Also thinking the same, looking for a monitor for my Surface Laptop 3 (Running Linux) and realising the lack of HDMI port really makes this a challenge USB C for a monitor lacks options currently, so am looking at dongle hell.
I should have been clearer, it would be really nice to just have one single USB C lead from my laptop to a monitor for video and PD. Overall I am happy with USB C. Having a laptop with many cable's connected for me defeats the object hence me looking at desktops.
As above I am trying to avoid multiple cable's in the laptop, be ideal to have just one USB C for HDMI and PD, A laptop with a load of cables in it for me defeats the object, at that point I may as well use a Desktop.
One cable, dock setup. I guess I don't understand how a dock would force you to use multiple cables, since that's what they're supposed to help prevent?
Something that's worked well for me is using "docks" with my laptops.
I'm typing this over a cheap-ish (80€) Chinese thing from Amazon [0], which gives me power, a bunch of USB 3 A ports, one C, gigabit network, HDMI and DisplayPort, and audio in/out (didn't try it). The video is pass-through, as opposed to a DisplayLink chip.
One thing to be aware of, is it requires two USB-C connectors. I've never tried only using one, since the provided cable has a dual-connector. It also looks quite nice, doesn't feel cheap at all.
MS, Dell, HP, Lenovo all sell similar contraptions, but they're much more expensive. At work I have a HP G5, which works well, and uses a single USB-C port.
You can also find cheaper alternatives that only do HDMI.
Interesting for some reason did not consider a dock, that one looks great but the Surface Laptop only has one USB C port. Will take a look at the MS version though thanks.
Thanks, we're getting closer, that's interesting as it has power pass through. Now to find something similar with a longer lead so I can tuck it away, to Amazon I go..
My primary computing device is a desktop PC. I have four monitors hooked up to it (two horizontal, two vertical). The primary monitor is for browsing. The secondary horizontal monitor is for coding. The two vertical ones are for things like reading logs/documentation, and for various chat apps (Slack/Discord/WhatsApp/Signal - yes I use all).
I started a new job recently and they got me a top of the line Macbook Pro. For the first two weeks, my productivity was in the gutter. Not because I'm not used to MacOS, but because going from four 27" screens to a single 15" screen was devastating. Things improved significantly once I bought an ultrawide, but I'm still having to do a significant amount of desktop-switching (using the three-finger swipe) and it's just not good.
I know the MBP supports more monitors but I'm out of desk space!
Desktop is actually better for that. At least getting the laptop up to eye height with good posture. My chiropractor says they see more younger patients (30s and 40s) with degenerative disk disease in the neck related to laptop and smart phone use.
Large home desktop, cheap replaceable linux laptop is the perfect combo. I've saved so much money over the years by swapping out desktop parts and using a beat-up thinkpad for off-location work. Every once in a while I'm missing a newer display port, but overall it's a great system.
I just rsync the root partition from time to time, ignoring /efi and /etc/fstab. Although this (obviously) only works in one direction, but that's enough for my use case.
Syncthing has worked fairly well for this. It has some caveats, and I don't recommend syncing anything other than some specific directories in your home folder to avoid conflicts with syncing config and cache folders.
What I synced:
~/files (contains all my projects, cat pictures etc.)
~/ide (contains just the IDE installation and other apps)
~/.ssh
Absolutely, +1 for Syncthing. I use it for pretty much all of my devices at this point, and it's maybe failed me... once over nearly 12 months of daily usage? For not having a centralized sync server, it works so much better than it has any right to.
During the pandemic I switched jobs and got a new MacBook Pro... it failed, then it failed again, and again. I sent it back a few times and each turn-around took a couple of weeks.
Whilst that happened I still had to do some work and fell back on my gaming PC. It wasn't a good PC, just an entry level gaming PC. Yet I found it out-performed my MBP for a load of things I cared about: Running Google Meet without fans spinning to full speed, reactivating a Google Doc tab almost instantly rather than it appearing to be blank for 30 seconds. Things like that.
The MBP finally got repaired, but I've owned that for barely 2 years now (it was new at the time) and it's been out of action about 10% of the time. In the meantime my desktop has been rock solid and reliable.
Recently I figured I'd do something different... sell the entry level gaming machine and build a desktop with work in mind. The result has been really great, with a silent and powerful desktop based on components I like and that work together. It runs Linux, and a surprise to me I'm also running Windows. Everything just works, and it all works well and the computer is fantastic at every task I throw at it. This includes local dev, compiling things, lots of meetings, webinar editing, and some occasional gaming post-work.
I still have the MBP... it's not a primary work device, my experience with Apple means I don't trust the machine at all, but for a travel device it feels fine and it's that which gave me confidence to go all-in on a desktop.
The M1 MBP is a new class of machine. Rock solid, faster than just about any other laptop, insane battery life, immune to the thermal issues that plagued Intel MBPs. It could probably easily replace that desktop you built with power to spare.
One reason would be that you don't like shitty laptops. Any other laptop (I tried top end Dells, Lenovos and Asuses) are much worse in all things considered.
Even the 2016-2021 MBPs were at best comparable to models of these other brands, never worse. Do you not like fans when you Google Meet? How about fans when you look at your desktop or start your computer?
> Even the 2016-2021 MBPs were at best comparable to models of these other brands, never worse.
This is patently false. The butterfly keyboards were a disaster for Apple. Financial reports suggest it may have cost Apple an additional billion dollars per-year in warranty repairs. The M1 machines are nice and Apple seemed to have fixed their reliability issues; but your post is essentially, at best, a cover up.
So what? It was still the better keyboard. I had it for two years. Much better than anything Dell or Lenovo or any other brand I've ever seen had.
Yeah, it had issues, but it never had the issues my Lenovo and Dell laptops had - like keys literally falling off, for example. Two keys on one of my Lenovo machines were broken from the factory. The Dell i9 machine had a key that was attached only on one side and they refused to fix it.
You think Apple's Butterfly keyboard was better than a Lenovo ThinkPad keyboard? That certainly would be a minority opinion. I can't comment on cheaper Dell and Lenovo machines, but that wouldn't really be a fair comparison.
Yeah my Lenovos had or developed the same problem, also not considered something to fix by them. Probably all of them except the really old 4:3 ones I had, which had the oldschool IBM keyboard.
The Lenovo keyboard is good when it works - but I never had a fully working keyboard on any post-2013 Lenovo laptop (my old T530 had awesome and reliable keyboard, but it was the last). I generally spend around $4-$6k on a laptop, so not the consumer-level models. Always at least few keys had issues (or soon developed some) and they didn't want to fix it.
The Apple keyboard was weird for a week and then I got used to it without much further issues. Occasionally a grain or something got under a key, compressed air fixed that immediately. After a year one key became squishy and Apple fixed it free of charge within few days.
Dell keyboards are squishy and unreliable and have the same problems with grains Apple butterfly keyboard had - but in 2022. Dell average is much worse than the worst Apple ever got.
Are you sure? I have both an Intel Macbook Pro (work) and a Lenovo Thinkpad and I love my Thinkpad. I hate the Macbook so much.
It's true my fans turn on a little more with my Thinkpad but I rather have fans over a sluggish Macbook. Plus with my Airpods Pro on, neither the other person or I will notice any fans. (I also won't get fans during a meeting anyway.)
Plus for half of the price of that Macbook, I get a much lighter laptop with 64 GB of RAM and a beefier CPU, plus a touchscreen that I love for the couch.
I had a great Thinkpad once, too. But the 2 subsequent models were all shit - laptop board burning (needed a replacement few times), RAM integrity issues, boot loops, driver crashes etc.
Then I tried 2 Dells - both of them shit in all ways possible (and I spent more than Macbooks cost!) - battery life bad, noise bad, performance bad, thermals bad, sound bad, keyboard bad, display horrendous (never get shitty 4K OLED from Dell, it hurts your eyes!)... - that's a machine that costs $4k+.
Regarding the CPU... I was not able to use even 50% of its i9 CPU because of thermal throttling. And when it was on "full", it got like 2 hours of battery.
M1 is like from another galaxy. The sound continues to amaze anyone who hears it. People can't take their eyes off the display. It literally does not have fans. It never gets hot. I can work 2 days on one battery charge.
And most importantly - even though I have only a 7-core M1 Air - it outperforms my i7-7770 desktop as well as every laptop I ever had, even the beefy i9 Dell - and it cost less than $1500. It has less RAM (only 16GB), but that's alright, I never had a problem with it (as a JS developer).
I agree. The display and touchpad in a Mac laptop are out of this world. And they're are even better if you have one of those new 14" Pros. There's just nothing in the PC world that compares.
Those 5 years were when Johny Ive had full reign over Apple design with no Jobs to keep him in check. I imagine engineers were screaming in agony but unable to do anything but work within these constraints that heavily prioritized form over function. It's really funny to see all Ive's bad ideas undone over the last 2 years — the touch bar, the lack of ports, the thinness taken to the extreme, etc.
Or another way to look at it: there's now screen around the notch and that's more useful than that area being just black glass instead. The menu bar used to eat into your screen, but now it's wrapped around the notch in that area and you have more screen for other things.
I'm looking at the menu bar of my laptop right now and I sure do have a bunch of menu bar items that go past the center of the screen. Personally I'd rather just ditch the camera, I never use the thing. Or just not scrape for every fraction of an inch of screen possible. Margins are nice.
As someone with both an M1 and various intel and AMD machines.
The M1 tends to outclass most laptops (primary in single thread based workloads) but they are well down the ladder of performance in comparison to what is possible to put in a desktop form factor.
The mac studio seems to take a nice bite out of those options as well, but its not a laptop either, and depending on workload its quite likely still loses pretty bad if the desktop is tuned to the workload (aka toss a couple 3090's in, or a threadripper/etc for massively parallel stuff, or faster disks, etc).
People who are stuck in the laptop mindset, seem to forget that desktops have a lot of add in card/etc flexibility for workload tuning. Need a 100Gbit network card, just plug it in, need 2T ram pick a motherboard with support/etc.
Think about what this (somewhat randomly picked) motherboard can do, that you can't get from an apple device.
I never need any of that though, or any additional performance. I need to have about twenty browser tabs and a few electron apps open. If it can handle that smoothly without painful latency we're good.
I don't forget what desktops can do I just don't care and would rather be able to work from the couch when I feel like it.
I think people who use 2T ram in workstations and people who work on laptops are not really overlapping much.
I've built a 5900x with 64GB high speed ram, 2x NVME 4.0 because my 2018 i9 Macbook pro was hot garbage and would crawl when working on a project with a bunch of docker microservices.
I regret this decision now because the new M1 MBP would do everything I need and I wouldn't have to worry about SSH workflows, keeping my PC/internet up while I'm away/traveling, having to work on two separate devices and migrate over all the time, two keyboard layouts (Mac/PC).
I think OP is right that M1 MBP really changed the equation for most "regular" developers, before the M1 MBP my choice was the only sane option because all the laptops available had huge drawbacks (Intel was and is hot garbage, AMD laptops are budget tier/gaming bricks).
> I think people who use 2T ram in workstations and people who work on laptops are not really overlapping much.
What do you think happened when the people with powerful workstations got sent home during covid?
Obviously for some employers the answer was SSH, or taking a workstation home - but for other places (e.g. CAD users), the answer was 'mobile workstation' laptops.
>I think OP is right that M1 MBP really changed the equation for most "regular" developers, before the M1 MBP my choice was the only sane option because all the laptops available had huge drawbacks (Intel was and is hot garbage, AMD laptops are budget tier/gaming bricks).
Eh, YMMV. I have an M1 and an i7-1185g7 based Linux laptop. Honestly, I never use the M1. Side by side, there is no noticeable speed difference for my day to day work. The M1 is more efficient, that's for sure - but my Intel laptop already has "all day" battery life. If I need to spend more than 8 hours working without access to power, the M1 wins - but I never see that situation happening (to me).
The biggest thing that turns me away from the M1 is the lack of Linux support, which I understand is also a personal preference thing. Also the M1 MBP is slightly bulkier despite the same screen size.
According to Passmark even the 10 core M1 Max gets absolutely destroyed by the 5950X just like I thought. Great chips for mobile use due to power savings but the top desktop chips still are all of course much faster at the expensive of extra watts.
Slightly, although less so if you have code you can compile yourself and use -march=native. The M1 is heavily default optimized for the M1, random x86 binaries are generally optimized for something like a Pentium 4. Just tweaking this one thing, can easily double perf.
Also, as someone who owns both, make sure the 5950 is actually turbo'ing correctly. Mine was a real pain to get it up to speed, despite having a seriously overkill water cooler.
I got an M1 on loan while my Intel Mac was in the shop and I was terribly unimpressed. Only 8 GB of ram was part of the problem, but I just didn't notice any performance improvement between it and my Intel Mac.
I went from a 16" MacBook Pro with an i9 and 32 GB of RAM to the MacBook Air with 16 GB of RAM, and my build times at work were almost exactly the same. But the single-core speed makes everything _feel_ so much faster than the stupid slow i9 cores. (At less than half the price, and without a fan!)
In my opinion, the Air is the perfect addition to a heavy Linux/Windows workstation. You get the full spectrum from iOS development to gaming, albeit at the cost of having to babysit two or three operating systems. You can use the Air for meetings or conferences, because everything that's not a game has a macOS version (think Microsoft Teams etc.)
It's worth noting that if your workload is still on x86, it's running through Rosetta emulation and it's significantly slower. I've heard of a few people having similar "what's all the fuss about" to "wow this is great" transitions after their key applications get fully ported to ARM.
I had the 16" Intel i9 MBP with 64Gb and recently got the new M1 Max with 64GB (had to wait almost two months after ordering) and it's not even close. I used to have to be quick about closing things in the back ground etc. Force closing things etc. Fans were always loud. New M1 I have NEVER heard the fans. It just works. And works well. No beach balls waiting. Just works.
My company gave me a i9 MBP for work, but I use my own personal M1 Macbook Air instead as it's so much better; no fan noise or smell of cooking thermal paste! Also and sites nicely under the 45" 4K QLED screen that I use as a main monitor.
That and desktop cooling tends to be lightyears ahead of laptop cooling; you can thrash a desktop for a long time before hitting a thermal limit, unlike most laptops.
A good desktop should never hit its thermal limit no matter how long you thrash it. 24-hour 100% CPU/GPU torture tests are standard whenever I build a PC.
...but without money to spare. If the desktop fits his needs there is nothing gained in replacing it with a proprietary and form-factor limited device like an Apple laptop unless he's hog-tied to the Apple world - which does not seem to be the case here.
I use a bunch of devices, some portable, some not. When I need something portable I take, let's say, a T42p running Linux. I'm typing this from a resurrected iMac 27" running Linux which sits next to a Compaq 6910p in a docking station connected to a 24" monitor. The iMac is the newest device at 12 years, that T42p is 17 years old yet it still works fine for most things as long as I can reach the server-under-the-stairs. Sure, that M1 makes for faster media consumption but... that is not what I use these things for. I also foresee a not-so-distant future where that M1 lies in a cupboard due to some malfunction - bad battery being the most likely - which is deemed too expensive to repair while most of those old devices around here still continue to work.
Let me jump on this opportunity to give a little unpopular opinion on the M1 MBP, after 1 year of using one (being completely new to apple), since most (all?) of the comments I have seen here are dithyrambic.
Granted, the hardware is great. Silence, good perf, no heating, amazing battery life. I love this.
The software part has not been that smooth for me:
- I use the python scientific stack, and it's not there yet. This will probably improve in the future, but for now, I'm stuck using rosetta stone and well the perf is not as good as it should be.
- I thought the stability of Mac OS X would amaze me. It did not. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely OK and I did not lose any work. But I have had to 'hard poweroff' the thing quite a few times.
- As a long time debian user, and for what I do (ML, image processing, simulations), linux is just less hassle in my opinion. Homebrew helps, yes, but feels so 'second-class' compared to [your favorite distro] package manager.
• Dith`yram"bic (?), a. [L. dithyrambicus, Gr. ?: cf. F. dithyrambique.] Pertaining to, or resembling, a dithyramb; wild and boisterous. "Dithyrambic sallies." Longfellow. -- n. A dithyrambic poem; a dithyramb.
• Dith"yramb (?), n. [L. dithyrambus, Gr. ? a kind of lyric poetry in honor of Bacchus; also, a name of Bacchus; of unknown origin: cf. F. dithyrambe.] A kind of lyric poetry in honor of Bacchus, usually sung by a band of revelers to a flute accompaniment; hence, in general, a poem written in a wild irregular strain. Bentley.
> for what I do (ML, image processing, simulations), linux is just less hassle in my opinion
I'm in a similar scenario (genomics, not ML). I pretty much gave up on using any local machine for this work and use my primary computer (desktop or laptop) to connect to my remote Linux servers to do this work. It just isn't worth the hassle to try to keep proper dev environments setup and in sync for work like this. I still use the Mac for other things like email, writing, generating figures, etc... but there are far faster machines for more difficult number crunching.
One of the exceptions here would be something more interactive like video or image editing (which is a workflow the Mac is really well designed for).
>use my primary computer (desktop or laptop) to connect to my remote Linux servers to do this work
In my case, the primary computer is the linux desktop machine and I use the macbook to remotely connect to it when I am not home. Feels a bit weird to use a $2500 laptop as a dumb terminal, but I guess that's the world we live in (and which I am part of).
>worth the hassle to try to keep proper dev environments
In my experience, debian stable + poetry + the occasional container have been great so far. De gustibus...
Similarly, I'm kinda looking at a Macbook Air and running Jetbrains Gateway to a big fileserver, as well as pushing a bunch of personal stuff off to my NAS as well. Remote desktop into a VM for casual browsing and doing my taxes and so on.
I could get old RDIMM/LRDIMM sticks (it's not widely known but some X99 boards support it) and a 1660v3 and be up and running with 8 cores at ~4 GHz for basically the cost of RAM, and that would probably be sufficient for my needs. And using RDIMM/LRDIMM would set up a migration path forward to Epyc eventually - Epyc is still Ryzen and still likes fast RAM, but those faster sticks are 3-4x the price per GB, so getting something running now with an upgrade path forward would be fine.
> It could probably easily replace that desktop you built with power to spare.
Not even close. A 5950x will absolutely smoke an M1 max on a multithreaded workload, and if your workload needs more than 64GB ram the difference is even starker.
Same with the M1 Air. First time I've ever considered an air. I really like the idea of not having a fan:
- No dust can get in because it's sealed.
- Mechanical parts break more often.
- I often block the vents anyway because I'm sitting in bed or something.
However, it's not all green grass. Non-replacable SSD and RAM is horrible, horrible practice. I root for the competition / right-to-repair advocates to force apple into fixing this. I usually perform a major upgrade on desktops & laptops after ~4 years.
No! Apple's integrated design has huge advantages. Then performance ceiling of RAM built on-chip, for instance, is much higher (because light can only go so fast) than even soldered-on discrete RAM chips, which in turn are potentially higher performance than DIMMs. One of the reasons why the M1 is so blistering fast is this integrated RAM design; it's like having 8-64 GiB of L3 cache.
The same goes for SSDs; by building the SSD controller into the CPU, you can get I/O performance that vastly outperforms even PCI NVMe drives.
Over the next few years, it will be the case that the most powerful computer you can buy will be a Mac. The M1 series Macs signal a return to the Amiga days, when thoughtful engineers designed the whole system with integrated hardware and software for speed and responsiveness that cannot be matched or surpassed by the cobbled together PC ecosystem that has dominated for so long.
The SSD controller is on chip in the M1 family, but the actual SSD controlled by that controller can still be removable. The Mac Studio proves that. The actual storage is on a removable card in a socket.
I don’t think Apple has said why they did it this way in the Studio. I’ve heard three theories.
1. They plan to at some point support upgrading storage.
2. It is so failing SSDs can be replaced instead of having to do a whole logic board swap.
3. It is for easier and cheaper inventory management. It is easier for them to build most of them with the most popular storage configuration or two and then when someone orders a less popular configuration change the SSDs than to build ahead of time and stock the less popular configurations.
It seems like chronic problems with laptops are often the fault of Nvidia or AMD discrete video cards. Even for Macs. Once I started avoiding non-integrated graphics in laptops, things got a lot smoother.
There's £2k+ worth of compute on my office desk, the size of a thick book that I haven't touched in years...
All because Apple deems it the only way to run xcode...
At least the client paid for the machine (enterprise, this was their way of having reproducable builds... Until the pandemic but a halt to their project)
Yeah, it certainly hurts a bit less if you're not the one paying for it.
I know we're in a high income profession, but buying another $2.5k+ laptop just for iphone development isn't a trivial expense if you do contracting (especially if you're not working 40 hours a week).
Well, that's why I use cross-platform tools. Heck, I often can simulate without even the Android emulator, if there's a Web or PC target for the cross-platform environment.
I have my old Intel® Core™ i7-5820K desktop with 32GB ram and a vega 54 running ubuntu and it's my main driver when working from home. Still does pretty much everything I need.
X99 is a great "tinkerers" platform before stuff really got locked down. You've got tons of PCIe, quad-channel RAM, dirt-cheap xeons with decent core count (some of them are even multiplier-unlocked), and some X99 boards support RDIMM and LRDIMM.
It may seem odd to say that you want both RDIMM/LRDIMM and overclocking but many of the server processors run at very low speeds compared to gaming systems, often 2.0-2.4 GHz or so, and just running at a modest 4 GHz or so on all 8 cores is easily achievable on X99 if the chip is multiplier-unlocked. Epyc is still better, you can achieve similar performance with much higher core counts, but you can get X99 chips and decent boards for a song, while (eg) Epyc 7402P is still almost a $1500 chip with $600+ boards for it.
The one downside to X99 is that the System Agent is just not very mature compared to later iterations. Even 3000 speed RAM often requires a "BCLK strap" which is like a special multiplier just for the System Agent. This is often set automatically when you enable XMP, usually a 1.25x multiplier, but this can cause some problems with some PCIe and NVMe devices which don't maintain their own clocks. I haven't run into major problems with consumer-tier hardware but YMMV and "dumb" devices like IO Fusion cards might have more issues.
I am thinking seriously about getting 8x32GB 2133 LRDIMM and using that as big NAS for homelab stuff, then transitioning to an Epyc 7402P at some future date, then upgrading RAM to something higher clocked once it gets cheaper.
Whenever I reach the point of thinking about getting a laptop to replace my desktop I keep being reminded that my desktop has parts that are at this stage around 9 years old. I am reminded that it still does everything I need, it still connects to anything I want, any way I want and it still runs my os(es) of choice without batting an eye. And if a part fails? The used market provides!
I am so sad to see things go down this path and it is so frustrating to see common sense beaten to death by some product manager, marketing vp or CEO saying that thin, light and unrepairable is the future...
My desktop is a 4790k, so maybe not far off the age of your system.
I had to buy a laptop due to covid and, to be fair, things have progressed on the laptop front so much that it outperforms my desktop. I now only use the desktop for gaming as I didn't bother getting a discrete GPU on the laptop.
The laptop is high-spec and costly (Dell Precision 7750), so much so that I doubt my employer would have bought it for me. So costly, in fact, that it makes no financial sense to upgrade my desktop.
I ran my second hand Dell computer from work for about half a decade, it cost $75 when I bought it from work after a merger. The CPU finally called it quits, and I parted it out for a profit.
I was considering what to switch to from my elderly ThinkPad. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that newer ThinkPads go as far in the direction of less user control that they stopped providing BIOS revisions that don't contain openly advertised "anti-theft" spyware.
I never want to enable it, and I don't want to live in the danger of enabling it by accident, either. If it reported to infrastructure that I own, I'd be talking different.
Certbot (and other acme clients such as acme.sh) are practically set and forget. I’ve never once had to touch those configs again once they were made ~4 years ago.
Certbot is a snap application nowadays. I was pretty screwed up when I decided to install it on CentOS system without SELinux, which snap requires.
But I would agree here, even when I had the problems with LE (botched cron config) it only required me to 'administer' it 4 times a year. And when I fixed cron config I don't need to do even that.
I think this guy is pretty confused about UEFI, which is little more than a boot abstraction. It doesn't lock anyone out, although secure boot can be used to do so, but so can any other firmware (phones anyone?). So at this point, the fact that UEFI secure boot standardizes how users can enroll their own keys/etc make it probably the _best_ of the current choices.
The part he seems to be confused about are the PEP's required for modern standby, because instead of extending the UEFI/ACPI specification to cover those corner cases (or wedging them into the existing notification mechanisms) they allow platform providers to continue to create machine specific power management blobs that aren't portable between OS's. The older ACPI power methods, were of course opaque as well, but the API was standard enough that non Microsoft OS's weren't at a disadvantage.
He was probably referring to secure boot when talking about UEFI, which effectively prevents you from installing linux (unless you know exploits or you get the unlock code from the manufacturer).
That said UEFI sucks and it inflicts unnecessary pain every time I setup a new computer.
Can you really not turn off UEFI in the BIOS settings? I don't think I've ever used a computer that didn't have an option to unlock it, as far as I know.
Your terminology is really confused. UEFI is the firmware that boots the computer and is a replacement for a BIOS. There are no "BIOS settings" on modern computers.
> which effectively prevents you from installing linux
This was going to be the state when Microsoft first proposed secure boot. But the backlash lead to (1) being able to disable it and (2) being able to load customer keys.
Are any motherboards actually locked down to where you can't install another OS? My older Gigabyte motherboard, my Thinkpad laptop, and my HP business line desktop all support both of these.
UEFI was definitely a pain point for booting Linux when it was first available. The same Gigabyte motherboard mentioned ended up having it all turned off and just used legacy boot for years. But everything works great with UEFI USB boot installers and the OS. I'd recommend giving it a try again.
I personally use secure boot for Linux through custom keys and a kernel install hook that resigns the EFI+kernel+initramfs+cmdline blob. It's quite nice in combination with LUKS unlocked by TPM2 (similar to Bitlocker). Secure boot actually lets you be more selective in which PCRs to verify for LUKS unlocking, meaning it's much less fragile during updates.
Sounds like the author's concern is that as more devices move towards becoming locked-down consumer appliances in the future that they will eventually lose control, making the DIY-desktop the only "safe" choice. I agree with the premise in the large, but the success of the Framework laptop tells me the market will always support a reasonably open, linux-friendly device. Also, I don't know a ton about UEFI but I remember the anxiety around it, has that materialized at all? I haven't had a problem installing linux on recent model Lenovo and Dell laptops which I believe had UEFI, so is it really a problem?
Yes it has materialized somewhat. The UEFI and Secure Boot are not the issue here - neither is uBoot/fastboot on phones. The issue is who holds the keys - if it is the owner of the device, then great! But most laptops and phones don't allow you to set your own keys, just Microsoft's or OEM's, and that is what the issue is. Linux distributions work around this by either explicitly requiring disabling Secure Boot / Unlocking the bootloader, or having Microsoft sign a shim that they can use and using that allow the user to add additional trusted keys.
I've not seen much issue from UEFI beyond mobo manufacturers occasionally releasing really buggy firmware.
UEFI also permits rather advanced features. For example, if a mobo manufacvtorer wanted to, they could theoretically code in support for using a USB monitor for the bootup display, enabling firmware access without any video adapter on board at all.
One can quite easily add new boot-loaders to the EFI system partition, and add the entries to NVRAM, making it possible to add add custom pre-boot diagnostics programs, or a small direct-boot emergency recovery kernel, or other fancy features.
Remote to your desktop from your laptop and never worry about losing/breaking the laptop. I've spent little over a year on a job where i remote desktop'd to office computer from home in a WFH scenario. Was perfectly doable and stable.
In this way you won't need the laptop at all and can use a nice tablet. I'm thinking of going this way, but not quite there yet.
I do this in reverse. My work provides a laptop, but never provided any other hardware at all once we switched to full remote. So I throw it in the closet and remote into it from my personal desktop. I much prefer to sit at a desk in a nice chair, with a good keyboard, monitors, etc.
My latest job is like that - from home with just a laptop. I used it as a secondary monitor (chat, email). At end of day i simply close it and turn on the desktop.
I remote into a desktop wired into my home cable modem and basically use my macbook as a thin client a lot of the time. Modern remote desktop software is crazy good. Using parsec.app even from hotels it's almost like I'm sitting at the machine.
What's the purpose of using 2012 hardware to avoid UEFI? All UEFI-capable hardware I have used had options to disable secure boot from the BIOS or would boot signed Linux kernels anyways.
Running at full load without noise is something that is easy to achieve on a desktop if you want it, and almost impossible on notebooks with any kind of comparable processing power. The coolers and fans you can put into a desktop are just so much larger and quieter than anything that can fit into a notebook.
If you care about fan noise and regularly put high load on your computer, a desktop provides much better options here. But I was also surprised just how much processing power you can put into a modern notebook, my Ryzen 8 core CPU in my notebook is not that much slower than the one in my desktop (which is a bit older than the notebook). But the desktop is silent at 100% CPU load, the notebook isn't.
For me the biggest issue though is monitors, I like to have two large screens. A single screen always feels somewhat limiting to me.
It's not the topic of the article, but I will never understand how anyone can do work like programming and data analysis, or even write reports that pull together information, without a desktop computer.
I've always maintained separate desktop and laptop. No laptop has ever run as well as a properly built desktop.
The bottom line is physics. Never will hardware crammed into a tiny case, a laptop sized case, perform as well as desktop components in even a slightly larger case. Even less so than components in a real mid tower allowed to be effectively cooled and run wide open. It's just the physics of it.
The bottom line, in my opinion, is whether you can fit the computing power you need into a certain size and budget.
If you only browse reddit, you can. If you want to play new AAA games at 4k@120Hz, probably not.
If it fits, and you can take the typically higher price, then going for the theoretically "more optimal/efficient" would scratch the "optimizer itch", but is arguably of no importance. Just like getting a nice $200 chef knife gets you a nice blade that cuts better and is more maintainable than the one you can get for $5, but if you only cut tofu, all those benefits are pretty abstract.
What I like about desktop computers in a WFH role is that they are tied to a physical space. The desktop is where I do my work and once I shut the door for the day, I’m done. No temptation to sit on the couch in the evening catching up on emails and reviews. I have to physically move to my desk to be in work mode. That separation is very valuable for a long term WFH gig.
Better to have those negative emotions confined to that workplace than to that workplace, your couch, your bed, the dining room table, and the kitchen counter.
Prior to pandemic, that is how I felt. (I expected to hate WFH; it turns out I love it, but I did enjoy the forced break and time for podcasts that the commute provided.)
I thought it was going to be about usability not user freedoms.
I dont understand people who work on a tiny 15” screen when they can have multiple large monitors. Yes, you can use externals with your laptop but then you need to invest in a squid (commonly called dock?) that will link your stuff to the laptop. And disconnect/reconnect your stuff when you go away.
Also let’s not forget the full size keyboard. I suppose that’s why no code coding initiatives come out once in a while, those people can’t stand typing on their laptop :)
My solution is one serious desktop with everything and one mid range laptop that I can work on if needed, but avoid like the plague.
Not all work requires massive computing power locally. I find the "squid" much less of a hassle than having to sync stuff between two computers. Especially with "newer" computers that can be charged over USB-C. You only plug that one cable, and you've got your screens, keyboard, wired network up and running.
I used to the two PCs for a while, but a single computer is so much easier to deal with.
Depending on the monitor/laptop combination and their support for USB-C that's not too much of a hassle.
For reference, I am using an XPS 13 and a Lenovo P24h. All of the peripherals are plugged into the monitor, and when I unpack my laptop, I just plug in a single USB-C cable and I am on my way.
Multiple monitors can (supposedly) be daisy-chained as well, although I have not tried this.
I've been using a 13" MacBook Pro for years. No issues to report. I'm not sure what type of programming you people are doing. Multiple monitors is nice but it really does not improve my productivity.
> I dont understand people who work on a tiny 15” screen when they can have multiple large monitors.
You can have it either way. When I'm away from my desktop, I attach a portable external monitor to the laptop via USB-C. It has an identical screen, and works really well. I do prefer desktops, but I have to move around a lot.
Laptops create freedom from a fixed position, desktops do not. Sometimes I want to work in the living room. Sometimes I want to work at the coffee shop. Sometimes I want to go into the office. I cannot achieve any of that with a desktop, while I can achieve a desktop-like at any point by plugging in a monitor and using a bluetooth keyboard.
A Mac Mini is smaller and lighter than a MacBook Pro. I could carry one between my home and office easily. It even simplifies hot desking in the office in a WFH-first world.
I never work from the living room. When the weather is nice I sometimes work from the park but to be honest I rarely achieve anything, it's just an excuse to go outside. Same for coffee shops, I can but almost never do.
Notably, the Mac Mini does not have a stupid external power adapter, but just uses a standard cable that costs like $1. I did carry mine around for a while, and it was glorious! I'm not sure why Apple's competitors insist on including a brick that's almost as large as the PC itself.
It would have been really cool if the portable profile concept caught on with iPods. Then we could just have a room full of Mac Minis and plug in our iPhones for (literally!) roaming profiles. But then the company would have to provide me with a iPhone/iPad. Sadly we got iCloud instead, which is radioactive from a corporate infosec perspective.
A mac mini is not a usable piece of hardware on its own; it's an unpowered box with no means of input or output. A brick. To make it viable you must connect all the elements that are integrated natively to a laptop: keyboard, mouse, screen, and power. If you showed up to a completely empty desk with just a mac mini, you'd get very little done.
Right but I already bring my laptop to a desk with a keyboard, mouse, monitor and dock. So the practical difference is nothing. In fact the Mac Mini is actually less duplication of capability.
My MacBook Pro has been out of clamshell mode less than 25 times in a year. Almost all of them to wake up after an OS update.
What you're describing is two desktops with a shared piece of hardware between them. If that works for you, great! However it does ignore my original point of "freedom from a fixed position", and why I made it in the first place. If you don't need to move around, then by all means use a Mac Mini. I personally find myself in a lot of places where there are no traditional workspaces, hence I use a laptop.
I addressed why this would work for me in my initial reply. I don't need to work from any point. It is enough for me to work from one or two fixed points. The difference between two desktops and carrying a Mac Mini between two workstations is that the computer itself is the same in both locations so all data is still local. It's all the benefits of a laptop that I actually use. I do not use the screen or keyboard on my MacBook, but I suffer the compromised thermals and bulky form factor anyway.
Chromebooks/low power laptops can basically act as terminals for a beefier machine at a comparatively small cost (Can you do a gaming pc for less than 1k?). The first time I saw this being done was a game changer, running modern AAA games on a surface tablet, nintendo switch before its time. Your local internet needs to be fast enough but I think that's still a decent population of HN.
For work, it makes sense to have a laptop. Portable, in case I need to be on the go. If I need extra computing power (which is rare), I can spin up cloud resources.
For my personal stuff - nothing will replace a fast HDD, big CPU, big GPU. Rock solid, quiet (if you have water cooling), powerful. If I need that power on the go (which I sometimes do), I can remote into it. I usually do personal travel with an HP Spectre x360, which is quite light with an OK screen and keyboard. My desktop is kinda old at this point, with an i7 4930K with 64gb DDR3 and a GTX 1060 3gb. I have far fewer issues with my desktop than my work provided laptop, and it's a lot older, and has suffered a lot more abuse.
It's amazing how long people have had performant productive systems with Ivy Bridge CPUs and Pascal based GPUs (NVidia 10xx parts)... If it wasn't for many of these older boards not having a TPM for Windows 11 support I'd have probably gotten years more still out of similar systems I own too. My similar Pascal equipped build has to have been one of the best value systems I've ever owned - I've bought two Macs in the same timeframe this box served as my gaming rig/desktop PC. Granted these were MacBooks so not fairest fight, but I've never had any computer last me as long as this PC build has.
My 1080ti has been one of best PC part investments I've made; if you ignore lack of Ray Tracing its still able to knock 60fps/1440p in just about anything, a god-send during these chip/GPU shortage times.
I tried this and it made me more productive than using a laptop from work.
I built a PC during the pandemic for work and gaming. It runs OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Windows 10 (the latter purely for gaming but I'm looking to ditch it for Proton/Wine on Linux).
I realized how much I prefer working on a desktop after years of using a laptop for work. Not gonna lie, I still like the niceties offered by my Macbook Air M1, namely great battery life and very good performance, so I use it primarily when I am out working remotely.
My desktop is fully quiet, despite running a parallel build on all cores. My macbook pro pushes jetplane levels of noise if I have the audacity of opening Teams
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadI would recommend a longer cable than the one provided if you want your computer to connect to a usb-c on side that doesn't face the monitor.
- dual 4k60hz monitors - keyboard - mouse - webcam - microphone - ethernet - ... other miscellaneous things I'm forgetting
One cable, dock setup. I guess I don't understand how a dock would force you to use multiple cables, since that's what they're supposed to help prevent?
I'm typing this over a cheap-ish (80€) Chinese thing from Amazon [0], which gives me power, a bunch of USB 3 A ports, one C, gigabit network, HDMI and DisplayPort, and audio in/out (didn't try it). The video is pass-through, as opposed to a DisplayLink chip.
One thing to be aware of, is it requires two USB-C connectors. I've never tried only using one, since the provided cable has a dual-connector. It also looks quite nice, doesn't feel cheap at all.
MS, Dell, HP, Lenovo all sell similar contraptions, but they're much more expensive. At work I have a HP G5, which works well, and uses a single USB-C port.
You can also find cheaper alternatives that only do HDMI.
---
[0] https://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/B09MTTZ36K/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_...
Don't know what they're worth, though.
I started a new job recently and they got me a top of the line Macbook Pro. For the first two weeks, my productivity was in the gutter. Not because I'm not used to MacOS, but because going from four 27" screens to a single 15" screen was devastating. Things improved significantly once I bought an ultrawide, but I'm still having to do a significant amount of desktop-switching (using the three-finger swipe) and it's just not good.
I know the MBP supports more monitors but I'm out of desk space!
wireguard to git host of choice
git-annex is an awesome thing and much more useable then any of the normal sync services across the board (once you understand what it can do).
ansible to make all the hosts consistent configuration wise
What I synced: ~/files (contains all my projects, cat pictures etc.) ~/ide (contains just the IDE installation and other apps) ~/.ssh
During the pandemic I switched jobs and got a new MacBook Pro... it failed, then it failed again, and again. I sent it back a few times and each turn-around took a couple of weeks.
Whilst that happened I still had to do some work and fell back on my gaming PC. It wasn't a good PC, just an entry level gaming PC. Yet I found it out-performed my MBP for a load of things I cared about: Running Google Meet without fans spinning to full speed, reactivating a Google Doc tab almost instantly rather than it appearing to be blank for 30 seconds. Things like that.
The MBP finally got repaired, but I've owned that for barely 2 years now (it was new at the time) and it's been out of action about 10% of the time. In the meantime my desktop has been rock solid and reliable.
Recently I figured I'd do something different... sell the entry level gaming machine and build a desktop with work in mind. The result has been really great, with a silent and powerful desktop based on components I like and that work together. It runs Linux, and a surprise to me I'm also running Windows. Everything just works, and it all works well and the computer is fantastic at every task I throw at it. This includes local dev, compiling things, lots of meetings, webinar editing, and some occasional gaming post-work.
I still have the MBP... it's not a primary work device, my experience with Apple means I don't trust the machine at all, but for a travel device it feels fine and it's that which gave me confidence to go all-in on a desktop.
(In all fairness, I have the smallest one, but still.)
Not faster than my > 3 year old linux laptop.
Night and day difference. Seriously.
Even the 2016-2021 MBPs were at best comparable to models of these other brands, never worse. Do you not like fans when you Google Meet? How about fans when you look at your desktop or start your computer?
This is patently false. The butterfly keyboards were a disaster for Apple. Financial reports suggest it may have cost Apple an additional billion dollars per-year in warranty repairs. The M1 machines are nice and Apple seemed to have fixed their reliability issues; but your post is essentially, at best, a cover up.
Yeah, it had issues, but it never had the issues my Lenovo and Dell laptops had - like keys literally falling off, for example. Two keys on one of my Lenovo machines were broken from the factory. The Dell i9 machine had a key that was attached only on one side and they refused to fix it.
The Apple keyboard was weird for a week and then I got used to it without much further issues. Occasionally a grain or something got under a key, compressed air fixed that immediately. After a year one key became squishy and Apple fixed it free of charge within few days.
Dell keyboards are squishy and unreliable and have the same problems with grains Apple butterfly keyboard had - but in 2022. Dell average is much worse than the worst Apple ever got.
It's true my fans turn on a little more with my Thinkpad but I rather have fans over a sluggish Macbook. Plus with my Airpods Pro on, neither the other person or I will notice any fans. (I also won't get fans during a meeting anyway.)
Plus for half of the price of that Macbook, I get a much lighter laptop with 64 GB of RAM and a beefier CPU, plus a touchscreen that I love for the couch.
Then I tried 2 Dells - both of them shit in all ways possible (and I spent more than Macbooks cost!) - battery life bad, noise bad, performance bad, thermals bad, sound bad, keyboard bad, display horrendous (never get shitty 4K OLED from Dell, it hurts your eyes!)... - that's a machine that costs $4k+.
Regarding the CPU... I was not able to use even 50% of its i9 CPU because of thermal throttling. And when it was on "full", it got like 2 hours of battery.
M1 is like from another galaxy. The sound continues to amaze anyone who hears it. People can't take their eyes off the display. It literally does not have fans. It never gets hot. I can work 2 days on one battery charge.
And most importantly - even though I have only a 7-core M1 Air - it outperforms my i7-7770 desktop as well as every laptop I ever had, even the beefy i9 Dell - and it cost less than $1500. It has less RAM (only 16GB), but that's alright, I never had a problem with it (as a JS developer).
Have to do your research either way.
I personally picked my Thinkpad model. I did not get to choose my MacBook model.
The M1 tends to outclass most laptops (primary in single thread based workloads) but they are well down the ladder of performance in comparison to what is possible to put in a desktop form factor.
The mac studio seems to take a nice bite out of those options as well, but its not a laptop either, and depending on workload its quite likely still loses pretty bad if the desktop is tuned to the workload (aka toss a couple 3090's in, or a threadripper/etc for massively parallel stuff, or faster disks, etc).
People who are stuck in the laptop mindset, seem to forget that desktops have a lot of add in card/etc flexibility for workload tuning. Need a 100Gbit network card, just plug it in, need 2T ram pick a motherboard with support/etc.
Think about what this (somewhat randomly picked) motherboard can do, that you can't get from an apple device.
https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards...
I don't forget what desktops can do I just don't care and would rather be able to work from the couch when I feel like it.
I've built a 5900x with 64GB high speed ram, 2x NVME 4.0 because my 2018 i9 Macbook pro was hot garbage and would crawl when working on a project with a bunch of docker microservices.
I regret this decision now because the new M1 MBP would do everything I need and I wouldn't have to worry about SSH workflows, keeping my PC/internet up while I'm away/traveling, having to work on two separate devices and migrate over all the time, two keyboard layouts (Mac/PC).
I think OP is right that M1 MBP really changed the equation for most "regular" developers, before the M1 MBP my choice was the only sane option because all the laptops available had huge drawbacks (Intel was and is hot garbage, AMD laptops are budget tier/gaming bricks).
What do you think happened when the people with powerful workstations got sent home during covid?
Obviously for some employers the answer was SSH, or taking a workstation home - but for other places (e.g. CAD users), the answer was 'mobile workstation' laptops.
Nobody was getting workstation grade laptops.
(speaking from experience).
I worked for a large studio at the time and anyone who could carry a workstation home could take it.
Eh, YMMV. I have an M1 and an i7-1185g7 based Linux laptop. Honestly, I never use the M1. Side by side, there is no noticeable speed difference for my day to day work. The M1 is more efficient, that's for sure - but my Intel laptop already has "all day" battery life. If I need to spend more than 8 hours working without access to power, the M1 wins - but I never see that situation happening (to me).
The biggest thing that turns me away from the M1 is the lack of Linux support, which I understand is also a personal preference thing. Also the M1 MBP is slightly bulkier despite the same screen size.
[1] https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-5950x
But, it does tend to win overwhelmingly in multi threaded.
Also, as someone who owns both, make sure the 5950 is actually turbo'ing correctly. Mine was a real pain to get it up to speed, despite having a seriously overkill water cooler.
In my opinion, the Air is the perfect addition to a heavy Linux/Windows workstation. You get the full spectrum from iOS development to gaming, albeit at the cost of having to babysit two or three operating systems. You can use the Air for meetings or conferences, because everything that's not a game has a macOS version (think Microsoft Teams etc.)
...but without money to spare. If the desktop fits his needs there is nothing gained in replacing it with a proprietary and form-factor limited device like an Apple laptop unless he's hog-tied to the Apple world - which does not seem to be the case here.
I use a bunch of devices, some portable, some not. When I need something portable I take, let's say, a T42p running Linux. I'm typing this from a resurrected iMac 27" running Linux which sits next to a Compaq 6910p in a docking station connected to a 24" monitor. The iMac is the newest device at 12 years, that T42p is 17 years old yet it still works fine for most things as long as I can reach the server-under-the-stairs. Sure, that M1 makes for faster media consumption but... that is not what I use these things for. I also foresee a not-so-distant future where that M1 lies in a cupboard due to some malfunction - bad battery being the most likely - which is deemed too expensive to repair while most of those old devices around here still continue to work.
Granted, the hardware is great. Silence, good perf, no heating, amazing battery life. I love this.
The software part has not been that smooth for me:
- I use the python scientific stack, and it's not there yet. This will probably improve in the future, but for now, I'm stuck using rosetta stone and well the perf is not as good as it should be.
- I thought the stability of Mac OS X would amaze me. It did not. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely OK and I did not lose any work. But I have had to 'hard poweroff' the thing quite a few times.
- As a long time debian user, and for what I do (ML, image processing, simulations), linux is just less hassle in my opinion. Homebrew helps, yes, but feels so 'second-class' compared to [your favorite distro] package manager.
I pride myself on knowing words, and I did not know this word. Thanks!
Webster's 1913 Dictionary:
• Dith`yram"bic (?), a. [L. dithyrambicus, Gr. ?: cf. F. dithyrambique.] Pertaining to, or resembling, a dithyramb; wild and boisterous. "Dithyrambic sallies." Longfellow. -- n. A dithyrambic poem; a dithyramb.
• Dith"yramb (?), n. [L. dithyrambus, Gr. ? a kind of lyric poetry in honor of Bacchus; also, a name of Bacchus; of unknown origin: cf. F. dithyrambe.] A kind of lyric poetry in honor of Bacchus, usually sung by a band of revelers to a flute accompaniment; hence, in general, a poem written in a wild irregular strain. Bentley.
> for what I do (ML, image processing, simulations), linux is just less hassle in my opinion
I'm in a similar scenario (genomics, not ML). I pretty much gave up on using any local machine for this work and use my primary computer (desktop or laptop) to connect to my remote Linux servers to do this work. It just isn't worth the hassle to try to keep proper dev environments setup and in sync for work like this. I still use the Mac for other things like email, writing, generating figures, etc... but there are far faster machines for more difficult number crunching.
One of the exceptions here would be something more interactive like video or image editing (which is a workflow the Mac is really well designed for).
In my case, the primary computer is the linux desktop machine and I use the macbook to remotely connect to it when I am not home. Feels a bit weird to use a $2500 laptop as a dumb terminal, but I guess that's the world we live in (and which I am part of).
>worth the hassle to try to keep proper dev environments
In my experience, debian stable + poetry + the occasional container have been great so far. De gustibus...
I could get old RDIMM/LRDIMM sticks (it's not widely known but some X99 boards support it) and a 1660v3 and be up and running with 8 cores at ~4 GHz for basically the cost of RAM, and that would probably be sufficient for my needs. And using RDIMM/LRDIMM would set up a migration path forward to Epyc eventually - Epyc is still Ryzen and still likes fast RAM, but those faster sticks are 3-4x the price per GB, so getting something running now with an upgrade path forward would be fine.
I'm confused, are you doing scientific Python or learning a language?
Not even close. A 5950x will absolutely smoke an M1 max on a multithreaded workload, and if your workload needs more than 64GB ram the difference is even starker.
- No dust can get in because it's sealed.
- Mechanical parts break more often.
- I often block the vents anyway because I'm sitting in bed or something.
However, it's not all green grass. Non-replacable SSD and RAM is horrible, horrible practice. I root for the competition / right-to-repair advocates to force apple into fixing this. I usually perform a major upgrade on desktops & laptops after ~4 years.
The same goes for SSDs; by building the SSD controller into the CPU, you can get I/O performance that vastly outperforms even PCI NVMe drives.
Over the next few years, it will be the case that the most powerful computer you can buy will be a Mac. The M1 series Macs signal a return to the Amiga days, when thoughtful engineers designed the whole system with integrated hardware and software for speed and responsiveness that cannot be matched or surpassed by the cobbled together PC ecosystem that has dominated for so long.
I don’t think Apple has said why they did it this way in the Studio. I’ve heard three theories.
1. They plan to at some point support upgrading storage.
2. It is so failing SSDs can be replaced instead of having to do a whole logic board swap.
3. It is for easier and cheaper inventory management. It is easier for them to build most of them with the most popular storage configuration or two and then when someone orders a less popular configuration change the SSDs than to build ahead of time and stock the less popular configurations.
Loud, hot, sluggish.
Now everything is snappy and smooth. Low regrets.
All because Apple deems it the only way to run xcode...
At least the client paid for the machine (enterprise, this was their way of having reproducable builds... Until the pandemic but a halt to their project)
I know we're in a high income profession, but buying another $2.5k+ laptop just for iphone development isn't a trivial expense if you do contracting (especially if you're not working 40 hours a week).
99% of the app dev happens on Android, and I just test on iOS when I need to--and for that I have an older, cheap, MacMini.
It may seem odd to say that you want both RDIMM/LRDIMM and overclocking but many of the server processors run at very low speeds compared to gaming systems, often 2.0-2.4 GHz or so, and just running at a modest 4 GHz or so on all 8 cores is easily achievable on X99 if the chip is multiplier-unlocked. Epyc is still better, you can achieve similar performance with much higher core counts, but you can get X99 chips and decent boards for a song, while (eg) Epyc 7402P is still almost a $1500 chip with $600+ boards for it.
The one downside to X99 is that the System Agent is just not very mature compared to later iterations. Even 3000 speed RAM often requires a "BCLK strap" which is like a special multiplier just for the System Agent. This is often set automatically when you enable XMP, usually a 1.25x multiplier, but this can cause some problems with some PCIe and NVMe devices which don't maintain their own clocks. I haven't run into major problems with consumer-tier hardware but YMMV and "dumb" devices like IO Fusion cards might have more issues.
I am thinking seriously about getting 8x32GB 2133 LRDIMM and using that as big NAS for homelab stuff, then transitioning to an Epyc 7402P at some future date, then upgrading RAM to something higher clocked once it gets cheaper.
I am so sad to see things go down this path and it is so frustrating to see common sense beaten to death by some product manager, marketing vp or CEO saying that thin, light and unrepairable is the future...
The laptop is high-spec and costly (Dell Precision 7750), so much so that I doubt my employer would have bought it for me. So costly, in fact, that it makes no financial sense to upgrade my desktop.
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Other-Linux-Discussions/Replaci...
I never want to enable it, and I don't want to live in the danger of enabling it by accident, either. If it reported to infrastructure that I own, I'd be talking different.
But I would agree here, even when I had the problems with LE (botched cron config) it only required me to 'administer' it 4 times a year. And when I fixed cron config I don't need to do even that.
The part he seems to be confused about are the PEP's required for modern standby, because instead of extending the UEFI/ACPI specification to cover those corner cases (or wedging them into the existing notification mechanisms) they allow platform providers to continue to create machine specific power management blobs that aren't portable between OS's. The older ACPI power methods, were of course opaque as well, but the API was standard enough that non Microsoft OS's weren't at a disadvantage.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/dev...
That said UEFI sucks and it inflicts unnecessary pain every time I setup a new computer.
This was going to be the state when Microsoft first proposed secure boot. But the backlash lead to (1) being able to disable it and (2) being able to load customer keys.
Are any motherboards actually locked down to where you can't install another OS? My older Gigabyte motherboard, my Thinkpad laptop, and my HP business line desktop all support both of these.
UEFI was definitely a pain point for booting Linux when it was first available. The same Gigabyte motherboard mentioned ended up having it all turned off and just used legacy boot for years. But everything works great with UEFI USB boot installers and the OS. I'd recommend giving it a try again.
I personally use secure boot for Linux through custom keys and a kernel install hook that resigns the EFI+kernel+initramfs+cmdline blob. It's quite nice in combination with LUKS unlocked by TPM2 (similar to Bitlocker). Secure boot actually lets you be more selective in which PCRs to verify for LUKS unlocking, meaning it's much less fragile during updates.
??? Most distros have signed boot loaders and run fine with secure boot on.
UEFI also permits rather advanced features. For example, if a mobo manufacvtorer wanted to, they could theoretically code in support for using a USB monitor for the bootup display, enabling firmware access without any video adapter on board at all.
One can quite easily add new boot-loaders to the EFI system partition, and add the entries to NVRAM, making it possible to add add custom pre-boot diagnostics programs, or a small direct-boot emergency recovery kernel, or other fancy features.
How one could replicate this with a desktop + laptop combo? Setting up a work environment which syncs between the two constantly?
I have three desktops. Projects are on SSD VMs that I carry, or in the cloud. So no issues about syncing.
With that in mind (except probably a very heavy data) you already need a way to sync your environment... to something, depends on what are you doing.
And if you can sync it for a fast recovery then, probably, you can make it sync between N+1 computers.
Another boon is that if your system goes kaput for whatever reason, you've already done the legwork to immediately get up and running again.
In this way you won't need the laptop at all and can use a nice tablet. I'm thinking of going this way, but not quite there yet.
If you care about fan noise and regularly put high load on your computer, a desktop provides much better options here. But I was also surprised just how much processing power you can put into a modern notebook, my Ryzen 8 core CPU in my notebook is not that much slower than the one in my desktop (which is a bit older than the notebook). But the desktop is silent at 100% CPU load, the notebook isn't.
For me the biggest issue though is monitors, I like to have two large screens. A single screen always feels somewhat limiting to me.
It’s fairly chaotic but my spatial memory handles it pretty well.
The bottom line is physics. Never will hardware crammed into a tiny case, a laptop sized case, perform as well as desktop components in even a slightly larger case. Even less so than components in a real mid tower allowed to be effectively cooled and run wide open. It's just the physics of it.
If it fits, and you can take the typically higher price, then going for the theoretically "more optimal/efficient" would scratch the "optimizer itch", but is arguably of no importance. Just like getting a nice $200 chef knife gets you a nice blade that cuts better and is more maintainable than the one you can get for $5, but if you only cut tofu, all those benefits are pretty abstract.
Suddenly, I feel like there will be some mental gymnastics to justify why WFH is okay but WFlaptop isn't.
I would rather shut a door and ignore my office than have to go back to commuting to a job I hate.
My day ends in seven minutes. In eight minutes, I'll be outside enjoying my yard.
And some people don't have a need to have a specific workstation or room that they can isolate in such a way.
It seems weird the internet pushes such a specific working style and refuses to acknowledge that other preferences exist. The prevailing
I dont understand people who work on a tiny 15” screen when they can have multiple large monitors. Yes, you can use externals with your laptop but then you need to invest in a squid (commonly called dock?) that will link your stuff to the laptop. And disconnect/reconnect your stuff when you go away.
Also let’s not forget the full size keyboard. I suppose that’s why no code coding initiatives come out once in a while, those people can’t stand typing on their laptop :)
My solution is one serious desktop with everything and one mid range laptop that I can work on if needed, but avoid like the plague.
I used to the two PCs for a while, but a single computer is so much easier to deal with.
Hmm the only thing I need to sync is done via git pull. Mail is imap and docs are online.
For reference, I am using an XPS 13 and a Lenovo P24h. All of the peripherals are plugged into the monitor, and when I unpack my laptop, I just plug in a single USB-C cable and I am on my way.
Multiple monitors can (supposedly) be daisy-chained as well, although I have not tried this.
You can have it either way. When I'm away from my desktop, I attach a portable external monitor to the laptop via USB-C. It has an identical screen, and works really well. I do prefer desktops, but I have to move around a lot.
I never work from the living room. When the weather is nice I sometimes work from the park but to be honest I rarely achieve anything, it's just an excuse to go outside. Same for coffee shops, I can but almost never do.
It's more expensive to design an internal PSU than source a random power brick. Oh wait, i thought it was called "an Apple tax"...
With a laptop you just bring a single slab-shaped piece of hardware.
My MacBook Pro has been out of clamshell mode less than 25 times in a year. Almost all of them to wake up after an OS update.
For work, it makes sense to have a laptop. Portable, in case I need to be on the go. If I need extra computing power (which is rare), I can spin up cloud resources.
For my personal stuff - nothing will replace a fast HDD, big CPU, big GPU. Rock solid, quiet (if you have water cooling), powerful. If I need that power on the go (which I sometimes do), I can remote into it. I usually do personal travel with an HP Spectre x360, which is quite light with an OK screen and keyboard. My desktop is kinda old at this point, with an i7 4930K with 64gb DDR3 and a GTX 1060 3gb. I have far fewer issues with my desktop than my work provided laptop, and it's a lot older, and has suffered a lot more abuse.
My 1080ti has been one of best PC part investments I've made; if you ignore lack of Ray Tracing its still able to knock 60fps/1440p in just about anything, a god-send during these chip/GPU shortage times.
I built a PC during the pandemic for work and gaming. It runs OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Windows 10 (the latter purely for gaming but I'm looking to ditch it for Proton/Wine on Linux).
I realized how much I prefer working on a desktop after years of using a laptop for work. Not gonna lie, I still like the niceties offered by my Macbook Air M1, namely great battery life and very good performance, so I use it primarily when I am out working remotely.
- omen 15, 32g ram: Windows11 for gaming + wsl2 + vbox hackingtosh + bluestacks.
- fully rooted poco x3 pro running lineage