or Google profits from your data.
It ran on her 2012 Intel MBP and whatever dayjob MBP I had in the past.
I still have an Intel MBP provided by my employer. I don't keep a personal laptop, it would just gather dust 99% of the time.
We aren't attached to Apple, but finding build quality, battery life, high quality screen and likely to last 10 years is hard elsewhere.
Neon is certainly not a bad SIMD ISA, it's a quite orthogonal one.
You also have the AMX extension at hand, which is more special purpose but allow to deliver very high throughput. (on a regular M1: 350Gflops DGEMM, 1.2Tflops SGEMM, without leveraging anything other than the CPU)
https://github.com/thenifty/neon-guide/
So far this has worked for me, and I'm able to get two full day's of battery life. I'm away from my desk far more frequently now.
Edit: My control center is using around 1GB of memory. Low enough that it wasn't causing issues but still concerning. It appears there is a memory leak somewhere, hoping a bug-fix is pushed out soon.
If such an issue were to occur on iOS without a crash, would anyone even notice? There's no real way to monitor RAM usage, and the failure mode is less clear (slowdown, issue with responsiveness, followed by likely reboot).
If the leak was in some part of the system, maybe a problem, but I'm sure they test pretty rigorously, and get enough crash reports to figure things out fast with that many devices in the wild, all in pretty constant use.
Rather than working with Activity Monitor open 24/7, just install iStat Menus. Makes it really easy to monitor your system.
That one had me yearning for a linux grub menu entry for "previous kernel".
Also, the majority of your comment history is bashing Apple and promoting Windows. Do you work there? Are you paid to do this?
That's an absolute, and easily refuted, lie. @dang -- ban this user.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Your anti-Apple comments are always hilariously off base, but this takes the cake :)
See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1735345#c18
(edit: rephrased to mention macOS 12)
Until you see a WWDC that doesn't announce a major release of macOS, expect more of the same.
To any involved Apple folks here, I feel your pain, and I'm sorry.
a) You can install XCode CLI with xcode-select --install.
b) Many applications can be installed with homebrew casks.
e.g. brew install --cask docker google-drive intellij-idea microsoft-office
It's a bit annoying getting macOS system preferences synced still although.
In any case, I can assure you that behavior is perfectly "normal" to them, unfortunately.
[0] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1486/extensions-sync/
To install, I run `git clone https:github.com/username/repo && ./repo/install.sh`, and I'm off to the races. I really reccommend writing one for yourself, as it's a great way to learn shell scripts.
For me there's a trade-off, depending on how often I setup a new machine. Value of automating with a procedural script vs taking the opportunity to try a leaner (or more modern) toolchain.
Currently upgrade about every 2-3 years, so I do tend not to need a bunch of things each iteration, and might upgrade OS. But I'd like a backup in case e.g. hardware failure, laptop lost or stolen.
Some declarative workstation config like terraform or Ansible would be interesting.
With homebrew you can install most applications through the command line as well.
Not sure I understand, could you elaborate what you mean.
The first couple of releases of OSX are always a little rough around the edges. And then by the end of the cycle everyone proclaims how wonderful this release is.
See everyone next year !
[1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/safari-blank-page-bug.2...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/users-complain-of-mac-os-x-lio...
Back in the days OS X was a dumpster fire in terms of overall reliability until the very late releases of every major version. Some versions like Lion had pure crashes until the end.
Even looking a few years before, we had the root user password bug and other pretty severe issues way worse than what we’re seeing now.
Snow Leopard was as solid as OSX ever got in my estimation. Man I miss those days. Snow Leopard's primary goal was just to harden Leopard and not really have too many new features. Apple really needs to bring that kind of thinking back. I'm happy to see their hardware is back on track, now if they could just get the software to do a U turn...
Charging $300 for a screen replacement will make them more money. Selling bluetooth headphones with non-replaceable batteries will make them more money. Collecting taxes on developers will make them more money. etc etc
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also, it seems like a relatively easy memory leak to fix, hopefully in an upcoming OS update.
Looking forward to the fix.
Every time this happens, Xcode uses about 4GB of RAM (probably because of the monolithic UI storyboard of Lunar) but it should still leave enough memory for my other non-memory hungry apps.
But then I open Activity Monitor and I see WindowServer using ~80GB of memory [2]
The only remedy is either `killall WindowServer` or a full reboot.
I've been using an M1 MacBook Pro and Monterey since the first developer beta but this only became an issue in the last 2 months or so.
[1] https://github.com/alin23/Lunar
[2] https://cln.sh/CfEL6u
I have no idea how to troubleshoot this and don’t really have time for it when working on hotfixes, I just want to get back in a state where I’m not facing an imminent system lock up where I can’t even save my recent work.
Although that particular issue will show in application footprint, not WindowServer. I see WindowServer buildup on one of my M1s still, even in 12.1 beta :(
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2018/02/11/zombie-processe...
This is an intel Mac though. I haven’t seen it on my M1 at home.
To answer your question, I have a total of 73 windows open at the moment. 11 of them are from applications with a single window open, 8 are from iTerm, and 54 are from Sublime Text. I am aware that is quite a lot for Sublime, but that is just how I use it.
Regardless, I just quit Sublime Text, and the memory usage only dropped to 8.9GB still absurdly high for having 19 windows open.
https://gist.github.com/ccampbell/9a0118b0e3e607ec56a3a2cc59...
WindowServer has consistently been the main culprit but occasionally other apps like to chip in where they can too. Often that means there isn’t one single process which I can kill to reclaim enough memory to continue working without being promoted again or having MacOS forcibly close all my applications on me. As a result, reboots appear to be the only real solution for me.
Interestingly though, in the past few weeks I have been working with similar numbers of open Sublime Text windows as yourself and I can confirm that since then, ST4 has been a regular and serious offender when it comes to memory usage in Activity Monitor.
They sell you a very expensive machine that doesn't work.
Your reaction?
Buy a more expensive one from the same provider!
Also, I get along just fine with the last few Macs I have had...
My issue with that is 1. Can I trust the hackintosh to not be compromised and 2. Uploading an IPA via hackintosh feels like bananas.
Of course, once Apple kills off x86-64 macOS it is going to become more complicated.
[1] https://github.com/tpoechtrager/cctools-port
[2] https://github.com/apple-cross-toolchain/xcbuild
[3] https://thi.im/posts/cross-compiling-for-ios-part-1-build-sw...
Is the experience very different for Linux developers?
Desktop application development today is maybe about 1-5% of all development, while overwhelming majority of backend development - the largest category - targets Linux.
Windows: 70%
Linux: 20-80% depending on your hardware, what you're doing with it, and how lucky you got with the current kernel & libraries your distro is running.
MacOS: 90%
So when Apple fucks up really bad and MacOS temporarily drops to 70%, no, I still don't switch. Every desktop operating system is shitty, but there are degrees of shitty.
And yes, I use all three pretty regularly.
Two concrete examples: trackpad feels like shit on both Windows and Linux, installing or updating drivers and some apps on Windows constantly switches back to legacy modes to display the installers (with different fonts, no subpixel smoothing etc.). If it's not a deal breaker, it is annoying as hell and something that almost never happens on my Mac.
Your experience must differ, but if I spent $2000+ on a device only to find that was locking up (due to poor memory management in a standard component!) under my standard workload, I would be livid. I would probably return it, and then tell the next 10 people I meet about my poor experience.
That said, I have run across a Windows 7 bug where the font manager would repeatedly fail and leave its cache/log on disk, only to restart and repeat until the hard disk was just about full. Complaints about the poor state of software engineering as a discipline go back to the beginning.
I got so sick of troubleshooting issues myself, I switched to Windows 7 and have never had to troubleshoot my OS since then. I don't google Windows issues, I don't have crashes, nothing.
It's nice to have a machine that I can just work on and not constantly debug.
(I 100% expect privacy advocates to admonish me for this, but I use hardware I assembled myself and block MS telemetry.)
That.
I don't love Apple. They're a corporation, so at best our interests temporarily align. Loving them would be absurd. I really really want them to have strong competitors. I'd love to be back on an open source OS full-time, like I was for many years.
Unfortunately, they're so far ahead of the competition, that they screw up, sometimes even in a few ways at the same time, and people come out saying "LOL and Apple fanboys won't switch to Linux even now", and that's true... but it's because I'd be trading a few problems for a few score problems.
I ran Linux on laptops and desktops for about a decade, as my main computers. Ubuntu near the end, Gentoo for about five years, Mandrake really early on, a little time with Fedora somewhere in there, a sprinkling of Debian. I still try it out every year or two! I wish it weren't, but it's still much, much worse, and in the best case slows me down and gets in my way more than a "bad" Apple machine with a "bad" version of an OS X / MacOS, barring actual faulty hardware.
Changing brands becomes more of an ordeal than staying.
I ran windows, then linux for ~4 years as a daily driver, switched to mac about a year ago.
I do back end/front end development full time for work + work on many performance sensitive personal projects, and couldn't be happier with the OS.
It's almost like different users have different experiences based on their use cases...
All these problems have since gone away thanks to software updates and (importantly) a BIOS update. It turned out my USB controller wasn't being configured correctly by the motherboard. If I didn't happen to check for BIOS updates, I'd still have lots of problems.
And that was still a better experience than the HP laptop I bought a couple of years ago. That laptop had so much HP crap preinstalled that it sat on 30% CPU usage at all times out of the box. The biggest offender was some HP process doing microphone noise reduction. It ran all the time regardless of whether or not the microphone was being used - and utterly demolished the machine's battery life.
Apple is far from perfect, but they have a better reputation than most vendors for a reason. And their technical support is are excellent. I've had thousands of dollars of free hardware repairs & replacements over the years when things have broken in my apple machines. I wish they didn't break so much; and I wish they prioritised fixing software bugs over adding features internally. (APFS aside, I would trade the last 5 years of macOS features for better stability and performance in a heartbeat.) But there's a reason they're so well liked on HN. They're still pretty excellent in comparison to the competition.
You said:
> The [mac users] that don’t complain have low standards
I agree with you. I'd go even further and say most users have low standards, because the out-of-the-box experience with most modern computers is pretty bad. Apple users should absolutely complain more when the out-of-the-box experience with their computer isn't perfect. We all should.
Apple customers keep buying apple computers despite their issues not because we have low standards. We do it because the alternatives are even worse.
I think you’re probably right about this. It’s like we’ve been trained to have low expectations.
If nonlinux users are trained to have low expectations, Linux users are trained to rape themselves constantly.
Here's my experience with Arch Linux: 1) You install what you need to install 2) You read the doc and configure to your liking, learning what the system can and cannot do and how it works with everything else 3) Things generally work as documented and you go your merry way 4) When something break or doesn't work, you have the knowledge or a general idea of what to fix
Compared to proprietary systems where there is no documentation and little configuration, when things break or misbehave you're essentially screwed. Will you wait for an official fix or look online for reverse engineers? You bought a black box and you can't just open it and fix it.
I'd rather spend a day learning about my system during the installation and having it work for years, instead of buying yet another black box I can't open.
Learning linux doesn't take a day. Second off those black boxes statistically are more reliable than linux EVEN when you account for all the things you talked about.
The reason for this is simple. Microsoft has a business advantage and unfairly strong arms hardware manufacturers to make their stuff work with windows. This unfair advantage makes the windows user experience better and more reliable than GNU linux whos' developers constantly have to play catch up with hardware.
In the last 20 years PC hardware has become ridiculously faster - and yet the user experience seems to have changed little.
I saw an article ages ago whereby Microsoft apparently had a dependencies approval gateway. If you made any change based on Windows you had to remove/reduce your dependencies or make a good case for not doing so.
I was hoping that would catch on.
Each operating system has benefits and downsides. For user experience linux is definitively the worst. Definitively. The differences are so large that it's almost comical how someone on this planet can't see the difference. If you can't see this then you are the one that is part of a cult.
I use linux every day for work and:
- Hidpi support is spotty (its getting better but still a bit spotty)
- Smooth scrolling in applications is inconsistent at best
- The keyboard shortcuts for moving the text cursor around are inconsistent between programs
- Hardware support is much more of a crap shoot. Linux has a harder job than macos in trying to support every combination of janky hardware out there. But as a user, I don't really care. I just know that if I buy a mac, the OS will work perfectly with the hardware on offer. That isn't true on linux.
- Lots of useful software isn't available on linux. Eg, I love Monodraw, but thats macos only.
- App distribution on Linux is a mess. Apt? RPM? Snap? Flatpack? Etc etc. I have 2 copies of discord installed for some reason, and I have no idea what the difference is between them.
Etcetera..
Linux gives you the choice and freedom to spend an unlimited number of hours customizing everything. With linux I'm in complete control and I love that. On macos, things usually just work out of the box. I love that too.
No OS is perfect. There's tradeoffs with everything. If you don't understand other people's preferences, that doesn't make you right. It makes you ignorant.
He's obviously comparing a linux PC experience with an apple OSX experience. It's a completely valid comparison but you're just being mean an inappropriate.
Wow, well, thanks a lot. I've been developing on both the Mac and Linux for years and I don't have this issue on any of the multiple MBPs I use, including my personal 2013 model. I'm not saying I have no problems on the Mac, but they're not worse than the issues I had with Linux, especially on laptops.
so what is the laptop that would meet this standard for which you're making a judgement?
So far, apple hardware has been superior to any other manufacturer, even with their warts, and their anti-consumer practises (of not having replaceable batteries, etc).
I've been perfectly happy with a surface book 2, and various Lenovo and HP laptops. They each have better and worse product lines. Currently rocking an HP elitebook for personal use and a MB Pro for work.
The hardware quality is more or less the same on both. With the pro, you get a moderately better touchpad, a bit thinner and metal chassis. On the other hand, crap keyboard and the abomination that is the touch bar, and no legacy ports.
Personally, I don't think I would buy Apple for myself ever again, but that's just me.
I primarily navigate by keyboard, so the difference between an acceptable and amazing trackpad is pretty minimal for my preferences. On the other hand, port wonkiness, temperamental wifi, okay keys, mediocre battery, driver issues and an utterly useless webcam convinced me to ditch the XPS the first chance I got. It's amazing I used it nearly 18 months.
This is where it started... https://www.engadget.com/2009-05-24-dell-now-offering-studio...
Milage may vary with other manufacturers, it doesn't look like you would change to another manufacturer. Which is ok.
Check business notebooks, from HP or Lenovo. (I forgot one particular Dell series.)
Microsoft is basically a toy OS run by incompetents without reasonable QA unfit to be anything but a launcher for stream.
That's a pretty broad brush you're painting with right there.
> they haven’t experienced anything better.
I don't want to gratify this pointless flame any more than to say that I have used all of Windows (XP, Vista, 8, 8.1, 10), Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and macOS as my daily driver at one point or another, and I currently use macOS because I have yet to experience anything better. There is a simple explanation for your problems here: something is wrong with your system (or you are overtaxing it) if it beachballs constantly. This is not typical macOS behavior, especially not since they switched to SSDs. I actually haven’t seen a beachball in years.
It just isn't as polished, and even that's debatable.
OSX is plenty responsive, and I basically never see beachballs.
It's not a matter of low standards.
I use my computer to write Elixir code, write music with Logic and Studio One, and edit photos/videos. Maybe none of those tasks trigger the problems other people are having.
I use a dual xeon, 64GB Linux desktop which performs reasonably well.
A colleague runs a Linux machine with 16GB of ram. Compiling the same project can cause OOM issues for him and the kernel starts whacking processes.
Even if he closes all non-essential processes, his builds run 10x as long as mine due to memory constraints.
My main point here - let’s not pretend your 4GB machine is being used to do any intense local work.
The inverse of this is seen on my Intel MacBook Air and my colleague’s M1 MacBook Air. The compilation time for our code is 35 minutes or more on my machine and only 3 minutes on the M1.
That depends entirely on what you consider intense local work. Just because you are not compiling doesn’t mean running your 15 microservice stack locally is not intense.
I'd argue that _most_ programmers or even data analysts don't need more than 8 GB to perform their actual work.
But realistically they need 16+ anyway because of opening 200 browser tabs, memory-heavy IDEs, etc. 32 or 64 is nice for sure, but definitely not needed for actual "work" workloads for the most part.
Which distro and can't you configure this? (Genuinely interested)
Also if the MacBook is better, than you should use that device. It's your "conclusion".
Most Linux distro suggest you to setup swap so instead of crashing it could use the swap. I personally don't use swap, because if something is consuming too much ram I most likely want it dead.
I don't know what are you compiling, but requiring more than 16GB of ram for compiling something sounds lazy and unneeded. Likewise you can use a browser extension which reclaims ram from unused tabs.
I can understand the need to have 64gb to do video editing or rendering, but most of the times we need that much ram is because our software is badly written and we don't want to face the problem, not because of the complexity of what we're doing.
Swap is still useful to move stuff out to disk that _never_ gets accessed again.
I like how x86 is a power sucking hog for the performance and enthusiasts response is to go out and buy more power sucking hogs!
Someone wasn’t around when Linux could figure out what to do with a USB device. Spectre? Meltdown? What are those?
It’s almost as if engineering is hard and being a critic is easy.
Kind of like numbers, language allows for a never ending, so big in a sense, corpus of little ideas.
Yes, I can go setup an oom daemon, but Linux should handle this for me out of the box (ideally with some sort of logic to avoid killing something like X taking down every single program I have open). Getting stuck for half an hour or longer is just not acceptable to let happen.
While the tooling and system stability are better, the desktop and app experiences are far worse. It’s buggy, half-baked, and crash.
I regularly hop distributions and do clean installs to see if that will fix it but they’re all the same — pop!_os might be slightly more stable in that regard.
I’ve been using Linux since 1992. I’ve had several year periods in the 90s and early 2000s where Linux was all I used.
I can ditch GNOME, KDE, and XFCE and go back to twm or i3 or fvwm or Window Maker, but I’ve moved beyond thoses experiences. I want a more functional desktop.
But, I see now why I paid more to put up with Apple.
So besides dpi-scaling issues linux is known for, whats the draw? Some hotkey that does a thing? Some visual candy? Smoothness in transitions?
Whatever it is, it's hard for me to imagine it being worth the tradeoff. I can't even name desktop workspaces on a Mac!
I'm reviewing the "new features" section on Monterey: https://www.apple.com/macos/monterey/features/ and I'm not seeing much other than a few known areas (multi-device support if you bought fully into the apple ecosystem, etc).
With most "I tried linux desktop" people it's a problem of DE/WM, but you seem to be beyond that so I'm genuinely curious.
A more cohesive experience across the desktop and applications, eg.:
- The look and feel is uniform. Admittedly somewhat less so, these days now that the Apple Human Interface Guidelines are largely ignored.
- Mac apps and generally more stable.
- Mac apps generally have more features.
- The Mac apps I use generally tend to tie into the hardware (hw acceleration, drivers, etc) much better. The benefit of controlling the vertical, I suppose.
- The keyboard shortcuts both exist and are the same across apps.
- The design patterns.
- The AppleScript/x-callback-url, etc).
- Third party apps generally tend to fit well into the above.
On Linux, almost everybody seems to have their own ideas on how an app should be arranged. With full desktop environments, like GNOME and KDE lessen this, but it's still really, really common.
That said, my money is still on Linux and other open source OSes, because I don't want a single company telling me what I can and can't do.
A few things that stand out about it to me vs GNOME 3, KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXDE, and whatever the Windows interface is called:
- The consistency of the menu system, and being able to search and use the menus of any app from the keyboard with shift-cmd-?. This is like having Emacs M-x or Sublime/VSCode shift-cmd-P in every desktop app.
- Being able to assign custom keyboard shortcuts for any menu option in any app.
- Emacs keybindings for editing text in every text field (including on the web). I believe GNOME Tweaks is supposed to do this, but I could never get it to work reliably and universally like macOS.
- Native app ecosystem. Third-party Mac software is generally the most polished, though not quite as much exists as for Windows.
- System animations. This is a small one, but it makes things more fun and makes the whole system feel fluid and “organic,” for lack of a better term.
Firefox crashing is probably a Firefox problem.
You can set the scaling to be anything you want on X, just set the Xft.dpi number in your .Xresources file.
One problem with your Hackintosh install is that it’s closed source, no? As far as you know it’s exfiltrating your financial information to China.
People who do that generally don't use Gnome, but i3/swaywm/xmonad and multitude of tools where you're in control what happens.
Grass isn't always greener.
Edit for an example, I'm stuck on Catalina because they tried deprecating functionality my firewall uses. And the window shifter shortcut key program I use won't work in Big Sur.
No, that's Microsoft Windows. Apple only does it annually.
Microsoft really only tries to preserve basic compatibility for well-behaved applications that aren't tightly integrated with any OS components or specific hardware/drivers and aren't doing anything that Microsoft disapproves of. Anything that strays outside those boundaries will run into trouble, and a lot of software ends up falling outside those boundaries even if it didn't really need to.
Both operating systems are pretty bad at letting you wield control over your own computer. But macOS doesn't try as hard to obscure the BS or obstruct your attempts to tame it, and macOS actually lets you refuse updates that you don't want.
I use Linux as my daily driver and the apps I use (GNOME Terminal, other terms, Spotify, Slack, Brave and Firefox, and the GNOME desktop itself) crash multiple, sometimes several times a day on my two (work, personal) machines.
This happens across diverse machines, as well as across multiple distributions (though again, pop!_os, so far seems much less trashy for whatever reason).
Does the OS hard lock or completely crash? No... unless you have graphics drivers issues, which isn't unlikely. Then, oh man, yes, lots. X/Wayland crashes that restart the window server? Yep. Applications crashing pretty regularly or glitching out so badly they have to be restarted, including the basic applications distributed with the heavier DEs? Yep. And it turns out that your windowing environment crashing or the main program you're currently using crashing is really close to as bad as the whole machine blue-screening in Windows, from the perspective of the user. Using Linux makes me anxious, even though I very much know WTF I'm doing with it. MacOS and even (spits) Windows don't do that to me, any more. Now that I've experienced not feeling that way, I can't go back. I go years between work-lost crashes of any sort at all on MacOS. Linux, one month without such a thing would be miraculous.
If you build up from almost nothing and keep things very minimal and have very boring and stable old hardware, and do as much as possible from the command line, it can be kinda OK, but it's a lot of work to set something up like that, and ongoing effort every time you do something manually that'd be automatic or trivial on a more full-featured GUI desktop. If you start with something like Ubuntu or Fedora standard desktop installs, though, there's just too much that can go wrong, and it will, with some frequency.
I could tolerate some hardware or workflows not working and things generally being a little less convenient, maybe, if it were rock solid, but it's very far from that. The main problems seem to be that its entire graphics stack is incredibly fragile (Wayland doesn't seem to have done much, if anything, to fix that) and it's way too easy for a glitchy driver to screw up the whole system.
The only issue I had recently were audio issues which were both due to my buggy soundcard and a bug in Pipewire. Excluding that, I've had almost no issues with desktop Linux since 2017.
Looks like the 16gb model is now artificially made obsolete as well - you are supposed to buy the 64gb one.
Modern hardware can and should last ten years. Accept no excuses.
You know how I can tell that Apple made that change not with the user in mind?
By the fact that until a 3rd party proved Apple was throttling older phones, Apple never publicly stated they were doing this. I’m fact, they vehemently denied it.
I saw this on a personal level, where my mother who took 2 trips abroad about a year apart, with the same phone (and she had a lot of disk space in both trips and she hardly installs any apps) found the phone an absolute pleasure to take pictures during the first trip, kept missing shots while waiting for the camera app to load in the second one.
And on taking the phone to the Genius Bar multiple times, she was gaslighted each time as the Genius showed her their diagnostic results which showed that no, her phone was in perfect health (minus a slight degradation in battery life).
Of course, a few months later the entire world learnt that, in fact, her phone had slowed down, and Apple was lying. What’s interesting is that Apple diagnostics tools (which should probably have a speed test?) also reported everything as being just fine.
It was a measure to increase product longevity (e.g a slow phone was seen as better than a phone that shut off randomly when voltage dropped)
My iPhone 5 got so slow and Apple was so unhelpful that I ended up replacing it. That was my first and last iPhone.
But even without Apple, that particular battery was pretty easy to replace
Also: users were not warned about this "feature", many (most?) didn't know why their phones slowed down, and there was no way to disable the behaviour.
And I already mentioned in my initial comment that they didn't notify users. That's what the lawsuit in France was over, the lack of notice. I believe an OS update did eventually let users switch off the behaviour, and view their battery health.
If this was such an altruistic measure why would the geniuses at the Genius Bar deny that my mothers phone had slowed down and throw diagnostic tests at our faces? Why was the exasperated Genius, who could clearly tell that the phone was slow indeed but his successful diagnostics meant there was nothing he can do, reduced to swiping up all the apps on the phone to kill them, when we both knew that if iOS was working properly that should do nothing?
It's extraordinary to find more than a handful of anecdotes about any particular model number of consumer Windows laptop that happens to be on sale at Best Buy today. There are so many, and they cycle so rapidly.
Note that I've had Dell XPS laptops that were configured with the same price point as a Macbook and while nice...those devices definitely didn't have the same attention to quality that I've experienced with Apple products. So it seems unfair to make such a broad criticism against Apple users at large!
What is the alternative platform that runs Xcode but with the memory leak bugs fixed?
I use a MacBook trackpad to make diagrams, for 3D modeling using Blender and FreeCAD, to draw schematics and route PCBs with KiCAD, and whatever else you’d otherwise do with a mouse, and it just doesn’t get in the way.
Over the years, I’ve been forced to use work supplied top-end Thinkpads, HP, and Dell laptops and none come even close to even the trackpad of my long retired, lowly 2009 MacBook Air 11”.
I don’t really care whether I use macOS, Linux or Windows: they all run the same applications. I also don’t care about the price of a laptop: what does it matter that a tool that I use day in day out for years costs $1000 more?
I care that it’s usable.
MacBooks are usable for things I use them for. The other laptops are not.
A finance professor once told me “if you don’t vote with your wallet you don’t get to complain”
That's how you sound.
I ran heap(1) on WindowServer [1] but there's nothing in there standing out so maybe this is a red herring.
[0] https://cln.sh/A7YPLN
[1] https://gist.github.com/772687dba65a35cca8cd707fcfda99c0
https://chromeisbad.com/
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=115840...
I wish I had found this website when my MacBook Pro was still alive, maybe Chrome actually killed it after all. The low performance was so bad I moved to Windows 10 ("the last Windows system" they said), but after it notified my system can be upgraded to 11 I quickly moved to Ubuntu. I'm currently experiencing a few hiccups and reduced them with some memory tweaks, but still the experience is much better than Mac and Windows.
> That’s extremely similar to the MacBook Pro and Monterey issues I’ve read this week—except I’m still running Big Sur.
Maybe there is more than one issue here, but Intel users having the same issue on Monterey where they did not have it before seems telling. Maybe M1 machines had a different OS build or features that caused this issue in Big Sur and now it's universal in Monterey?
I doubt it's directly hardware related, though it's possible it is scoped to special MacOS logic that only is executed on M1. My assumption has been that it's actually coming from shared libraries that Apple-owned processes share, because I usually don't notice it happening for non-Apple processes.
Sometimes it just crashes. This has rarely happened on Linux. This sometimes happen on MacOS to the point where I don't trust it. At all. Ever. I have to save everything I'm working on constantly, just in case. Sometimes apps just stop working. Right now telegram just won't start. No matter what. Never happens on Linux. Sometimes it won't wake up from sleep. Never on Linux. Sometimes it loses the keyboard and/or mouse. This never happens on Linux. Sometimes the screensaver works, sometimes it doesn't. Grep is slow, waaay slower than on Linux. So are other random CLI things. How? Why? Docker... don't get me started, and don't make excuses. (~700 people at Mirantis and ~150k at Apple can't figure this out?) Everything runs slower on MacOS. Every. Thing. grep, sed, awk. Why don't sed, awk, grep, etc.. all the Linux things work quite right? I need to add something else on macOS to get them to work like they did on Linux. It's always "almost" but never do they work like I'd expect. I need to remember to turn off my monitor at night, because some nights it just randomly turns on. Never on Linux. Maybe it'll wake up, maybe not. I figured out if I unplug my headphones and/or webcam I can force it. All of these super basic things just DON'T work. It sucks. I could forgive Linux, but not an OS and Hardware made by the biggest company on the damn planet. I get it, this is faster than a 4 year old laptop. But that's not what I'm comparing it to. I'm comparing it to a 5 year old system I built myself from random parts that runs an open system operating system. That's a pretty low bar, and it doesn't win.
What's the appeal?
Clunkier and buggies depend entirely on which distro you are comparing it with, though I find clunkier at least to be true.
Buggier than linux WMs and desktops is a pretty high bar to beat, as long as you're not including homebrew in the equation (worst, most necessary bit of software for Mac ever).
It runs the software I need. full stop
I do not even think about these things on macOS or Windows.
At this point my time is too valuable for that shit. I used to fiddle a lot with my computers when I was 16. Now I want them to work.
I feel like many many engineers like me would easily get a reliable laptop with MacBook Pro like specs. The problem is that simply does not exist.
Excellent hidpi display.
Ryzen 5000 series CPU with its low power draw.
Good build quality.
Reliable support system.
Non weird components such that a recent release of popular Linux distribution would “just work” without needing manual tweaks.
In my experience, you get 3/5 in the above list at best. Framework laptop hits several of those points but misses out on Ryzen. Another contender on my list is ASUS 14 OLED with Ryzen - I’m worried about their support system though.
How is the trackpad?
https://kristiandupont.medium.com/m1-dev-setup-with-a-virtua...
Probably not any better either. If you want to run docker on a mac you probably should not, but the second best strategy is probably to bite the bullet and run an actual VM in which you do your docker stuff.
Odds are a proper and well maintained hypervisor you keep running will be a lot better than whatever DfM does.
Probably, although you probably do still get better thermals and battery life with the M1 Macs.
About 6x worse perf in my specific case.
It makes the case for stuff like GiHub Codespaces or sshing into a remote machine via VS Code a lot more manageable. For everything else, the M1 is a beast, and even emulated, you can get a really good Linux experience (Windows too for that matter — games, obviously not withstanding), but containers? Nah. It’s worse than the already sad state on Intel Macs.
I've loved my M1 MBA but I purchased it specifically knowing I have a primary x86 workstation to fallback on for heavier tasks and I'll often give up trying to install some dep/run some program on the MBA and switch to that. It still works great as a general purpose device and I do some dev on it but if you're looking to do all your dev on it, I'd be cautious.
It's been this way since OSX day 1 IIRC, so it's a little surprising the apple versions are still apparently inferior (if the grandparent poster is anything to go by, haven't used em in years), but it's conceivable the CLI just isn't an apple priority.
I wish they'd just give up already and copy as much (of the CLI-relevant stuff) as possible from linux, and accept that they'll need to give up a tiny amount of control over a small sliver of their OS - a sliver that they never wrote in the first place and also can't really change the api of, because that would break all kinds of things, which renders their ability to close source somewhat moot anyhow. And most users never use this stuff! The linux-conventional gnu variants are well maintained and usable in both MS world and linux world - having CLI scripts that are more easily portable across three OS's would be great. Apple's toxic control-freak nature really hurts here, and mostly just their users. I really don't get it.
Anyhow, there are workarounds (but e.g. homebrew is hit and miss), it's mostly just an annoyance they're even necessary.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158017
> They're basically achieving their dream now with Swift, though. I don't expect them to ever release that source. I don't think there is any precedent for Apple releasing source code after the fact.
I wonder, to what degree is this still the case today? Has Apple's position on Open Source changed in the past half+ decade?
[1]: https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html
[2]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...
[3]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...
Accepting major changes like that isn't trivial; and a certain amount of NIH is healthy here. I mean, that's kind of apples motto too right? This was a technical patch set with unclear upside (if any), and potentially relevant cost - why would they accept that?
A better phrasing: They were unable to close-source an existing GPL'd compiler.
Apple is very fond of locking down their hardware. Google took a very strong stance against the AGPL-even banning it from their own public code repo service before they shut it down.
M1 Air here that I've had for almost a year with zero issues, and I also use Firefox and watch a lot of youtube.
ag and rg are other fast options.
The speed of GNU grep vs BSD grep is discussed on the BSD mailing lists here: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-Aug...
It seems to be black and white: users either have no problems, or ALL the problems.
I started to get "the curse" after 8 years with my 2012 MBP. It started randomly turning off. Not crashing, just turning off! I replaced the battery because that was the only warning I was getting. But it can no longer run any macOS. Even mavericks. It crashes randomly. It went from rock solid to fragile as an elderly lady with osteoporosis rollerskating on a cobblestone path.
Now it is my primary Ubuntu machine since the touchpad works so much batter than Ubuntu running on my Lenovo Yoga and it has better performance. Zero turning off problems. It's been on for months running a VNC server.
I also don't see any memory issues, etc.
Most people don't give any sources.
If you mean how they work, like command line arguments and such (and not just speed), that's because macOS is based on BSD and thus using the BSD and not GNU versions. That's not really a "not right" thing, it's just different, and would be the same if you used any other BSD like OpenBSD, FreeBSD, etc.
I used GNU ones without the `g` prefix for a year or two and never ran into trouble because of it.
Take the example of 'tar' that slowly evolved and some time even changed its default behaviour. e.g. what to do when untaring a folder but there's already a symlink with the same name as the folder, do you erase the symlink and create a folder or do you untar the folder in the symlink? Between centos 5 and 7 this changed... Causing me some amount of pain.
hostname stopped supporting '_' in host names. Could have raised a warning, have added a '-pedantic' option but no.
hostname stopped assigning the permanent host name with the 'hostname myhostname' command and now you need to use hostnamectl. Could have left the 'old' feature and make hostnamectl whine instead, but no.
ifconfig the deprecated tool subtly changed the order of fields too and now the MAC address is not in the same place as before, breaking scripts that trusted that not to change.
df changed its syntax, adding or removing a new-line some time ago.
Yeah thinking back we shouldn't have used the standard tools and expected them not to change.
So, now, whenever I see in code review some bash person using 'standard' tools to get info that could be gathered through procfs or sysfs, I instead ask they use procfs, sysfs or ioctls and be done with it.
Take the evolution in /proc/meminfo that changed the meaning of some of the lines there over time (WTF?), whilst adding others (which was fine, expected, etc.). Of course I want now to include IO cache (that will be reclaimed if I ever needed to malloc) in my system's free memory indicator! Heh you can still get back the old value with this formula, what are whining about?
This 2 year old HN post shows the performance difference between Gnu grep and BSD grep on Macos:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19522456
sed 4.8 - 15 Jan 2021
awk 5.1.1 - 28 Oct 2021
grep 3.7 - 14 Aug 2021
What am I missing here?
That being said, Apple still knows their audience. I imagine there will be a lot of chronic Twitter browsers and Pages advocates who fall in love with this machine, and I think that's fine. I do have to wonder what constitutes a "premium" device if not for the hardware though. Everything I do on modern MacOS feels like it's prodding me to go spend $8 on a tool that I'd have for free on Linux or even Windows. Booting up Big Sur makes me long for my old a1502 running Mojave and handling some frankly ridiculous workloads while staying rock-solid in terms of stability. If anything, I applaud Apple for coming straight out and telling me that the future of their devices isn't for me.
That is delightfully insulting. Real developers would never use Macs, of course.
I'm curious what you mean by "raw performance"? I'm no Apple enthusiast, but AFAIK the M1 is the fastest laptop CPU on the market. There are faster desktop CPUs, but I don't think that makes it "a phone CPU shoehorned into a clamshell body" — it beats pretty much any laptop CPU in existence in the benchmarks I've seen.
Yeah, that’s so annoying. Wanna browse a .zip file (not extract it)? Either `brew install file-roller` with its non-macOS UI, or use shady paid shovelware. Wanna record your desktop audio as part of a screencast? It’s so complicated [0] and often involves shady stuff [1] or software that costs $99 [2]. What about Windows? There’s (mediocre) ZIP browsing support in Explorer since Me, 7-Zip is free and trustworthy, and OBS just has a desktop audio input built-in (and I also could do that easily in 2005). Linux? You’ll probably get a working archive tool built-in (file-roller, ark, whatever) and OBS desktop audio just works.
[0] https://billykorando.com/2020/04/14/capturing-desktop-and-zo... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4VPbMvBuLg [2] https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/
It doesn't have to be a screencast, it's kind of a convoluted process regardless of which operating system you're using [1]. If I'm not mistaken OBS is using the built-in virtual loopback devices available through pulseaudio, but MacOS does not include a virtual loopback device by default, hence requiring a third party one such as Blackhole or loopback.
> ...and often involves shady stuff
...what shady stuff are we talking about here? Blackhole [2] is open source software. It's about as shady as any of the (several) linux audio systems.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopback
[2] https://github.com/ExistentialAudio/BlackHole
Amusingly, this is exactly how I felt when using Windows.
Also, every browser tab with text entered was a random crap shoot if you were going to lose it by going to another tab to copy something and return to paste. Nothing was predictable, youor work was just constantly lost of the device. Almost no apps seemed to persist things when the OS forced them to shut down, except maybe the highest rated dedicated artist and note taking stuff. But even Apple's own apps (like the bug reporting tool) often didn't bother.
Did you actually tried to replace Apple garbage version of command line utils with latest one from GNU? It's kind a obvioius that OOTB version of utils will be much slower since Apple stopped updating GNU versions once license been changed to GPLv3. And BSD version of utils they ship with newer macOS is also usually inferior.
And by 2nd gen, I mean first update after a major redesign.
Why should all Unix implementations work just like Linux? What's so special about Linux? Why doesn't Linux work like BSD?
Just a random opinion. Others disagree and prefer the BSD way. Concrete reasons include code-base simplicity.
https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/yes.c
https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/usr.bin/yes/yes.c
Take the example you provided, of yes(1). Most of the extra code relates to optimizations, and ensuring that the entire argv is echoed back rather than just the first argument. Because of this, even a very simple example like:
"yes hello world"
will behave differently on BSD vs GNU, with the GNU version likely being what users expect.
Lol why? Not everyone grew up on GNU.
> strictly superior
This isn't something you can quantify and say 'strictly superior' it's all just taste and opinions.
I didn't grow up on GNU either, but the GNU yes does everything I expect having used other unix systems.
> This isn't something you can quantify and say 'strictly superior' it's all just taste and opinions.
For a complicated tool, sure. But this tool is very simple. The GNU yes(1) accepts 100% of inputs that work on the BSD tool. It does a few additional things too.
Extra functionality is always better?
Then I can fork GNU, add extra junk options, and give you a strictly superior tool? Nonsense.
The GNU tools are the Homer Cars of UNIX. Not everyone wants that.
Here's the thing: GNU userland isn't some poorly designed aberration. It's by far the most popular unix userland in the world and is very commonly ported to systems which may do things differently. Almost every other unix has a distro to supply GNU userland tools on it -- no other unix userland can make the same claim.
Not everyone wants it, sure. Especially people with perspectives broader than the typical user. Of course. But it's the most popular system in the world -- not some weird never-used prototype.
And in the case of yes(1), I think you would have to try very hard to find a reason for a user of the tool to have a negative preference.
You likely can't, all the possible option flags already have some meaning. <:)
Not sure what you mean - you can get it to print whatever you want by passing that on the command line?
https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
The whole reason Docker exists makes complaining about its performance on non-linux operating systems asinine.
> Why don't sed, awk, grep, etc.. all the Linux things work quite right?
Because MacOS is BSD-based and those tools aren't "Linux" things. You can install the GNU equivalents easily if you dislike them.
> I could forgive Linux, but not an OS and Hardware made by the biggest company on the damn planet.
Software development doesn't particularly care about the fact that Apple is the biggest company on the planet. The pooled resources going into development of linux is quite substantial and yet it too still has plenty of software issues. LTS kernels can have hundreds of patches because software development is hard no matter how many eyes you have looking at it.
TIL there's a single "whole" reason Docker exists.
Please, enlighten me, what exactly is that reason?
If it's "to provide a standardized unit of software that allows developers to isolate their app from its environment, solving the 'it works on my machine' headache", I don't see how it makes expecting good performance asinine.
Linux's ABI is stable, MacOS can definitely implement it... there's nothing in Docker/Linux containers in general, forcing MacOS to incur virtualization overhead.
> When running on Linux, Docker uses the resource isolation features of the Linux kernel (such as cgroups and kernel namespaces) and a union-capable file system (such as OverlayFS)to allow containers to run within a single Linux instance, avoiding the overhead of starting and maintaining virtual machines.[12] Docker on macOS uses a Linux virtual machine to run the containers.
Point being, Apple has zero barriers to making Mach look like an existing interface to userspace a la FreeBSD. They can take advantage of Linux's stable ABI and add the necessary Linux interfaces for native Linux containers support, and it could be performant.
The whole x86 on ARM problem seems like the more difficult one to make performant from where I'm sitting, but there's no shortage of claims to the contrary saying x86 emulation on the M1 is fast enough even for demanding video games.
To serve as an easier to use facade on top of Linux kernel virtualization options. It only works on Linux - or with an emulated Linux.
My maxed out 2013 Macbook Pro (the last model that runs linux without issue) has finally worn itself out and I’m in the market for a new laptop, but I can’t find a new laptop worth spending money on. I’m currently doing all my work on my desktop just hoping I don’t have to travel any time soon.
None of these things happen to people, much less altogether.
>Everything runs slower on MacOS. Every. Thing.
The experience of everybody who bought an M1 is everything (or almost) running far snappier.
>Everything runs slower on MacOS. Every. Thing. grep, sed, awk.
So, is it "everything" or is it "grep, sed, awk"? And what is your case exactly? Benchmarked them on the mac and on some Linux system with the same file? Maybe did it on a network attached drive?
>Why don't sed, awk, grep, etc.. all the Linux things work quite right? I need to add something else on macOS to get them to work like they did on Linux.
You seem not to understand this POSIX system or versioning. Apple has older (or BSD) versions of those tools. Use Brew or similar and install the GNU versions, which would be like you know them from Linux. Not that the BSD versions are broken, they're just different.
> What you describe is not a Mac Mini with some OS or HW bug, it's a broken one. Don't know what your issue is, if it is hardware, or it was pwned, or has 2-3 incompatible Rosetta apps wrecking havoc. But I'd get it replaced.
> None of these things happen to people, much less altogether.
> The experience of everybody who bought an M1 is everything (or almost) running far snappier.
Especially since there are reports of the same thing as described happening qll over the comments here.
I did not give due credit to the rest of the comment, it was quite well written. I apologize for that coldtea.
This is the GNU in GNU/Linux :)
I really like GNU coreutils, and other basic GNU utilities like GNU sed, find, and awk. I know some BSD folks see them as ‘bloated’ and ‘non-standard’, but to me they're plenty fast and they feel complete.
When I used macOS for a while for a job, it surprised me how much I'd come to rely on the features and behavior of certain GNU utilities that are apparently peculiar to them. But I miss 'em when they're gone.
b) If your speakers sound bad then it could be dust or debris. Might want to unscrew your Mac and use a blower / vaccum cleaner on it.
This happens every single year where there are annoying/serious bugs that takes a while to get fixed as the focus is on P1 showstoppers.
To be honest, I’m probably not going to upgrade again at all until the new MBPs seem stable enough for me to buy. Nothing in Big Sur or Monterey seems compelling enough, apart from M1 support and access to iOS apps, for me to risk the disruption.
Wikipedia shows the exact version number of the latest releases for each.
Now, if I were to update my hardware that won’t be an option.
I will probably soon-ish update to MacOS 11 "Big Sur" (released November 2020), but not yet the just-released MacOS 12 "Monterey".
On new hardware released with Big Sur? To be clear, what I was saying is not an option is “downgrading” new hardware to an older major version than the one it was released with.
Man up Apple and release Apple Silicon drivers for Linux.
Mac hardware is nice, but it’s not that nice. Except for maybe the trackpad.
I'd like to use one of those Mac Minis as a homeserver/homelab and macOS is the only thing standing in the way. Similarly, I doubt there is a non Apple laptop that matches the M1 Macbook Air's battery life to performance ratio, specially in that form factor.
I know Asahi linux exists but reverse engineered drivers will never be as effective/performant as official drivers. Porting drivers to Linux won't even be expensive for Apple. They refuse to do it just cause theyre Apple.
I bought an M1 max laptop and I’m almost tempted to go back to my Linux machine because of several issues I have with macOS. There are things that are by design like mandatory animation delays for things like switching spaces and going in/out of fullscreen, which are borderline dealbreakers for me given how often I do those things. And there are also things I suspect are either bugs or straight up performance lapses, such as scrolling through text in a terminal at 4k being slow if you have ligatures enabled.
I could go on, but I think it’s a perfectly valid sentiment (regardless of whether or not they were venting) to wish for mac hardware with a Linux OS.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html