The complaint about power usage in suspend is especially sad because it’s pretty much a common problem for Linux on laptops. Not sure if that’s what applies here, but the numbers about match what I see with my Framework. Basically: if you want to use secure boot you usually also want kernel lockdown mode, and you cannot hibernate a lockdowned kernel. At least not without out-of-tree patches.
IMHO that’s a giant issue. If you can’t hibernate (aka suspend to disk) you will never be able to get that power consumption low. And telling people to not run secure boot or lockdown is not really a good answer either. Especially since the default installer already sets those things up.
I get that „Linux on laptops“ is not a priority big enough to get a proper fix for that. And that it’s not an easy issue to fix. But the current state is really really sad.
This is not a Linux issue (Though the hibernate issues are!). It's a PC issue. Microsoft went on a crusade making hardware vendors implement S0 next to S3 but most hardware vendors now _only_ implement S0. So that the laptop can keep phoning home and download updates etc whilst closed. Which means it's impossible to turn off the CPU during suspend. it's always on.
Shouldn't that mean that the relatively open platforms like Framework should work better, since they lack the incentive to defy the user/owner like the locked-down platforms do? What would prevent Framework or anything similar from implementing the other sleep states?
Framework doesn't produce it's own CPUs. It buys them directly from Intel. Producing your own CPU is really difficult, if you want it to be competitive with other state-of-the-art CPUs.
They don't need to make their own CPUs for that. Framework can write its own BIOS and ACPI drivers for Windows and Linux to have proper sleep support. But that's more R&D expenditure they probably can't afford.
For example, for my home lab, I bought a used Intel 12th gen industrial PC from a specialized Taiwanese embedded systems company, whose BIOS allows very granular control of all sleep states plus individual power control of most peripherals, probably because that's a must-have for customers in that space over stuff like benchmark scores and bang for the buck.
So technically, IT IS possible to do, just probably not very cost effective for consumer devices.
Do those settings actually work? My HP laptop with a 10th gen intel has an option for this. Windows manages to suspend, but it doesn't come back to life. Linux is broken, too.
As I remember, sleep state are mostly implemented by the CPU (or require the CPU collaboration), and neither intel nor AMD does s3 sleep on their proc anymore.
With 32 GiB of memory it's just too slow. A laptop, to me, is supposed to be a device much like a phone in that I can just flip it open and do what I need to do, suspend is supposed to be that, but if I don't charge my Dell precision every single day it'll just run down to 0 for absolutely no reason.
S0 is a step forward. Disabling CPU entirely is just a "workaround". Both S3 and hibernation has a lot of security implications which S0 solves. Apple uses their own S0 alternative and it works... Perfectly?
The real problem is that both AMD and Intel S0 implementations are mediocre at best and this is what they should fix. Also most vendors are dickheads and cannot even verify that their system even goes to S0ix states without any problem before releasing it. Because of their laziness you can buy brand new certified "Linux ready" machine which won't even achieve S0ix states out of the box.
Wouldn't that mean that Intel Macs would have a much worse battery life than they did while suspended? Even suspended they did better than the same laptop running Linux.
Microsoft is not to blame for Linux’s abysmal battery lift. Linux has never ever had good battery life. It’s the only issue preventing me from replacing my MacBook.
My personal machine is a Framework 13 AMD (first gen of AMD for them) and my work machine is a MB Pro M4. The Mac Book just keeps battery _forever_ while suspended, where as I've found the Framework (running Ubuntu 24) loses about 1% an hour while suspended. 1% per hour is acceptable for me, but the Mac Book's power to performance ration is just insane.
I can't blame Framework, of course. Upstart laptop manufacturer that is open about repair vs tech giant who's spent years optimizing hardware and batteries.
All that said, I'm optimistic for better batteries, better suspend software/hardware support, and more efficient mobile processors outside of the Apple ecosystem in the coming years. The M-series Apple processors are definitely kicking others in the industry into gear.
I don’t think there’s much framework can do about this. The same happens with Windows on HP and Dell laptops, except windows tends to quickly enter hibernation (if it doesn’t somehow hang and burn up your bag).
We used to have better suspend before, when s3 was thing, on both Linux and windows. Maybe not as great as Macs, but way better than the current shitshow. Now I’m not saying pcs are great hardware, but I think this particular issue should be pinned on Microsoft, who tried to copy apple’s power nap, only doing it halfassedly as they usually do.
Does Framework operate at the same abstraction level as Apple? I thought because of scale, Apple can dictate terms from its suppliers to get everything custom. I would imagine Dell, Lenovo, and HP simply don't care enough and Framework and System 76 and the like don't have enough scale to get custom parts or custom code from vendors?
It's up to Framework what level they work at. If they want to make a competitive product rather than just throwing together what currently exists will dictate what they need to do. I would think it would be in Dell, Lenovo, and HP's interest to compete against Apple, but Framework shouldn't let others software that they should have bad suspend functionality.
I really do not understand why hibernate under secure boot is not implemented on Linux and this continues for years.
It is as if the features are implemented by completely different people. But this is not obviously the case since systemd supports both and actively improving both.
Note for me hibernation is a security measure and not about saving battery. I am traveling sometimes with the laptop and risk of theft is non-trivial. If it is hibernated, then it is just a property loss. But with just suspend there is a chance that the data can be extracted. So I configured it to hibernate automatically after 15 minutes in suspension. Surprisingly it has been working reliably with Linux.
To add some context: man kernel_lockdown[1] reads "Unencrypted hibernation/suspend to swap are disallowed as the kernel image is saved to a medium that can then be accessed.". And to my understanding there is currently no way to tell a (mainline) kernel that allows "encrypted hibernate", i.e. no way to tell the kernel that its hibernation disk is "secure".
So its not a direct "linux prevents hibernate on secure boot", its "linux recommends kernel_lockdown when secure booting", "kernel_lockdown prevents hibernate with unencrypted swap" and "theres no well to make the kernel believe the hibernation disk is encrypted", but the result is the same.
You can "just" run secure boot without lockdown. Its a cmdline, you can just omit it.
You can run custom patch sets that add cmdline options so the kernel allows hibernation in lockdown (if you pinky-promise the swap is encrypted).
But neither of these are easily accessible to the average user.
A UKI is a kernel+initramfs+boot-arguments bundle all as a single WinPE/UEFI executable using the "EFI Stub Loader".
You configure your system firmware to execute it, passing no arguments. It boots using the command line you set earlier. It's signed, and verified by the platform secure boot.
It doesn't, it's just another bootstrapping method that happens to work fine with hibernation.
UKI allows you to extend your chain of trust from the bootloader to ramdisk, instead of just your bootloader and kernel. From there, you can enable kernel lockdown and checking of module signatures if you want to.
I think you can do the same thing without UKI (I forget tbh), but UKI simplifies it with one UEFI executable that doesn't even need a bootloader.
The swap file that memory is dumped to during hibernation is on an encrypted disk. Upon wake, you need to unlock the disk before you can resume from hibernation.
This may or may not apply to your situation, but at least some motherboards have an integrated bootloader. You need to register the options with it (via efibootmgr for example). Then pressing a key (check your manual) presents you with the options.
This has worked with both Linux and Widows on all my machines: handbuilt 3rd gen intel with an asus MB, 6th gen with some msi, 10th gen with a cheap Gigabyte, and an assorted bunch of HP Elite desks and books with intel and AMD.
I understand there’s even a way for them to auto detect the options, but since this has been a set it forget it type thing, I never bothered to look into it.
Unless it's a really old SSD, lifetime is so massively extended over 15+ old SSDs, that it's not even a consideration any more. People use consumer grade SSDs for databases which last years, even when mostly full.
I expect many of the servers I have deployed, again consumer grade SSDs, would have more writes in a day than you in a year -- even with several suspends a day.
I cannot of course address the specific model you have, or the size of RAM you're suspending to swap space.
There’s also the fact that some laptops have laughably slow SSDs. I’m thinking my 2020 HP elitebook whose nvme drive is basically always slower than my 2012 sata drives… it takes forever to write the 32 GB of ram to it. It’s actually a better experience tu turn it completely off and on, unless there’s something I absolutely need to keep in its current state.
I was excited to see news about AMD beginning work on ACPI C4 in the Linux kernel (1) – my Framework loses about 10% a day in suspend, sometimes more, which is OK for me but of course I’d love for it to be better!
I authored a patch (I still use it to this day, and I think others do too) that allows this, and sent it to the LKML as an RFC, and was rejected, for some background.
"I've got to warn you that I have an allergic reaction to arguments
that start with "the right solution is really hard, so let's pick the
easier, worse solution." ;)"
Proceeds to continue enforcing objectively worse solution (evidenced by the existence of this entire thread).
Let’s see how long DHH & co can keep harvesting low hanging fruit of Linux laptop problems. I’d expect they’ll plateau soon but I would love to be surprised.
I’m torn between my instinct to classify anything from DHH as mostly hype, my faith in Linux kernel developers, and my cynicism toward Linux kernel developers.
Honestly, given my experience from distro hopping, I am certain that collecting solutions across distributions and implementing them in one can go very far. It's almost as if distributions contributors too rarely try out other distributions to then steal what the other distribution does better.
Small enthusiast distributions with a bit of a hype can gain good features in by just pulling in knowledgable users missing things from their previous distro - and they can move a lot faster than the Debians or Fedoras of the world can, no committee decisions to be made first.
At the very minimum, omarchy and omakub already provide out of the box seamless fixes for all the common issues that are “fixed” but need tedious involved configuration nonetheless.
> On Windows/macOS it just works, on Linux you'll probably break secure boot with it.
The way it works on my Windows laptop is it’ll stay in sleep overnight, then when I open the laptop in the morning it’ll wake up, then hibernate itself, then I have to wait for the computer to turn itself back on. Thankfully this feature can be turned off.
The way it works on mine is that I open it in the morning to find it powered off because it chose to force quit my running applications to apply updates.
That's because MSFT doesn't really do hibernate any more but does "modern sleep" where it functions like a phone with the screen off. It keeps active network connections, downloads patches and keeps checking for notifications and other such nonsense.
BIOS support for proper hibernation has been getting worse too because with MSFT demanding it, there is little reason to continue support.
I've had older laptops that do the sleep->hibernate setup without too much issue but now it is a crap-shoot on if it is even supported in the hardware.
That's because the goal is not to have functional hibernation, but to start up faster. If the goal can be achieved by using less power instead of shutting down the whole machine and restoring it identically and that's easier it's a valid alternative.
You used to be able to edit ACPI tables to reenable S3 sleep but these days they're stripping the functionality from firmware entirely.
For example, HP's enterprise lines have S3 stubs in their firmware. If you enable them, nothing happens, because someone deliberately removed the S3 blobs entirely.
In most cases your kernel will tell you it's "locked down" and refuse to hibernate. In my case - on a cutting edge kernel no less with Fedora - it refused to believe that the default disk encryption setup with Swap on encrypted LVM actually is encrypted and locked me out.
Linux security bros followed Apple and others here and refused to add any ability for us to configure or tell kernel that it's wrong about that and to fscking allow resume.
This stuff just works out of the box on both macOS and even the mess that is Windows.
What's exasperating is that this has been going on for literally 20 years:
> Pretty much exactly 19 years ago I got on a train to Oxford and made Mark Shuttleworth's laptop successfully suspend and resume using ACPI and that was the turning point in my entire career [1]
Windows on my case, since Windows 7, although I kept a netbook with Linux around until it died.
While I can understand random Joe and Jane are at the mercy of reverse engineering while installing a Linux distro over the weekend, I expect that anyone selling Linux laptops as OEM, to actually get the specifications and have everything working as any other hardware vendor.
This is also something that is ideally fixed in hardware. Suspend to RAM should take extremely low energy (about 10 milliwatts). Apple has this down to an art while other laptops have quite of bit of random power draw from motherboard components. A laptop battery should be able to power suspend to RAM for months.
It does not make any sense to write 32 or 64G data to secondary memory every time you close your laptop lid, that will accelerate the lifespan of most SSDs.
This is a seriously annoying Linux problem that never get acknowledged by hardcore Desktop Linux fans. On any Linux thread on HN, one can argue till one is blue in the face, but they will always finally deflect with: it works fine for me on X hardware. Usually, the first response is that suspend works completely fine on Linux and it is Windows that is worse.
That's what I thought, so I disagree with OP, we don't want hybernation for Linux, we simply need way better power management and hardware that can sustain low power drain for weeks.
Mac M series don't do hibernation, probably because sleep has so little impact on battery life (my MacBook lasts for about a month in sleep mode) and Apple doesn't like to burden users with questions like 'what sleep mode to use'.
Ah yes, I think I've seen this before, it still resumes impressively fast from it, and I think since I normally notice the battery is almost dead it gives itself a good excuse.
As I understand it, the complaint isn't about battery life during usage. The issue compared to a mac is that I could close the lid on the macbook air m1 that I'm typing this on mid sentence, and then open the lid in two weeks, and have lost basically 0% battery.
I'm not sure if that's possible on windows. I know my work laptop doesn't work that way, but then, it probably runs all sorts of enterprise settings.
I'm on an AMD machine that System76 wrote the firmware for, and they specifically wrote in S3 sleep functionality despite the base firmware missing it.
The firmware vendor contracted System76 to develop the feature specifically for Linux compatibility.
I'm unaware of how much access Framework has to the underlying firmware blobs. If they don't have source/license/keys/etc for the right parts, they might be at the mercy of their own vendors for S3 support.
> If you can’t hibernate (aka suspend to disk) you will never be able to get that power consumption low.
This is cope. An Apple Silicon Macbook does not need to suspend to block devices to save energy (they only do this when the battery is empty). ChromeOS doesn't offer hibernate at all. The only reason that a Framework can't have good battery life in an operating state is that nobody is paying attention to the details.
Correct. I've got a ThinkPad T480s. Hibernation is disabled, but suspend works great. Keeps charge for at least a week. Running recent Debian. I think that Lenovo, for all their faults, just does better with Linux than Framework.
Thanks, I did not knew that. My understanding was that keeping the memory alive for suspend-to-idle was the main issue here. But that also might be something a vertically integrated Apple Silicon can win vs. that x86 madness there every day.
And to be sure, I do not claim that there is nothing to gain in s2idle. I bet theres still a lot of headroom to safe energy. Its just that it would be easy to safe a lot of power if s2disk "just worked".
Keeping memory alive is how sleep worked for over a decade and is incredibly power efficient.
The issue is that Modern Standby goes ones step further and keeps the CPU and peripherals in low power states instead of just the memory. This will use more power than S3 sleep by default, and each SoC will need deep integration with the kernel for that to ever be power efficient. That means it will require heavy investment from AMD and Intel to enable efficient Modern Standby in Linux, along with heavy vendor investment to ensure each model they sell implements Modern Standby efficiently.
It isn't a matter of Framework dropping the ball, it's matter of hardware platforms being shitty and platform owners not investing as much resources into Linux as they do Windows.
While I don't have any suggestions on how to look at the relevant metrics, a big part of the issue is the parts selection and having them power off properly.
1%/h is just 0.5W (for a 50Wh battery) which isn't a lot, but fail to bring a component or two to shutdown or sufficiently low power state and you'll observe exactly this behaviour. Of course some drain is going to be almost inevitable just to keep memory contents sufficiently refreshed, but with proper power-saving states memory can go appreciably below 0.5W.
Timer coalescing, idle wakeup minimization, race-to-idle optimization, etc.
It's not a single oversight, it's a massive project that needs to be carried out throughout an operating system. Linux's usual advantage of decentralization and wide distro variety with massive customization potential is a disadvantage here. To have a power-efficient system you need all of the software to be working toward the same goal. One bad actor process can completely hose the system's power efficiency.
> Linux's usual advantage of decentralization and wide distro variety with massive customization potential is a disadvantage here.
How so? You need each thing to do its part, but that decentralizes perfectly well because it isn't actually integration at all, it's just a hundred different pieces each doing it right.
And open source has the further advantage that you're not beholden to the maintainer. If Framework notices that piece #37 is wasting power, they have the code and can fix it themselves. If the upstream isn't completely asleep at the switch they'll accept the patch, and even if they are you can still ship it on your own device.
Where this can get messed up is in one of two ways. The first is if something is not open source and then the vendor fails to fix it but also fails to supply anyone else with the capacity to fix it. But this isn't a problem with integration, it's a problem with filthy knuckleheads not keeping their heads on straight and calls for some new competitors to show them how to do it.
The second is something like an actual trade off, e.g. if you want the machine to be able to wake via network packet or pressing a key on the keyboard then you'd need the network controller or USB controller to stay in a low power state instead of being dead off. And then that might cost you half a watt, but you're paying it in order to get something, and then somebody has to decide if Linux users would typically want a default where that feature works or one where the battery can last a month in standby, since it's one or the other.
You’re right that it’s “a hundred different pieces each doing it right” but you gloss over the disadvantage of decentralization: getting everybody on board with the project. With a centralized product (such as at Apple) the CEO can say “I want to increase battery life on existing hardware by 20% before next release or you’re fired” and people will work 80 hours a week to get that done. With open source? You’ve got ten thousand different projects, each with their own leadership and their own priorities. You have no leverage at all to get them all to work on power efficiency, so naturally it takes a back seat to them working on their favourite features.
Because it's not actually a disadvantage, because if it's actually open source no one can stop anyone else from doing it. If you or your company wants to work 80 hour weeks to improve power efficiency on Linux, you can submit patches to all the different projects where nobody else is doing the work.
And that actually happens in real life. Most of the projects care to begin with because they use their own stuff and don't want to ruin their own battery life or have a competitive disadvantage over the alternative. Then other third parties that find business value in having it work pay someone to clean up the odd stragglers when one of them didn't do it or have the resources to do it themselves.
The main problem is when some vendor both doesn't do it and is hostile to anyone else doing it.
And that actually happens in real life. Most of the projects care to begin with because they use their own stuff and don't want to ruin their own battery life or have a competitive disadvantage over the alternative.
Sure, they try not to ruin the battery life, but who is investing the amount of engineering resources into Linux battery life that Apple invests into macOS's? No one, of course, because the ROI of doing that for Apple is much higher than doing the same for Linux. Linux's open nature means that going for SotA battery life does not yield a competitive advantage, so no one does it.
If you or your company wants to work 80 hour weeks to improve power efficiency on Linux, you can submit patches to all the different projects where nobody else is doing the work.
In other words, centralize the battery life project. Who is doing that?
> Sure, they try not to ruin the battery life, but who is investing the amount of engineering resources into Linux battery life that Apple invests into macOS's? No one, of course, because the ROI of doing that for Apple is much higher than doing the same for Linux.
The answer is rather that everyone is doing it. Then most people care about it a little so they do a little, but because it's most people that adds up to being the majority of what needs to be done. A smaller number care about it a lot but all that's left is for them to shave off the rough edges.
> Linux's open nature means that going for SotA battery life does not yield a competitive advantage, so no one does it.
How does it not yield a competitive advantage? If you're Framework, Dell, System76, Canonical, Red Hat, etc., you want people to use your product instead of buying a Mac or some competitor's Windows laptop.
> In other words, centralize the battery life project.
I don't understand how this is centralization.
Suppose Intel does the work to make good open source drivers and make sure their hardware has low idle power consumption, Red Hat does the work to make systemd behave in a way which is power inefficient in the hardware-independent ways, etc. Then Framework does an analysis of where power is going on their systems and finds that Intel and Red Hat did a good job but there's a bug in the third party network controller driver preventing it from going to sleep, so they fix the bug.
Where is the centralization? The work is being done by all different companies who aren't even necessarily interacting with each other. Some of the bugs in third party software are fixed by hobbyists or other vendors. Then Framework is left with a limited amount of work to do and they do it.
The problem comes when they go to do that analysis and find that the thing using more power than it should is a piece of hardware that the vendor both failed to document and failed to provide source code for the firmware, so that no one else can fix it when they don't. In other words, it's caused by a thing that isn't open source.
Something's wrong. Maybe a setting or a random app is preventing your laptop from sleeping properly. You have many threads here saying that MacBooks can go weeks on sleep, and that's also my experience (M1 Pro).
There was a thread about just this issue another day.
I don't daily drive an MBP anymore, only occasionally. But I had one for a week or so, and once or twice I've noticed that my backlit keyboard still had its lights on, which is unusual when the computer sleeps. The screen was dark, though, so it can be confusing.
If the swap file is encrypted and memory encryption is turned on, I don't see why lockdown shouldn't be allowed.
You're already relying on the hardware platform for Secure Boot, it's not far fetched to apply the same view to hibernate if the platform protects memory and disk.
That said, S3 is still a viable option, and IMO, the best option. Some hardware vendors still implement S3 sleep for their Linux laptops.
>power usage in suspend is especially sad because it’s pretty much a common problem for Linux on laptops
I don't know what you're talking about, is this an apple Silcon marketing ploy? my linux laptops lose less battery in suspend than my macbooks do powered down
While I don't deny that suspend is an issue on Linux I've just never seen this as a major problem? I simply turn off my laptop and turn it on when I need it - boot times are less than a minute so it really isn't a issue for me, just flick the power switch, wait for a bit then I'm good to go.
This, so much. I read that comment and immediately recoiled at the idea of waiting "less than a minute" to be able to do anything. I'd estimate that 1/3 of the time I even open my laptop, I'm done with what I needed in less time than that boot up sequence takes and have closed it and moved on to something else. So often I just pop it open, do/check something and close it within seconds.
I go _months_ without rebooting/proper shut downs. And this is on a MacOS install that I've migrated from one Macbook to another for 5 macbooks now O.O
...recoiled... Some people go to work, switch on their computer and turn it off when they leave. I would say most in the world do that. Sure they don't know the diff between clapping their macbook shut or switching something off, but 1 minute does not make people 'recoil'. Very strange.
Totally understandable. You're right that those people are highly unlikely to really care between 2 seconds to being functional and 60 seconds. They're at the coffee machine anyway.
I've been obsessed with building things since I got my first lincoln logs set. I don't "clock out". There's no work computer and life computer, or even more foreign to me, no computer when not at work. I take my laptop nearly everywhere with me and have been known to pull over into the nearest gas station or any parking lot, pull it out and immediately write some code or make some notes due to something I'd just then had some breakthrough or idea about. There's no way I'm doing that if it takes a full minute to boot up and I'm there looking at a fresh rebooted OS. But if I can open it, touch my finger to the fingerprint reader and _immediately_ be productive? Happens all the time.
Hell, I'll walk across the room and open my laptop when my phone is in my pocket because it's just easier to use and it's immediately functional.
Different strokes for different folks, but I'd venture to bet that my experience mimics that of many others.
I'm reminded of this Steve Jobs story: So it's the MacBook Air guy's turn. He comes in and places his prototype down in front of Steve. Steve opens the lid. Two seconds later he picks up the laptop and heaves it so hard it skipped across the table like a stone on water: "I said fxxking INSTANT ON!!"
I know it's poor form to speak ill of the dead in general and of St Jobs in particular, but I do not see how anyone gets much more from stories like this than "Steve Jobs was an ill-tempered dick of a bully" and "power made Steve Jobs immune to getting his head kicked in which is absolutely what happens if you behave that way outside of an air-conditioned Silicon Valley office".
I've never used sleep on my laptop. I always have the lid set to 'do nothing' when closed (i.e., stay on and keep running). In the past I gave up on using a macbook for many reasons, but a key one was that I couldn't keep the machine on when closing the lid. I can't fathom having to reconnect terminal sessions or other similar connections every time I want to move from one meeting room to another. Carrying my laptop awkwardly with the lid open between rooms just seems silly. I just close my lid and let the laptop keep running and then hibernate at the end of the day, resuming the next morning. True instant-on, and no downsides to me.
It's a failing that I need to pre-empt every situation where I don't want the machine to sleep and run a tool to prevent it from sleeping, when I could usually just say 'don't sleep when I shut the lid'.
S3 sleep is a solved problem and security issues around it are solved by Secure Boot and memory and disk encryption.
The issue is that firmware vendors disable S3 sleep in favor of s0ix/Modern Standby instead, which just puts hardware into low power states instead of stopping them entirely. This will inherently drain more power over time than just keeping memory powered in S3 sleep.
Modern Standby requires heavy integration with the OS to be power efficient. Turns out that takes a lot of reverse engineering because vendors will not release documentation or tune the kernel for their firmware.
Not just laptops but affects computers too. I have a brand-new Mini PC with Windows 11 and when you turn it "off" it continues to pull 6-10 watts. Not a lot but still over a year if you were to only used it minimally that's 52-83kwh or around $25-45/year at PG&E rates. Vendors are removing support for classic standby/hibernate so the only way to go to <1 watt is to pull the plug. It shouldn't be this way.
My thinking is that Microsoft is basically the most influential in that, as they badly want to do their "stuff" while the laptop is not in use. Their "stuff" requires network connectivity and seemingly they believe they can do updates, or any other "optimizations" when the laptop is in "modern sleep" mode.
I'm surprised this required implementing a whole new sleep mode. Since it seems to be mostly used for async background tasks, why not configure the RTC to wake the laptop every hour or so (I think every laptop in existence already supports suspend with timeout) and go back to suspend if no tasks need to be done?
My main use for laptops is as a notepad. If it takes a minute to start when I need it it's vastly inferior to a sheet of paper. If it can't remember what page I was on that's doubly so. Windows works more or less like a sheet of paper (though automatic reboots to apply security updates are a point in favor of paper that has no such issues.)
And I often use my laptop for things where seconds matter. I've got things on the stove that could burn, I may not have 5 seconds to spare locating the next step in the recipe.
For those use cases that I love my Chromebook. Underpowered, yes, but also it can basically sleep forever and also wakes up from sleep fast. Even if I need to turn it on if it is powered off it takes just a few seconds to boot.
There are often browser tabs and other documents windows I would like to keep openers and I want to jump back to exactly where I left off as soon as possible.
Let me preface this reply with that I'm not trying to preach or tell you how to live your digital life - everyone is different and if you have setup that works for you then great, keep on trucking.
That said, I worked the same way many years ago, with browser tabs and desktop sessions that were precious and I didn't want to drop them. But what I ended up realizing was that the stress of losing that state due to random power failures or software bugs was too much. I found it far better for my sanity and actual productivity to instead make sure I had a sane note taking system, where I could track what was actually important to me.
It was a great relief to my mental state and general stress to allow myself to shut down all processes and start clean every day.
While I understand your perspective here - let me counter with mine. I have the same issue where I maintain a 'state' that I'd prefer to maintain but my interest in maintaining it does have this anxiety you describe.
It's just a huge waste of time to get it all back. I see it no different than being in the middle of a heavy coding/mental task and being interrupted to the point that you have to 'start over' in the sense of getting all that context back in the right places.
Sure, I _could_ neatly close everything out and have a pristine perfect work/desktop environment. But, personally, when I see the work/desk environment of someone and it's absolutely pristine all I can think about is how they're spending energy to maintain that.
To give another example - in my workshop (woodworking), if I'm in the middle of something and need to take a break/leave the shop... I'm not putting _anything_ away. I turn off the lights and walk out. That way when I return I don't have to set everything back up. Now - when I finish something, then I go through and clean up and organize and get the state freshened up. Same thing with my laptop/computer.
Zero anxiety about it all - it's not about losing anything but time. And that's what's most important.
When I moved to Obsidian, I created a great note taking system that I use to track all my research. I didn't realize until you said this that I don't need to have my applications open any more because of this. Wow. Out of sight, out of mind I guess.
As suggested in the blog post, the battery life issue is complex.
You do need a CPU/SoC that’s efficient, and while Intel and AMD can do this it’s traditionally been a struggle for them.
Next, the OS needs to be capable of taking full advantage of the chip’s efficiency. Windows could be decent here in, but Microsoft doesn’t believe in an operating system that’s ever truly idle (and neither do the third parties living in your taskbar tray), so even on relatively efficient laptops much of that potential is wasted. Linux is kind of all over the place, depending on your hardware, which governor you’re using, how it’s configured, whether your browsers are configured to use GPU acceleration or are burning power intensive CPU cycles, etc.
Then there’s sleep. Most of the problems here come down to x86 laptops not implementing proper S3 sleep but only “modern standby”, which attempts to emulate the sleep mode that Apple uses that allows for emails to be fetched etc while in a near-sleep low-power state. The problem is that modern standby is not implemented well in Windows or Linux and how individual laptop firmwares handle it can vary a great deal, and the sum of it is that it generally speaking doesn’t work, which is why so many x86 laptops drain themselves after being “asleep” for a couple of days. My ThinkPad does this too.
It’s possible for x86 machines to manage this state correctly, as proven by Valve’s Steam Deck which can be put to sleep and drain its battery slowly enough to stay alive for a week or more. This seems to require a level of integration between the hardware and the OS (an Arch based Linux in this case) than practically all laptop vendors are either willing or capable of.
My Thinkpad X1 Carbon (gen 5) running linux can suspend for weeks without dying. There was definitely a window where battery life under suspending wasn't a huge problem in Linux, not sure what happened.
I also have a Framework 13 (11th gen intel) which has terrible suspend battery life (also loses 2-3%/hour like the newer AMD version)– I was hoping that the AMD chips would fare better, but it seems not.
For my all AMD ASUS TUF 16, I am having a great experience with sleep and battery drain. I’m running Nobara, a Fedora gaming spinoff. I can 100% treat it like my apple devices where I can close it and ignore it for several days, and maybe lose 1-5% battery over that time.
My understanding is that it being all AMD makes a difference, but I don’t know for sure.
I guess that's an argument for Framework to start looking into working with the software that runs on their hardware. It's not like they need to support a whole lot of options either.
> Most of the problems here come down to x86 laptops not implementing proper S3 sleep but only “modern standby”, which attempts to emulate the sleep mode that Apple uses that allows for emails to be fetched etc while in a near-sleep low-power state.
That's strange because when I close the lid on my Framework laptop it disables Wifi.
> It’s possible for x86 machines to manage this state correctly, as proven by Valve’s Steam Deck which can be put to sleep and drain its battery slowly enough to stay alive for a week or more.
I had the original Steam Deck and the OLED Steam Deck and neither of them would hold a charge past a day or so. It's a constant annoyance for me as I don't want to leave it plugged in 24/7 but if I don't, it won't be ready to go when I use it. I often end up playing while plugged in which is just silly.
A week of battery (while it's "off") would be amazing, it feels like I can't get 24hrs without the battery being trash.
Compare this to my iPad or MBP and the difference is stark. I really only use my Switch in docked mode (the joycons suck) so I don't have a good read on how long it holds it's battery but I assume it must be better than the Steam Deck.
We got an ipad mini for my kid(s) and regularly leave it unplugged for weeks at a time, sitting on a shelf until we've got a flight or long enough car ride to justify bringing it out. I did that the other day and after not charging it since at least labor day, it was sitting at 90%. I'm just blown away every time.
Hey fyi and for posterity, on SteamDeck I have the same issue and the cause is the same as outlined above (modern standby). I would love to hear more from folks who don't have this out of the box.
The fix is simple but I have to wonder why it's not set by default
Ideally the Steamdeck would come with hibernation after timeout and FDE enabled by default, but it doesn't. Still love it, and I'm glad/grateful it's open enough to enable these features on my own
I got a Steam Deck OLED a few months ago. I haven't changed the standby behaviour at all. I can get a bit less than a week of standby + a few hours of gaming out of the box. Currently, my deck is on 52% charge after last charging it 4 days ago and playing ~3 hours of Silksong across those days.
And yes, I'm surprised they don't do something like this out of the box. I really love my Steam Deck overall and I agree, the ability to tweak and enable these features really make it an amazing product. Especially in comparison to my Switch 2 which is great but 100% locked down.
Can't agree on it. For whatever reason my deck OLED do have this issue. Do you use SDcard btw? Since it's really the only difference from a stock device.
Battery life is the only thing stopping me from getting out of the Apple ecosystem. As soon as a viable Linux laptop with "enough" battery life becomes available, I'll make the switch. At that point there's nothing on Apple side that couldn't be done better in Linux (with a bit of work, but that's okay).
I travel a lot, and often on standby for work during that time. I need to be confident that when I pull the laptop out, there's ALWAYS enough juice to respond to a situation immediately without worrying about anything else.
If Framework offered hot swappable batteries, even if a quick restart is required, I'd be fine with that because at least I wouldn't be stranded in that case. And I'd be happy to pay as much as a MacBook, or a bit more even, purely for ideological reasons. Apple's dominance is bad for all of us.
Instead of a hot-swappable battery, why not just carry a large battery-bank that can charge your laptop over USB-C? That way you don't even need to reboot.
Browsing around on Amazon, I see there's actually quite a few battery banks that with over 60W of output, and ~100Wh of capacity for under 100€
Charging is a lossy process. Charging a battery, then using it to charge another battery isn't as efficient.
Plus, depending on how/where it's used, having to wait for it to recharge while connected to a power bank might be a non-starter. You also don't necessarily want to recharge while transporting in a bag either because of heat concerns.
And a mouse, because non apple laptops are hard to use with just the trackpad.
And the huge power adapter for the "gaming" laptop.
... sadly, it means I'll have to stick to Apple hardware for longer. As much as I think Cook is an idiot who's trying to dumb their products down to the point they're not even usable for power users, let alone developers.
> And a mouse, because non apple laptops are hard to use with just the trackpad.
Have you ever used a Framework's trackpad? It's very good.
> And the huge power adapter for the "gaming" laptop.
First of all, Framework laptops are not gaming laptops. Second of all, Framework ships smaller power adapters than Apple because they invested in Gallium Nitride chargers which are significantly more compact than other options.
Personally, I wouldn't even carry around a power bank, I just mentioned it because the person I was talking to said they wanted to carry around a hot-swappable battery, and I thought a power bank was a better option.
I've actually bought a gaming laptop for someone this year. Asus. It comes with a brick proprietary charger that delivers the full power it can use and also with an USB PD that can't fully power it. Guess it works if not gaming, or gaming at reduced fps.
When you say "Apple's dominance", are you referring to a potential dominance?
Because in terms of actual dominance, Apple is far from that in laptops. Lenovo, HP and Dell each sell more laptops than Apple, and those three alone make up 60% of the market.
Completely disproportionate, off the charts dominance (relative to everything else I have tried in (mostly hardware, but also software) quality, attention to detail and UI/UX would be my opinion. Power consumption would be part of that.
Granted, I haven't tried most of the newer niche Linux-focused laptops, which I intend to do.
There's a few things for me, and the saddest part is I'm a very die-hard Linux user. Until a couple months ago when I had to start traveling, I've been using Linux exclusively for work.
1. The battery life, as others have mentioned.
2. The quality of the hardware: The screen is incredibly nice, the trackpad is VERY nice to use, and no other laptop has even come close.
3. It's so quiet. The fans almost never spin unless I've been compiling something for over a minute. I don't know how they do it but any other Linux laptop I've used, including desktops, have been super loud when running similar tasks.
I really haven’t had a problem with my Lemur Pro from System76, which I got in spring of 2022. I did have to replace the battery once when there was noticeable swelling. Prior to this, I had always used a MacBook.
I use a Mac M4 for work and have a Framework for myself.
The M4 is a beast, but I have a different priority for a device I want to call "my own". I want more control over "my" device, and I don't demand the highest performance or battery life. I grew up on Windows, and for a long time dual-booted with various Linuxes, and eventually used WSL on the regular. But now with my Framework I'm running Fedora, so for the first time in my life I don't have to deal with Windows at all.
It helps, I suppose, that I'm one of those weird types who likes to actually shut down their computer when they're not using it, instead of just closing the lid. I like a fresh start each time I open it up.
How quickly does your laptop start? I like this idea a lot, I am now going down the rabbithole of finding which distributions boot the fastest (I remember this mattered a lot to linux users about 20 years ago)
The point, I believe, was that their laptop battery lasts longer than many people's, with any OS or battery, because they shut it down much more often than most.
There was some discussion about Linux having trouble with battery life while hibernating. That hasn't been a problem for me because I just don't do that.
In my experience, most people like to just leave their computers on, or sleep or hibernate them. Some people specifically like returning to their windows etc. just like they left them.
I don't remember having "range anxiety" under S3 suspend on my old intel laptops. It just worked and they woke up reasonably reliably and quickly under linux if you had a regular thin and light with integrated graphics. I had an Apple intel laptop that might have been marginally faster returning to life but it basically just worked on either.
The move to modern standby has been a mess. It seems to have improved a lot but my kid always shuts down his windows laptop before putting it in a bag because it seems to have become urban folklore that laptops turn on in bags, overheat and get damaged. That is new. I carried laptops in bags suspended for years and nobody thought that. It just worked.
As someone whose job was to improve Windows fundamentals this makes me really sad. I worked on making Windows respect modern standby better, and there just wasn't a whole lot of interest in making it work. The whole OS needs a lot of considered improvement, and it's not getting it.
Thanks for your effort. I still have one of those early ARM based Windows machines: HP Envy X2.
While I rarely use it, when I do the instant-on still works pretty flawlessly. That is after running a few hours of Windows updates!
I'm in the same boat as the article. I actually use a Macbook Air these days for coding instead of the usual MBP and the battery life still surprises me.
can confirm, my MS Surface did it all the time, something about shutting the lid before removing the power supply. I can't recall now, but it was the thing that make me switch back to apple.
I've had it happened, sure it was with Linux but it was scary taking out a fire brick from my bag and praying it was still working. I had been using Linux for 10+ years until the M1 came out, and for as much as I love Linux unfortunately I haven't looked back, the hardware is just that good.
When it's time to replace my M1 air, if the laptop is still working (I tend to replace when they break), I'll try to install Asahi Linux to see how it is. It feels a bit too experimental/me being too inexperienced with OS to risk it on my main computer.
My M1 is suffering from a bug where there is runaway SSD writes and I have to restart it every few days. I've learned so many coping techniques. I'd never call this the best hardware I've ever owned, that was a 2011 MBA.
Yikes that sounds terrifying! What program is doing the writes? Apple or third party? Some demon going crazy with logging?
I've had my M1 Air since they launched, five years, and it doesn't show any sign of getting retired soon (except for the slight bend in my case where my lid jumped on it when it was open on the couch... but that mostly bent back.)
I had a 2011 MBA but vastly prefer everything about this one.
I think I had that happen with a Windows laptop once like 6 years ago, I have used a couple MSI and Lenovo laptops and haven't had any issue. Windows has a much more wild driver ecosystem, and I'm sure there are bad drivers/motherboards/GPUs. (I do have some issues with my MSIs around USB-C docks causing bluescreens and refusing to resume from "screen shut off to save power" but as far as the laptop stuff it's been flawless.)
I’d noticed recently that my Macbook was consistently being warm even when I hadn’t used it in hours and it was closed and unplugged. I wound up doing a clean up of a bunch of processes that might be running in the backend, and it was resolved. I believe in the end it was some daemon for a built-in app, the contacts app maybe.
I’ve certainly had that particularly with older Dell XPS computers. So has Linus at LTT, which I suppose how it entered folklore.
I say this as my lab mate had his laptop do exactly that just last week, with up to date windows and a newer XPS laptop. It simply has never happened to my Macs
Only mildly relevant, but I dualboot windows and arch on my xps and decided to disable the grub boot screen timer... Accidentally left my laptop in grub mode for a few hours and it was toasty
Saying that the macOS desktop is vastly inferior to Linux desktops is absolutely nuts. I've tried to get my relatives on Linux desktops so many times, just for it to go completely wrong a couple of weeks after and having to reinstall Windows. It's just not made for average (or below-average) users, so I don't see how it can be VASTLY inferior to something as easy and polished as macOS.
I don’t need polished and superior, I need to get work done. I want the OS to get out of the way, not slow me down with animations, stage managers and pretty docks. I don’t even need customization, I just need it to stop trying to outdo itself and fall over.
I’d run kde or even gnome on my work MacBook if it let me without a second thought.
PS just installed ios 26 and what is this? If this low contrast blobby window thing makes its way to the laptop I’ll be very, very not impressed.
TUI is GUI with a focus on keyboard control. All the TUI apps people regularly use could be at least as good with a GUI, ssh and DX are the only good reasons for TUIs and ssh does X forwarding, too.
Finder the least flexible file explorer of any OS. There's no location bar. You can't have a dynamically resizing grid of icons, so if you resize your windows, the icons are constantly outside of the horizontal scroll blinds. The view modalities make it difficult to sort and find files. Major system paths (eg. Applications) are locked down and hidden.
The window manager can't be replaced.
Window manager placement hacks exist, but they are not first class. You'll never have first class tiling windows in Mac.
Many of the window manager quirks are forced upon you. You can't change how to cycle and alternate windows. Exposé is flakey...
Option 1: View > Show Location Bar (you can right-click or double-click on any folder to interact)
Option 2: Option-click the folder name in the Finder Window's title bar to immediately jump to other folders
Option 3: If you want to type a location and go there, press Command-Shift-G for Go > Go to Location
> You can't have a dynamically resizing grid of icons, so if you resize your windows, the icons are constantly outside of the horizontal scroll blinds.
Of course you can. Select View > Clean Up By > and choose the option you like best.
> The view modalities make it difficult to sort and find files.
Name a built-in file explorer with semi-spatial (Sidebar off), browser icon mode, hierarchical list mode, gallery, and column view. Bonus points if they have anything remotely like QuickLook.
> The view modalities make it difficult to sort and find files.
What is difficult about Command-1, Command-2, Command-3, Command-4 to switch views? What is hard about Command-J for granular settings?
> Major system paths (eg. Applications) are locked down and hidden.
Applications is visible at the system-wide and user level. Applications folder is listed in the "Go" menu, present in every Finder menubar. Applications is, by default, on the left sidebar of every Finder window. If you want to type, Command-Space brings up any Application at a whim.
Can't find an Application or want to see EVERY app on the system and connected drives? Hold Option while going to Apple > System Information and click the "Applications" listing on the left sidebar.
> Window manager placement hacks exist, but they are not first class.
Moom wants a chat. BetterTouchTool wonders if you've heard of it. Heck, DockDoor is free and excellent, too! They're only second-class in the sense they won't bring down your system when they act up.
> You can't change how to cycle and alternate windows. Exposé is flakey...
This is either a configuration error or not being familiar with how to use it. Exposé works better than any similar system on any other platform I've tried - what do you think is a better example of a systemwide Exposé alternative on another platform? Wait, I don't need one because Mission Control & Exposé are bulletproof.
> Finder the least flexible file explorer of any OS.
Tell me how you getting around your system on linux?
Search is and remains a first class citizen on Mac, and is for the most part on Linux. Spotlight still edges out linux choices. Windows has all the "power tools" to root through folders cause its search is such hot garbage.
> You'll never have first class tiling windows in Mac.
No you have ones that work.
Because the moment that you plug in mismatched or non standard monitors into a modern linux distro all bets are off. To make that work your going to end up with some pretty intense setup where your forced into window management rather than a traditional desktop.
Can you do it... You sure can... But I run an out of the box IDE on a basic Mac with a few tweaks for a reason: because playing games with my tools isnt getting work done. I have an arch, ubuntu and windows desktop and I have a Mac laptop. Is the linux box fun. It sure is. Does running it involve doing a lot of chores, you bet it does.
> Because the moment that you plug in mismatched or non standard monitors into a modern linux distro all bets are off.
I do this daily with different displays and have no problems whatsoever. I've probably used over 30 different displays over USB-C and HDMI on Linux and have had no problems.
They were all different sizes, DPIs, panel types, brands, etc.
Meanwhile, I can't even do fractional scaling when using macOS lol
> I run an out of the box IDE on a basic Mac with a few tweaks for a reason: because playing games with my tools isnt getting work done.
I hear this sentiment often, but I think it's missing the main reason why most people prefer Linux, whether that's for work or leisure.
What you call "playing games" to me is actually configuring our tools and environment to function optimally according to our needs and preferences. Yes, we spend an inordinate amount of time doing this, but it ultimately leads to a more comfortable and enjoyable experience, which is well worth it considering we spend most of our day using our machines.
This is not unlike a carpenter who has very specific preferences about their tools, and how they might spend a lot of time organizing and honing them. Sure they can use a pre-built workbench from IKEA, but chances are that they prefer using one they've customized or partly built themselves over the years.
Dealing with jank and the occasional frustration is unavoidable in Linux, but no operating system and machine are perfect. There are always trade-offs. We just prefer the freedom and flexibility over a corporation forcing us to use our computers the way they think we should.
We all have different priorities and preferences, and I'm not saying yours are in any way inferior, but I wanted to clarify the other perspective.
My parents can never understand windows because they keep changing the ux design and my parents can't tell the difference between Microsofts AI ad stuff and the real os. My parents will literally type "email" into the Google search bar and hope to find their email address.
Windows has failed them.
Linux Mint/Cinnamon is closer to windows 95 than windows 11 is. It's cleaner, simpler, better.
Mac osx is annoying compared to cinnamon. I hate the empty space around the dock. I hate how Mac windows don't always consume the same amount of space for some reason so I can see the different rounded corners on different "maximized" windows. I hate Mac osx's full screen mode forcing each fullscreen app onto a different desktop. I prefer cinnamons default window tiling/desktop switching/fullscreening keyboard shortcuts and animations.
Finder's default mode of unaligned randomly placed folder icons is so wild. .DS_Store is so annoying. The lack of a system tray meaning you have to use the dock in order to see if you have a DM in slack. Spotlight opening the "spotlight" app when I type the "spot" of Spotify. Idk I just truly prefer cinnamon.
There's things about Mac osx that are great. The central nature of /Applications and of ~/Library is great. Lots of things are great.
Mac hardware is by far best in class but Mac osx is honestly pretty ugly compared to Cinnamon imo. I'm not biased. I paid through the nose for my MacBook. But I like the esthetics of Cinnamon on my desktop much more than osx.
I just got a work Mac and I have spent around 20 years now on linux before it. I was making a list compared to KDE (not pros/cons just differences) It is still a work in progress since its only a couple of days since im using it.
1. No delete button. I know you can do Fn delete but It is more problematic. And I do use delete often.
2. System keeps important system stuff in Library directory in home. Do not do remove any directories.
4. Os x doesnt quit apps and then expects me to go through all apps in windows switcher.
5. The spaces dont wrap around.
6. Finder is always in your alt +tab? Causes issues with switching.
7. Corners are round. How to Disable it control the roundedness
8. Alt +Tab doesnt automatically restore minimized windows.
9. App store is quite weak compared to archlinux
10. There is no spaces pager (a small bar at top where I can immediately see which desktop im in)
11. It seems that I cannot have windows of same app in multiple spaces.
12. Same app has only one window. Apple mail for example. Cannot copy text from email to settings.
13. How to Disable HTML display in apple mail.
14. Kmail has much better interface for signing
Both for viewing rhe signed emails and for deciding which key to use
15. Opening a new windows from spotlight is not possible
16. Download multiple wallpapers at same time is not possible
17. All operations related to an app should be inside an app. Alt+w for tab and ctrl+tab for switching makes me move two fingers instead of one.
18. Spectacle is so much better than screen shot on MAC os
19. Ramdisk on mac os x
21. Threads view in emails isnot possible in apple mail
22. Application specific power optimization (for good battery life) on OS X
23. Better security and access on OSX for apps.
23. Switching between apps of same windows on OSX does not bring up a visual aid..
24. Long press leads to accents which is very cool but also I didn't use it.
25. Left-clicking in a window to raise it _sometimes_ performs actions in the app (e.g. clicking a button or scrolling the window) and _sometimes_ only raises the window. It seems to depend on the app.
26. No ability to use focus-follows-mouse.
27. Home/End keys send you to the top/bottom of the whole document instead of the start/end of a line. The latter is much more useful to me and I use it all the time. You can change this behavior with a terminal command followed by rebooting, but some programs still do whatever they want.
28. Automatic text replacements change the text you entered into the text that Apple thinks you mean. (Can also be disabled.)
29. Holding down an alphanumeric key brings up an accept/symbol selector, as on iPhone. This isn't compatible with many terminal applications like vim.
30. The dock has a tendency to move automatically to another display when there is a maximized window on that display. (I know how to move the dock by going bottom of the display and moving the mouse down, this isn't that.)
31. The camera notch can hide icons and you have no way to get to them without either connecting and external display or a workaround like https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden.
I feel your pain here; I remember my transition from Debian to MacOS. I’ve used DOS, Windows, Linux, and MacOS — each full-time for more than a decade. The switching pain is real, and some things still feel wrong to me after I got to love them on a prior OS.
E.g., in Windows apps, menu items are keyboard-addressable by default. This is brilliant for accessibility, and for accustomed power users. MacOS has no _by default_ equivalent.
E.g., managing virtual desktops in Linux are exactly as flexible and powerful as you want them to be. MacOS does it One Way (more or less), and you’d better like it.
I still love MacOS the most. Some of the things you list are real misses (#1). Some of them, I believe, are things you haven’t found yet (#11, #15, #16). Some are MacOS-specific metaphors which I’ve come to love compared with the alternatives (#4). Some I don’t understand but would be happy to discuss with you (#17).
> E.g., in Windows apps, menu items are keyboard-addressable by default. This is brilliant for accessibility, and for accustomed power users. MacOS has no _by default_ equivalent.
Cmd-Shift-? (really, Cmd-?)
You can begin using arrow keys from there, or start typing to search the menu items of the foreground app
You can also assign arbitrary hotkeys to any application's menu items in the OS system preferences
Yeah, I know about this; it’s not the same. In Windows apps following the standard (which all good ones do) _every menu item_ is keyboard addressable. Something several submenus in is trivially accessible by muscle memory: ALT-I-R-C to resize an image without constraints, e.g.
MacOS allows easy navigation of the menu, but does not guarantee that each item is hotkey-addressable.
4 - in macOS apps != windows (some apps don't respect this)
8 - minimize in macOS is more like "get this window out of the way without closing it", and it is related to 4)
15 - because of 4
23 - wat
Personally, once I got used to cmd+tab and cmd+` for window management, I can't go back, but it needs a different mental model than the one on Windows/Linux.
MacOS is just missing way to many core features. It feels more like a demo than actual software to be used day to day for a variety of computing work. I know the technical under the hood are all solid but the software the user interacts with is bad, all the default apps are barebones with bad defaults and no settings to fix it. My final point is: finder.
When I put non techy people on mac they end up having a good experience because they learn quickly there is no reason to touch anything except the web browser. I also want to highlight Macs are high end hardware in a premium package compared to Linux where people usually try it on a really old low/mid range device.
If they're like 95% of computer users, they use them to check their email, their FB/IG/etc and browse the web. A Chromebook would suit their needs, but in my experience, so would a modern Linux installation + a browser.
The biggest friction in my experience is UI differences, but that is solved by just mimicking Windows/macOS UI in KDE. Put buttons and components where they expect to find them and it seems to just work, in my experience.
You can also just tell them to get an M2 MacBook Air for $800. You'll have to do near zero troubleshooting, it'll last them the better part of a decade, they get unmatched battery life and hardware reliability, and if they do run into issues they'll have top-of-its-class support from Apple.
I know Linux guys don't mind putting up with the Linux experience but if your family is trusting you as "the techie," you'd be doing them a huge favor by not making them put up with that stuff.
> You can also just tell them to get an M2 MacBook Air for $800
Yes, you will find that most material problems can be solved by buying more stuff. If they wanted to buy a new laptop, they would have done that.
> You'll have to do near zero troubleshooting
That's the case now.
Meanwhile, with the Macs they use, I have to explain that there's a difference between Intel and ARM Macs, that no, their software won't work in MACOS_VERSION because Apple deprecated some API, and no, you can't upgrade to MACOS_VERSION+1 to use something that works, no the hardware they've been using for years won't work because the driver for it is no longer compatible with their Mac/macOS version, the simple thing they want to do actually requires $30 paid software to do, I can't help you when Apple sold you a small hard drive at a premium and macOS takes up half of it, etc.
> I know Linux guys don't mind putting up with the Linux experience but if your family is trusting you as "the techie," you'd be doing them a huge favor by not making them put up with that stuff
Yeah, having a fast computer that just works must be tough lol
> I have to explain that there's a difference between Intel and ARM Macs
No you don't? Why not tell your grandma about PowerPC and Motorola 68000 Macs too while you're giving her pointless information about CPUs Apple used in the past.
We're half a decade into the Apple Silicon transition. Intel Macs are not relevant to anyone except people who purchased a Mac within a couple years before the M1.
> no, their software won't work in MACOS_VERSION because Apple deprecated some API, and no, you can't upgrade to MACOS_VERSION+1 to use something that works, no the hardware they've been using for years won't work because the driver for it is no longer compatible with their Mac/macOS version, the simple thing they want to do actually requires $30 paid software to do, I can't help you when Apple sold you a small hard drive at a premium and macOS takes up half of it, etc.
I... can't even imagine what scenario you could possibly be running into any of this so I don't know how to argue against it.
I was already speaking on the scenario you brought up where this is someone that is gonna be living 95% in their browser. I don't know what weird proprietary software non-techie users are needing that's apparently not compatible with new Macs. Anything beyond web browsing - e.g. word processing, light photo editing, dealing with PDFs, etc - can be done with very high-quality, free software baked right into macOS.
You describe using a Mac like the black and white "before" footage from an infomercial showing that previously the only way to cut a tomato is smushing it with the side of a dull knife. If a Mac is too difficult for someone, Linux is not the solution.
> No you don't? Why not tell your grandma about PowerPC and Motorola 68000 Macs too while you're giving her pointless information about CPUs Apple used in the past.
Yes, I do, when Apple advertises new features in macOS and for whatever reason, they just don't work on their Macs. Why? Because some of their machines are Intel-based and Apple chose not to implement certain features they expect on their Intel hardware.
Similarly, I have to do the same for software. While fat binaries are common, sometimes they end up with ARM binaries that just won't work. Similarly, the ability to run their iOS apps doesn't exist on Intel Macs and they don't know why.
> I... can't even imagine what scenario you could possibly be running into any of this so I don't know how to argue against it.
My family member spent thousands of dollars on software licenses for their business. For years, they could use that software on their Macs, until they couldn't. I'm talking about things like Office and tax software.
Similarly, try using an old macOS version that older Macs get stuck on. You eventually cannot even get a working safe browser anywhere, because the APIs Firefox and Chrome depend on change between macOS versions due to API churn, eventually deprecating old macOS versions altogether when it comes to new releases. Eventually, the entire Mac app ecosystem does this and the only solution is to either upgrade your macOS version through hacks or buy a new Mac with an updated macOS version and then experience that again in a few years.
Then there are driver issues. I have family members that have perfectly good music production hardware that drivers no longer work for. For some of it, it looks like 3rd party companies developed paid drivers for new macOS versions. Same thing with touch screens, had to go down the paid driver route for those, too. That's just not a problem on Linux.
> You describe using a Mac like the black and white "before" footage from an infomercial showing that previously the only way to cut a tomato is smushing it with the side of a dull knife
I mean, that's one way to interpret being honest about my experience as tech support for my family's Macs and other computers over the years. The Intel -> Arm transition + Apple's propensity for API and OS churn affects their users who aren't buying new hardware every time a new version comes out.
> If a Mac is too difficult for someone, Linux is not the solution.
I'd stand by the statement that if a Chromebook would suit a user's needs, so would Linux. Both require a curated experience and there should be no expectation of users setting it up themselves. You can make computers running Linux into solid email/Facebook/Zoom/office/web/etc machines a la ChromeOS, and in my experience, that keeps people happy.
Obviously, Linux is not a universal solution, Macs or other software/hardware might be the right solution. I wouldn't subject musicians in my family to Linux, but it has kept my older family members online and safe.
I'm a huge Linux fan but "it just works" is not a phrase I'd use in the same paragraph as Linux. Try explaining to your grandma that she needs to open a terminal and run "sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade"
Why would grandma do that when there's been an update manager service GUI for two decades?
Either set it to do upgrades in the background automatically or tell her to hit "Install updates" when she sees a notification about it. Ideally you'd click the checkmark that enables the former.
The great thing about Debian and Ubuntu LTS releases is that they're rock solid and nothing changes for like a decade or however long they're kept on life support.
It seems that you haven't used it in a long time then. You don't need to go the terminal to update the system. Mostly you get a message that there are updates for the system. You click it, click update all and your done.
Yeah, and my fisher price car is a lot easier for my 3 year old to drive than my car.
Sometimes powerful tools need sophisticated users that have time to invest in learning to use the tool. "Inferior" might depend on who is trying to accomplish what, but it's hard to argue that if you're trying to do or build the most sophisticated and cutting edge things that computers are capable of doing, you probably don't want to be using macOS or window.
That doesn't mean that it doesn't work marvelously when you have 0 time to invest in learning to use your computer, and all you want is to access web applications and manage a few files on a screen bigger than your smartphone and with a physical keyboard.
People's habits have nothing to do with "superior" or "inferior" qualities of a certain OS. No matter how good or bad, the habits have a strong resistance force against any change. That's not necessarily bad, but let's not make it part of judging OSes qualities.
I do all my software development in remote clusters/supercomputers. I’d consider myself a power user. My laptop is for running a terminal, vscode, a browser and the various applications my company requires, e.g. Teams, Slack. So I want reliability, low configuration and maintenance overhead on my part and good battery life. Linux can’t compete on these fronts.
All those pros you list have nothing to do with the desktop environment. Maybe low configuration but you can have that on Linux too.
I totally agree that the hardware and the underlying Unix is decent. Audio on Mac is also way less of a hassle. I am not saying that a power user wouldn't have good reason to chose a Mac, just that the desktop is for me the weakest part of it compared to Linux.
It’s more subjective of a thing than many would like to admit. As someone who’s been working as a dev for a decade and writing code outside of work for twice that, one of the things keeping me away from Linux is that there simply isn’t a true Mac analogue DE.
It's funny how polarizing this is. Seemingly based on whatever system you grew up on, or are most accustomed to.
I find Mac's window management to be something of a joke, and can't imagine why anyone would want to replicate it. I do see the value of the global menu but everything else feels wholly unintuitive to me.
I can't stand that cmd+tab takes you to the last app, not the last window, and raises all that apps other windows as well. I literally never want that.
The way Mac window management works, ironically, is that you manage windows as little as possible. You don't even go as far as to maximize or tile most of them. Instead, windows are sized to fit their content and sit where they may, overlapping each other and allowing the most relevant portions of each to peek through, like the digital analogue of a desk with a pile of odd-sized papers. Windows are foregrounded by either clicking a bit that's peeking out or triggering Exposé and choosing a thumbnail.
It's a very different mindset than that of a Windows-like desktop or tiling window manager.
Desktop Macs do have fans so they're not completely silent, but if you were under the impression there aren't any then that reflects well on how good their tuning is. AFAIK the MacBook Air is the only passively cooled Mac.
I know that they have fans but I really can't hear them. Maaaybe when gaming but I would to have to really concentrate on that. And I am super sensitive to noise.
It is so sad that apparently no one else bothers to tune their fans properly. It is such a killer feature for me.
> The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world
I have to use Mac, Linux, and Windows desktops in my work.
They all have their pros and cons, but I can’t say I’d ever argue that the Mac desktop experience is vastly inferior to the Linux desktop experience.
Edit: Getting a lot of downvotes but most of the comments are about someone’s highly customized Linux desktop compared to completely vanilla Mac desktop. I’m referring to apples to apples comparison where they’re either some standard out of the box version or when customized with available tools and mods. Comparing your highly customized Linux desktop to a completely uncustomized Mac setup with no attempt at other tools or utilities isn’t an interesting comparison because it’s not apples to apples, it’s just a statement about your current preference.
On a Mac, you can switch between apps with Command-Tab or windows of the same app with Command-` but there's no way to cycle between all windows or bounce between to two most recently used windows.
Maybe this used to make sense when apps were single purpose but I do basically everything in a web browser or a terminal so not being able to bounce between the previously selected window(of whatever kind), as I can with Alt-Tab on linux or windows, is frustrating.
Also Command-` switches to the next window, not the previous one like I would expect.
MacOS removed subpixel antialiasing, honestly for understandable reasons, making rendering on low-ppi displays blurry, but high-ppi displays are still super expensive. I got a 32" 4k monitor(~140ppi) at Costco for $250. A >200ppi display of the same size costs 20x that amount.
For web apps, spinning them into “installed” apps (doable in both Chrome and Safari now) is the move. This unclogs your tab bar, gets rid of the pointless persistent browser chrome, and gives you the benefit of OS task management capabilities.
You can add Shift to both Command-Tab and Command-` to move in the reverse direction.
Also I find the default Command-` to be unintuitive, especially on non-US keyboards (` is next to left Shift for me). I remapped Command-` to Option-Tab so you only have to move your thumb.
The solution is subpar, even if it's nice to have one. What windows and linux have is hinting for text and good antialiasing on vector elements. They map these those the actual hardware pixels so you won't have wobbly lines.
These don't matter as much when you have high PPI. But they're a lifeline on low PPI displays (and there are a lot of those).
I completely agree, having gone through that frustration myself a couple years ago, but it at least makes the experience sort of good enough for my backend swe usage instead of making my eyes hurt. It’s still much better on other oses on the same display, absolutely.
Then you are deliberately handicapping yourself, this isn't something you can blame on the OS. It's like complaining that a car has bad fuel economy because you always stay in first gear.
As for the displays, you are comparing apples to oranges. You can get a high DPI monitor which is smaller than 32 inches for cheap. Which is plenty of screen for the distances where DPI differences are important.
My experience is just the opposite. I have never encountered a cloud app which is anywhere near the best paid apps in quality. What cloud app is better at photo editing than Affinity or Photoshop? What cloud calendar is better than BusyCal? What cloud spreadsheet is better than Excel? IDE and text editor? Etc.
If you think that the purpose of OS X or Apple devices is to live in the web browser or live in the terminal, then you've been very misinformed. It's on the level of buying a motorcycle and expecting it to have a roof. And then complaining about the manufacturer. Apple stuff has worked like this for decades.
Man just give me a way to switch between only the two most recent windows using a keyboard shortcut (without requiring some janky 3rd party program). Windows-style alt-tab. It's not a big ask and would make the macOS experience go from "barely usable" to "perfectly fine."
Not if the windows are both from the same program. Then it's a different keybind, CMD-~ which doesn't have the same priority order style as CMD-Tab. I get caught up on this constantly, to the point where I decided to stop using one Chrome window under my work profile, and one under my personal profile, just so I can have my personal browser under a different program so CMD-Tab works better.
That switches between apps, not windows. Open two browser windows and two terminals. Try to switch between one terminal and one browser without bringing all the other windows to the fore. You can't do it.
Windows (and most Unix WMs, I don't know where it actually originated) style alt-tab maintains a stack of recent windows. So you can hit alt-tab repeatedly to swap between the two most recent, or hit alt-tab-tab-tab to bring up only the 4th most recent window, etc.
Linux Mint with Cinnamon is bliss. Or well anything else, you are absolutely spoiled for choice with Desktop Environments in Linux. There is the perfect one for everyone. At least if you use X11, wayland is still a turd.
I found the Mac Desktop absolutely unusable for any development work as it comes out of the box. You need a metric ton of third-party extensions for simple stuff like proper alt-tab support or custom shortcuts. An configuration is supper limited.
And it will get so much worse with the whole glasses ui thing.
This is one of my go-tos when I need a VM, so I’m familiar.
> I found the Mac Desktop absolutely unusable for any development work as it comes out of the box.
But why are we comparing vanilla macOS to an extreme customized Linux setup as if they’re the same thing? Why one set of rules for one platform but those criteria are suspended for Linux, where we get to assume some specific set of perfectly configured everything?
This is the hyperbole that I can’t really take seriously. Calling it “absolutely unusable” just isn’t something I can take seriously.
I understand that some people like to customize their environments to the Nth degree and can’t live without their personal set of customizations, but that’s personal preferences. Calling other platforms “absolutely unusable” or “vastly inferior” is just an exaggeration when millions of devs use them just fine.
> But why are we comparing vanilla macOS to an extreme customized Linux setup as if they’re the same thing?
Your assumption that these Linux setups are "extremely customized" is wrong. Personally, I hate configuring or customizing much at all. The appeal of Linux is that there are distros that come configured out-of-the-box pretty much as I like it, whereas MacOS and especially Windows requires configuration and constant upkeep and maintenance. (MacOS doesn't even come with a decent terminal, for starters.)
For me, my main problem with MacOS is that it's full of looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong animations that you can not disable or remove. Disabling animations (or setting them to be <10ms long) is one of the few configurations I like to do. But this is not even an option on Apple's operating systems. It's like running through molasses in a dream-- it's so damnedly and artificially slow.
Because there is no option to disable all animations. Despite the name, that doesn't disable all animations. (In fact, I couldn't even find an animation that does remove.)
One can not disable the animations on MacOS. I would very much like to be wrong. Please tell me I am wrong and how to disable animations, especially when swapping between desktops.
> disable animations, especially when swapping between desktops
When I first started using a mac for dev at my current job, I tried their virtual desktops implementation as a workaround for macOS's lack of alt-tab support. That desktop switching animation is so long it's honestly really funny, I just sat there for a minute switching around and laughing my ass off in disbelief at how slow it is. Unfortunately it does also make the feature completely unusable, so we're just stuck with one desktop and a gimped alt-tab. Just an absolute usability train wreck going on over at Apple.
I'm surprised and happy a third party solution exists for this. It's a shame a Mac requires so much third-party software to get it to a usable state. But it's a good thing supply-chain attacks are a long solved problem, and Macs can not get malware.
(For posterity: I am being sarcastic, to highlight how Apple's UX stance increases users exposure to supply chain attacks. "Macs can not get malware" is a long-standing myth.)
> But why are we comparing vanilla macOS to an extreme customized Linux setup as if they’re the same thing? Why one set of rules for one platform but those criteria are suspended for Linux, where we get to assume some specific set of perfectly configured everything?
My Linux Mint installation is actually barely customized. It absolutely works out of the box. I disabled a few animations and selected a different theme and added like three extra shortcuts but that is it. Nothing that would take more than ten minutes.
I was comparing the vanilla experience.
And yes, I should have specified that I am talking about my needs. I totally believe that the Mac Desktop might be better for the average user but that is no me.
Other OS’s handling of “alt-tab” does not make it de facto “proper”.
You are trying to use macOS like your other favorite OS(s). This is not how macOS has ever worked, and the macOS approach is more than fine for millions of people.
There are a dozen or more options for tiling systems and keyboard-driven computing on macOS. Personally, one of the reasons I use macOS over Linux is because I find it easier to create custom keyboard commands and shortcuts. It’s all doable on Linux, sure, but on macOS there are several apps that make it easy.
If you haven't used something like i3/sway/awesomewm/hyprland on the linux side you won't know what you're missing.
While there are several apps to create custom keyboard commands, only yabai+skhd come close to what's available on linux, and it's not even that close tbh.
> I’m referring to apples to apples comparison where they’re either some standard out of the box version or when customized with available tools and mods. Comparing your highly customized Linux desktop to a completely uncustomized Mac setup with no attempt at other tools or utilities isn’t an interesting comparison because it’s not apples to apples, it’s just a statement about your current preference.
Perhaps you missed the parent's "(for power users)"?
So here's an apples-to-apples comparison: customizing Mac desktop for one's preferences compared to Linux.
I've been on Mac for 10 years because of Work. Before that I was on Linux, using the AwesomeWM tiling window manager.
I dearly miss AwesomeWM. I've tried most 3rd-party window managers for Mac, and nothing comes close to the snappiness and functionality of Linux's tiling managers like AwesomeWM. Nowadays I just use window-movers like Rectangle [1], and I feel handicapped.
The simple fact of the matter is that Mac does not allow the level of customization that Linux inherently does. MacOS' UI hooks are through the Accessibility framework, and in my user experience, it's just a slower, jankier emulation of what a more deeply integrated WM can do. As a specific example, the author of DisplayMaid [2] has complained elsewhere on HN that macOS does not provide reliable identifiers for the displays, so they had to implement their own heuristics. Side-note: for a system so inherently dockable as macbooks, it's a tragedy that I have to rely on a 3rd-party app to re-position my windows for one of my 2 regular work setups.
I'm sure Apple could implement the hooks for better WM customization, they've certainly done their few updates with Spaces and their own poor-man's tiling, but the years with no update to integration demonstrate that they consider the Accessibility hooks to be Good Enough.
The one I have always missed is proper focus-follows-mouse support. The mac desktop always feels really clunky without that when working with multiple windows.
Proper focus-follows-mouse does not autoraise the window when it gives it focus. I see that that app does offer "don't raise the window" (which I think is an improvement from last time I was researching this some years back), but only under an "experimental feature" flag that relies on undocumented private macos APIs that might go away in any future macos version...
Personally, most of my problems with MacOS (and Apple's operating systems) would be fixed if it were faster. The OS is full of very lengthy animations that aren't necessary, such as when switching between desktops.
This sounds like the so-called "modern standby" (S0 vs S3, if I remember correctly). I bought a thinkpad a while back with "modern standby" and the thing wouldn't last the night suspended, and would often wake me up with its fans howling and end up being very, very hot while suspended. I disabled "modern standby" in the BIOS and it was back to sleeping for weeks without losing charge. I have no idea if that's what's going on with Framework laptops, but "modern standby" is one of the dumbest changes I've ever seen in PC hardware. To my understanding it's to make laptops behave more like phones, but I've never experienced any meaningful difference in resume behavior between S0 and S3 suspend.
The standby issues with Framework laptops (at least the early ones, I don’t know about recent developments) was a well known issue.
I recommended Framework to someone looking for a laptop a while ago and they were bit by the standby battery drain issue. I felt bad having recommended it to them because I assumed such a basic issue would have been addressed in a laptop that was so highly regarded.
Some of the issues have been addressed. For example, iirc, there was a bug where pulling out the power plug while the lid was closed would trigger the device to wake up.
Some other issues remain. Largest I am aware of is independent from the hardware, but an issue with suspend-to-disk & kernel lockdown, which prevents deep sleep.
The idea behind modern stanby is a good one, when it is implemented correctly (like how Macbooks do it). Unfortunately most PCs have a terrible implementation and instead get hot and drain the battery overnight.
I had* an 11th Gen Intel NUC that couldn’t sleep at all for something like a year due to EFI bugs… They finally did eventually fix the regression but really, it’s just incredible - if one company should be able to do EFI right it’s Intel!
I’m not sure if this was related to “modern standby” (it was around that time if I recall) but that hasn’t really helped anything. This is a desktop so why they insist on deprecating real standby for everything is beyond me…
* I actually still have it but it became my home server, so now doesn’t ever need to standby, luckily.
Honest question, how is it possible that Macs are so much better in terms of hardware? Context: I use a MacBook at work and a Lenovo with Linux at home and now I might need to change my personal laptop, but I struggle to find (hardware) reasons why not to buy a MacBook, a MacBook Air is actually cheaper than another laptops with similar specs. There's still the ideology of repairability and openness which still plays a big role for me, but from a hardware perspective I see a clear winner. How is it possible that no other manufacturer can come close to the apple offering? There are big players (Lenovo, Dell, HP etc...) that I would have thought they would have the capabilities for producing similar products, why do they lag so far behind?
I think one factor is that other companies (rightfully or not) think they have to offer a range of products that uses lots of different hardware.
Looking for a laptop at dell.com, for example, they seem to offer a choice of 7 different CPUs in 5 product lines (Latitude, Inspiron, Dell Pro, Dell Plus, Dell Pro Plus) with at least 3 different graphics cards (Intel Iris Xe, Intel Arc, and HawkPoint - UMA. I also spot a generic “Intel” that may indicate a fourth one)
Their desktops use different hardware, again, with, for example, Intel® UHD Graphics or Nvidia cards.
To me, that suggests they internally somewhat act as multiple smaller companies with smaller budgets to tune products.
Also, if they ask one of their suppliers about a performance issue, chances are the answer is “get out newest product”, not “let’s help you fix that”.
Apple doesn’t have that problem anymore for most of their hardware.
I HATE this. I regularly look at really high end products I'll never buy for the fun of it in a "What's the best X that money can buy?" sort of way. And it took me half an hour to find what's the "best" Lenovo laptop money-no-object . Not even ChatGPT could figure it out easily (as far as I can tell it's the P16s). Apple? Well they sell 2 laptops: the MacBook Air and Pro. Select the Pro, spec it out to the max, done. Even the 13/16-inch choice is part of the spec process, and not a separate product.
PC manufacturers, please, for the love of all that is holy, make FIVE laptops: the thin, the tablet-laptop, the "pro", the gaming (the "pro" with RGB) and the workstation (as in Xeon/Quadro). Keep the name you give each of them year-after-year-after-year. And just offer me a lot of CONFIGURATION options to each of these, not a lot of different products.
Dell seams quite reasonable by comparison with Lenovo.
Huge barrier of entry. It requires a lot of integration and investment. Getting another supplier to move usually involves handing over big bills. Even then it is not guaranteed that the change is (fast) enough. I see it all the time, nobody gets their ass up unless it’s on fire. Still some companies will claim „at least it’s warm now“. „This is fine“-meme is real. Resist change at all costs.
I’ve seen companies losing their by far biggest customer because they refuse to hire real engineers instead of juniors to fix their software. The customer tried YEARS of complaining before.
Another customer: different suppliers use different barcode patterns for deliveries, some including nasty stuff like NULL as separators (but only sometimes, can be space, tab, whatever) or non-unique IDs. They rather spent the effort to fix everything else with workarounds than change the contract and demand proper barcodes/delivery data.
They’re about 1-1.5 generations ahead of AMDs mobile offering, and OEMs have sweetheart deals with Intel, which is more like 4-5 generations behind.
So flagship business laptops (which are the only comparable laptops in terms of build quality to Macbooks) are hamstrung, and everything else is built like a matchbox even with AMD cpus.
It's everything else where MacBooks excel too. The build quality is insane, I've never seen a laptop with as little flex as a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. The keyboards are now finally great, and the display is amazing as well. Trackpad is best in class too.
Another thing: the displays are glossy, but still not very reflective. The Windows laptops glossy displays are so much more reflective, they are unusable outside. Also something worth mentioning, the MacBook displays get really bright. A high-end OLED display hardly goes above 400 nits. A MacBook Pro can go to 600 nits and outside it goes to 1600 nits. This is the difference between being able to use a laptop outside, and not.
Durability: if you're not doing anything crazy the MacBook will look brand new even after years of usage. Notable exception is the cheap plastic key caps which degrade very quickly, a bummer.
So the MacBooks beat the competition easily from a hardware quality perspective, and we haven't even talked about the elephant in the room yet: CPU performance, battery life and fan noise, obviously Apple is even further ahead in this area.
And then price, as strange as it sounds, both the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are cheaper than the competition.
Disclaimer: I don't own a MacBook personally because I think macOS is not great, but that's probably the only reason why I'm not buying a MacBook. I would happily pay same the price of a MacBook Pro for a similar Windows laptop if it existed. It does not. There are always compromises.
That’s a factor, but I’d still rather have an M1 MacBook Air than any other laptop with a comparable form factor. Surely AMD and Intel can offer something that’s at least able to compete with an M1 in terms of performance per Watt. But Apple’s competitors are just nowhere near offering a comparable product.
no, and even if they did, the way they operate is “thermal and power headroom is free performance gains!” - which is a sucky philosophy with laptops, as they get hot and lose battery much quicker than they need to by constantly boosting.
>how is it possible that Macs are so much better in terms of hardware?
Mac are premium hardware, and they earn higher margin. Apple use that to reinvest into their own hardware. And has been doing so for 30+ years.
Better quality PC generally dont sell as well. They have less incentive to do so. The whole PC business is also cut throat, in the old days you could have most of the margin on PC going to Intel. While others are fighting for what is left.
Recent example speakers. PC Laptop have had appalling speakers for years if not decades. It wasn't until Youtuber start pointing out some of these flaws which became competitive advantage for certain brands did PC marker start paying attention and R&D to it.
Is your theory that PC's bad reputation is from people only having experience with cheap ones? If so I'm not sure if I buy it.
At my work, all non-developers are given Microsoft Surfaces. They're not cheap machines by any means, but they have nothing but problems with them. Overheating, battery drain, lag, full-on lockups, requiring regular daily reboots, needing replacement after a year, etc.
I'm guessing they just give everyone PCs because it's what most people are familiar with, but I have to assume they're spending more on those units than a base-spec MacBook Air that would get way better mileage and cause less tickets for IT.
The article is pretty light on details. Whether the Framework is worth it to you really depends on your use case. I never leave a laptop in my bag for three weeks, and if I do I have the foresight to actually shut it down rather than sleep it. So the battery drain while sleeping is less of a problem for me.
My Framework 13 has the Ryzen 5 AI 340 Chip, and I get 5-6 hours of work on a charge. The Macbooks definitely beat this, and their hardware has other benefits (silent if you opt for the Air, bigger/better trackpad, etc) but for me, being able to run Linux is worth the trade-off by far.
I like that on Linux (GNOME) I have all the functionality I need out of the box without having to install a paid app for window snapping (I heard they fixed this recently?) or to make my mouse buttons work. I also find that since I work with containers a lot, developing on Linux removes a lot of friction. I can run docker/containerd natively without having to babysit a VM that likes to eat all my RAM or hang randomly (no docker/rancher desktop layer). Even just having the same coreutils and package managers as I do inside the containers really simplifies things. Our MacOS devs are always struggling with homebrew putting shared libraries weird places that can't be found by the python bindings and this "just works" on Linux.
My Framework is a personal device, not for work. I might use it once a day or less for a couple hours or less. It was 100% charged this past Saturday night when I picked it up off the charger. I used it for an hour or two looking for doing some planning for Halloween. Nothing serious, just browsing with Firefox. I shut the lid and placed it on the coffee table. I picked it up Sunday night to find the battery had depleted to below 20% and Windows was in Power Save mode.
This happens every time. I get one and half evenings of light usage out of it before having to charge it.
You can change the action for "shutting lid" in windows settings. Mapping it to hibernate can help. You might have to enable hibernation first if you haven't already.
Windows has automatic Modern Standby to Hibernate support (by default after 5% battery drain in standby). If it is not entering Hibernate, there may be an application keeping the system awake.
This works great for me on my Lenovo, I don't even have to close the lid, it just works. I think I configured it to be a little more aggressive about going to sleep when on battery than the default, but the settings work.
this sounds like a dumb workaround for fundamental issues that should ideally be addressed by beating app, driver, and hardware developers into submission in a way that would probably fall afoul of antitrust law
5-6 hours? In 2025? That's... really bad. My 5 year old Macbook Pro lowest-spec M1 gets at least 10-12 hours of work on a charge and lasts for weeks in sleep mode.
I love my Framework but the battery life is indeed horrendous no matter how you slice it. Combine it with the sleep drain and if I use it for a bit then close it overnight without shutting it down it's probably dead by the morning.
To me it appears that the screen is a huge power hog - at least in the 16.
My idle power consumption at 0% display brightness is around 7.5W, but I've seen people get to as low as 6.5W. Not great, not terrible. With the display at 50% it jumps to the teens(13-17W).
Let's me try to give you the solutions to your problems using Mac.
1. Homebrew: I use Nix package manager (with home manager, though you don't need to) and get rid of homebrew completely.
2. Docker: I assume you referred to Desktop version. You can just just Colima and the Docker/Compose CLI. You will get rid of all the bloats coming with Desktop. Bonus: see #1 for installing Colima and Docker CLI.
The parent's complaint about non-native docker is not solved by colima. It's not bloat from the desktop app it's the fact that you have to run a VM to run any sort of container runtime on a mac.
I really, really want an ARM laptop with great Linux support. It's very difficult to justify buying an non-M series laptop today, when the M series laptops outperform x86 laptops in battery life by such a wide margin. I'm sure some of that is because Apple controls their entire hardware and software stack and can optimize macOS for battery life, but it's hard not to believe that the processor architecture (i.e. x86) is mostly to blame for the terrible battery life of most laptops.
I think it's still up in the air whether a decent non-Apple laptop/desktop class ARM chip will come to market before Intel and/or AMD narrow the efficiency gap enough that the hassle won't be worth it.
Who would make it? Do the likes of Broadcom have the vision & ambition to push into that class? I could see it happening if AMD decided Arm was the way to progress, but that would be bold too. (AMD does already have an architecture licence though I believe.)
The M Series doesn't get battery life rep due to it being arm its purely due to Apple optimizing for battery life and partly marketing it a ton. You can get x86 chips that can do 24HR playing a video which is 5 hours more than the M2/M3 laptops and keep in mind thats running bloated ass windows which probably uses 2-3x the system resources of macOS. I'm pretty sure the snapdragon chips out preform Apple silicon at almost every metric.
I have extremely low trust in the methodology of that website. Just seeing the multi threaded benchmarks alone is enough to know they've cooked most of those tests on the snapdragon Elite machines. The Snapdragon chips came out before the M4 to compete vs the M3 which they won in almost every metric except single core. Since the X2 is soon to be released they appear very likely do that again.
The Arm architecture isn't why Apple Silicon is so good at this. Apple's silicon engineers have been very good at designing a system of power states that is extremely efficient, and have tight coupling with the OS. Linux on a framework laptop gives you none of this co-design.
Exactly - Apple hardware is designed for its software, and vice versa. They get battery gains across the stack.
I remember when the M1 Macs first came out, an Apple engineer revealed they'd optimized the hardware so one specific low-level operation macOS does all the time was 5x faster than on Intel [0].
It’s not even a particularly obscure low-level operation: atomic add. Every computer in the world performs that exact instruction a huge number of times running normal, non-Apple software.
The key insight is the kind of “vertical integration” providing the kind of feedback loop to spot the opportunity.
Funny side story is years ago when AMD was developing the Opteron A series I commented somewhere that AMD is making a terrible blunder and is going after the wrong market. They needed to start the other way around, and build a kick ass Arm + GPU SoC that was more akin to a PC in terms of performance and not a throw away raspberry pi SoC. Bigger caches, wider memory bus, PCIe e.g. for NVMe, powerful GPU. Essentially something general purpose that could power a mid range laptop/work PC/Desktop/Embedded but designed to be cost effective and crazy power efficient. "There is totally a market for it." I said.
People responded along the lines of "And what is going to run on that?" And they were right. At the time there would have been no killer app, not even Linux could propel it IMO. Of course Apple has the ability to steer their entire ship just like they steered from PowerPC to x86-64. So kudos to them for proving I was right ;-)
For that, you'd actually need a high performance ARM core on one side (and frankly, it's just Apple at that point, they needed well over a decade to get there), and you need some way to make legacy x86/x86_64 applications to run smoothly to get over the chicken-egg effect, and you need some way for all the legacy hardware devices that people plug in into their computers.
Apple could do it not just because of their experience from the iOS device family and the IP they acquired for it, but because they didn't need to take care that much about the issues in the Windows ecosystem. Apple has long since discouraged third party hardware that can't be driven with libusb from userspace as kexts have been deprecated, Apple has been pretty ruthless in forcing developers to keep their software compileable, and their ARM Architecture License allowed them to do tweaks and extensions to make performant emulation of x86 code possible.
The problem is, without the backwards compatibility and a high-performance core design, the customer base is really, really small - and that's the reason (in addition to Qualcomm having had an exclusivity agreement with MS, but only putting out crap designs) why every attempt of pushing a non-x86 Windows machine so far just completely and utterly failed.
The lower/ultra-low end market is a different thing - just look at the absurdly massive popularity of Raspberry Pi and their clones - but as said these are toys, not capable of being an actually usable general (as in: general population) computing device.
This isn't just a question of direct power management features or use of custom silicon, but there has been curious noise for years out of Apple over a major cause: memory management.
In modern systems memory becomes a major source of power consumption, so reducing how much if it you need to keep active results in big gains, on top of all the other benefits of doing this. This is partly used as the reasoning to explain why Swift has evolved in the direction it has, but also various apps that suspend/resume their state at a higher level than simply relying on the OS to do it.
It would take a gargantuan effort, which would likely annoy almost everyone, to get a desktop Linux distro to do this.
I think Apple's success at using power management data from their mobile products to make computer hardware with really good power management is highlighting just how bad computer power management has been.
When you close the lid on a laptop, there are a lot of layers that all have to do the right thing. How is Windows configured? How do the drivers installed on that laptop handle the Windows state transitions? How do all the pieces of hardware on that laptop (CPU, etc.) work together to implement the various states?
I think it is possible for a computer manufacturer like Framework to work with operating system vendors like Microsoft and Canonical, and hardware vendors like Intel and AMD to improve how power management is implemented in their hardware.
There is always some level of "friction" involved when you are trying to integrate across different vendors. Some of the best Windows hardware I've used was made by Microsoft. The Surface line, at least in my experience, is really good.
It will require an investment of course, but I think it is possible.
I want to love framework, and I really do want to get behind their mission, but a few things stand out.
First and this is the elephant in the room, it's probably better for the environment to buy a refurbished think pad. The most environmentally friendly product is one that gets reused instead of going to a landfill.
The 13-in framework only offers one SSD slot, The expansion Bay offers a nice storage option but these are a bit overpriced and then you're down to three ports. The design itself feels really prone to failure, if you're popping in and out expansion cards all the time eventually the ports are going to fail which seems like a really weird design choice. It probably would have been smarter to do something that requires actually screwing in components.
To get comparable specs, you seriously need to spend about 50% more on average, and this is just me comparing ThinkPads to Frameworks. If I wanted to look at laptops on sale you can easily find framework specs at half price.
Finally the support issues don't really inspire confidence, if my Lenovo laptop has issues I can walk into a variety of authorized repair centers and just let them sort it out. Framework simply doesn't have this, I don't have the appetite to pay a premium price and not have this as an option.
Extended warranty options are iffy. You have to first pay more for the prebuilt laptop, and then at the performance tier ( Amd 350) you have to drop $1,690 to get a 3 year warranty. It's out of stock anyway.
The Lenovo E14 Gen 7 with a Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 255H Processor is about 1030$ direct from Lenovo with a 3 year warranty (2 years is available, and is my risk tolerance sweet spot, so I can save 60$ there).
The only reason I'm looking at the E14 is I REALLY want two SSD drives. If I'm ok with just one I can buy a refurbished P14 for around 780$.
I think the core issue is Framework is still a boutique brand, if they ever reach the size of a major OEM then they're pricing will be more competitive.
> if you're popping in and out expansion cards all the time eventually the ports are going to fail
If you're plugging and unplugging USB-C cables all the time, eventually the ports are going to fail, but we generally consider plugging things into USB-C acceptable.
The Framework expansion modules are just USB-C ports, but they're not subject to much twisting or bending when using the modules so they should last longer.
Even if the internal USB-C ports which the expansion cards plug into fail, which to me also seems like a long time away, the mainboard is designed to be replaceable so I think you'd be in a better position than with another laptop with a failed power plug.
There are also clips that hold the expansion cards in place. My HDMI one started coming out when I unplug the cable even from really early on, even without pressing the button which should be required to remove the card. That is another way they could fail - in getting loose enough that they weren't securely held in place to be useable. The internal USB-C port would still apply some force in holding them in place though. In my case, this is not related to the socket, but to the card. I'll need to open it up and take a closer look, but hopefully they're designed so the cards fail long before whatever is in the chassis which holds them in. Plastic on the cards vs metal on the chassis would seem robust to me. Otherwise, if the mechanism fails on the chassis side, that would be a much bigger replacement.
Disclosure: I was a big supporter of Framework and bought an early 13 inch (11th gen Intel). I would no longer recommend them due to the mounting list of problems I've had, and despite their responses always being friendly and prompt, they are unable to send any replacement parts, because I've moved to a non-supported country and there is no way they can send anything to the maritime capital of the world. I try to be neutral in my comments, but sarcasm creeps into my disclosures.
Your last paragraph is exactly why I'm avoiding the brand.
It's a premium product with subpar service.
You have Framework the ideal. Right to repair , replaceable parts, ownership rights.
Vs
Framework the company, weird QC issues, parts out of stock, iffy supply. Prices so high you might as well just buy a better laptop whenever you'd swap the main board out.
I think I'm just going with a Thinkpad for my next computer. I also prefer the all black look.
> there is no way they can send anything to the maritime capital of the world
That just blows my mind. Not shipping to one of the richest and tech savvy countries in the world which happens to be less than 5 hours away from Framework's assembly base Taiwan.
> if you're popping in and out expansion cards all the time eventually the ports are going to fail which seems like a really weird design choice
Anecdotally, I've developed a bad habit of fidgeting with my expansion cards by popping them in and out. I've probably put them through several hundred cycles like that and they still work fine - I think the fact that the cards are "rail-roaded" into the slots helps a lot, since it makes it very difficult to apply pressure at an angle to the internal USB-C port.
I spent a ton of time researching this. I wasn’t able to find any thinkpads that are relatively lightweight, have a hi res screen, and new CPUs for even close to the price of the framework 13 which can be purchased with a reasonable spec for less than $1100.
It’s entirely possible that I missed one. But honestly that also makes me root more for framework - just sell me one high quality product instead of offering 40 models, some of which are shit, half of which are so niche they don’t even get a proper review anywhere.
Nothing is stopping you from buying a used Framework. Admittedly, the market is much smaller than for refurbished Thinkpads, but it's smaller on both sides (demand and supply), I found several both on Frameworks own community marketplace and on ebay. And considering the fact that after you buy the first one, you will re-use the chassis and other, non-mainboard components across at least a few upgrades, I actually still think that a framework is the correct "environmental" decision. Plus, if I were to buy a used/refurbed Framework, I would be _supremely_ confident that if some sub-component of it came broken (or broke shortly after purchase), that I would be able to get the laptop as a whole up and running and not need to ewaste the whole thing.
Price-to-performance. This is true....the first time you buy the laptop. On subsquent upgrades, you are not paying the full price of the laptop, but only the mainaboard. Over a few upgrade cycles, the framework comes down _significantly_ in price. This is, in fact, close to the entire point of framework.
I can't speak to support. I have had no issues with my 16. I've heard stories in both directions (very good and very bad support). I guess I will say that it is reasonable to be more skeptical about the level of support one will receive from a new company wit a very small team.
I recently made the move from a Framework to a M4. And god that’s so convenient to simply be able to close or open the lid to instantly use the laptop.
On the Framework, I had to get it plugged before I could turn it on, due to a problem with the RTC battery [0]. There is actually a known defect here but they provide a free replacement _and_ a guide to help you perform the swap [1].
TFA suggests ARM64 might be the answer. It's not that simple. Asahi Linux on Apple silicon still uses substantial energy when the lid is closed, compared to MacOS on the same hardware. With Asahi you might get a couple of days of sleep before the battery dies but you definitely won't get a month.
FWIW, I use Arch Linux with XFCE on my Intel Framework 13 and I only lose a few percent battery per day in sleep mode. I suspect you could find some software settings to make this better, maybe worth digging a bit further.
I wish Framework offered a laptop with an ARM64 processor.
I have a Surface Laptop 7 with a Snapdragon CPU on Windows 11 and it's been awesome so far. Insane battery life, especially in standby. I can reopen it after 48 hours and it only lost 3% of battery, while it stayed connected to WiFi and received notifications all along.
No issues so far, almost 1 year in, but I don't use specialized software: only web browsers, Office suite, Obsidian, Dropbox, PowerToys, FileZilla, Putty, VLC, Notepad++, WSL and random .exe utilities. I've found the emulation to be pretty good, but avoid it if you plan to do any gaming.
I wish I didn't have to optimize the Framework battery myself.
Buying an SSD and RAM that uses less power when idling helped, a handful of settings helped, but then I realized, this laptop is near perfect, and it stands out even more that I have to compensate for lack of a power management setup out of the box.
It was early for Framework though, and it otherwise ran flawlessly. I hope battery power management can be a first class citizen on Framework one day soon.
The rest is so solid and I wish Framework sustainability for a long, long time.
For now, I need my laptop to be invisible so I can do what I need.
As with all things, it’s all dependent upon the details. OS, Bios, chip, they all can have an impact on battery consumption while sleeping. The linked (from the post) Reddit thread has many suggestions on how to fix this, but for the author, I don’t think it was ever resolved. The author of that Reddit post was also shocked.
The reason why it works well for Apple is that they control everything. There are limited numbers of parts they have to support, so they can make sure it all works.
In the PC world, there are many… many variables, even from the same OEM. It’s a legitimately hard problem and manufacturers aren’t particularly motivated to get it to work better (particularly with Linux). In fact, at this moment, there’s another post on the front page that talks about this exact issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45288440 . It is about debugging an ACPI bug that has existed for years.
Reminds me of the windows laptop-closed-but-loses-power-while-hibernating bug that’s been around for ages (10+ years at minimum). Linus (LTT) has made multiple video regarding that over the years.
Obviously, that’s windows. But I do wonder why sleep modes in Linux/windows don’t actually work effectively. I mean they ‘work’ as in slowed battery drain, but still nowhere near any of the MacBook series (with/without the M* chips). Idk something about them, they get it right..
It's a shame indeed. I've been a long, long time Linux user and just trained myself to always power off (although I feel that in the old days this was less of an issue? Can that be? Just install ACPI-tools or something?), feels more tidy anyway. But yeah that's what it does to you to always grab a laptop that either has 0 battery or is cooking, from a backpack.
On the other hand, yesterday my sons Windows Laptop (we keep an open mind in this family + school requires it) was also cooking in his backpack so there is that...
How are System76 laptops in this regards? You'd think somehow because of the hardware control they should have this down? At least when sticking to Po#@Po!s!.
Ah well, you can see that the money is on the server part when it comes to Linux ;)
The difference is fundamental. A product where the hardware and software is built by the same entity will always work better in the long run. It all comes down to decades of iteration and low-level optimizations that aren't easy to do any other way. This is why you'll pry my Apple devices from my cold, dead hands. Even if a super magical alternative device manufacturer with the perfect open source OS appeared tomorrow they wouldn't be able to replicate the decades of compounding interest that have been invested into the Apple ecosystem. The value of that compound interest far outweighs any other concerns I might have about Apple devices, such as "lock in" or declining software quality (valid concerns, still worth bearing the cost). Apple devices are objectively and measurably better not just on metrics like battery life. Linux nerds like DHH and his heroic Omarchy effort are simply wasting their time because they hate Apple.
"I still love my Framework, despite its flaws. I will just keep it plugged in so that it’s ready to go when I want to use it."
That sounds like a plan!
I suppose that if I was distant from an outlet for a long enough time, the battery life would be great, but I'm rarely if ever. It's nice not to be tethered to a wire, but it's not bad really overall.
For me when it comes to laptop it's less about how long I can last with the battery but more about efficiency and termals - I just love that my MPB M1 is basically cool & silent for 99,9% of the time.
I was on the fence a few years back when upgrading ancient MPB 2013 and in the end went with M1 instead of "PC" laptop with Linux because of that...
I do hope that the recent surege of ARM laptops and MS finally embraicing it well will result in more machines like that available.
The standby experience is so bad on Linux laptops that I almost always shutdown and optimise for boot speed.
On the MB a shutdown is quite rare and getting into the system takes 1s with the fingerprint reader. That’s such a huge difference it feels like magic.
I've mentioned it elsewhere in this thread, but installing TLP makes a huge difference for suspend on Linux laptops. https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html
As someone who moved from an MacBook Pro I share the pain, but I also made the following adjustments:
1. I just shut down the computer fully more often. It’s annoying so I don’t always do it, but I’ll do it if I know I’m not using the computer as much.
2. I carry a 98Wh battery pack with me. If my laptop is fully dead it’s not a big deal because a full battery pack charges it all the way up, or if both are full it extends the battery life to be MacBook level. Since the framework is lighter than my Mac was anyway it’s not such a big deal.
I run NixOS on Framework 13. For battery life, I just shutdown fully. My system boots back up in no time. I then just restore my Firefox session and I’m 99% back to where I was when I shut down.
Somehow related, there is a new firmware upgrade available this morning: Beta Software update for your Framework Laptop 16 (AMD Ryzen™ 7040 Series) - BIOS 3.07. Among other things, one update states "Fixed non-functional “Force Power for Input Modules” setting".
I guess it's a bit on how various technologies are optimized within the system. My Steam Deck can hold quite some battery juice for a while, but i will never be more amazed than my original Nintendo DS, that still has lots of battery capacity even after years and years of neglect.
For my current laptops i have been ignoring the battery completely. I rather have max performance, so every energy saving thing gets disabled. Most of the time it's connected to power anyway.
I am forced to use a MacBook M4 at work but I have and love my Framework 13 Intel.
Battery management is superior in MacOS but I can leave my Framework suspended for more than at least a week (I never measured how long it can stay like this).
I run vanilla Ubuntu with TLP, though, which might be the trick.
TLP is definitely the trick. TLP makes a huge difference in improving battery life while on suspend in Linux - especially since laptop makers stopped supporting S3 sleep.
> Apple Silicon is built upon ARM64 which is apparently core to such great battery life.
Not really, actually. ARM isn’t terribly more efficient to decode than x86, and both are converted into micro-operations that are internal to the CPU.
The real strength is Apple’s custom ARM cores; as evidenced by the failure of Qualcomm and MediaTek to make anything quite like it, even with the same manufacturing nodes.
I think as jeffbee said below it's not even the custom ARM cores, but rather Apple's ability to control not only the hardware but the software on-top of it. In a typical Windows machine you are dealing with your CPU and microcode made by AMD/Intel/Other, then the BIOS/Driver code written by your motherboard manufacturer, and your GPU from either the on-board, or dGPU from Intel/Nvidia/AMD and then Windows made by Microsoft. All of this leads to silly things like the ASUS ACPI driver bug [1] or Dell [2]. Apple does not suffer from this lack of control and communication, instead allowing tight integration.
Qualcomm is getting there with the Snapdragon X Elite.
It's still significantly slower than the M4 but you can at least meaningfully compare them nowadays which is a strong come back from where they were when the M1 was introduced.
We are likely to see improvements now that Microsoft buys Arm chips for their Surface laptops. I guess it was hard to justify the investment before.
Can someone tell me if hibernate works on the kubuntu Focus IR14. I love kubuntu but as I’ve mentioned elsewhere really don’t like inability for my thinkpad to hibernate without losing charge. I’d buy a Linux first machine if I knew it would just work.
The best thing about owning a framework is that you can easily recover from silly events like spilling an entire latte on your laptop. I've done this twice so far and both times it cost me $99 to swap out the keyboard and get back to a stock look and feel.
I just got a framework 12 and the first day I set it up a latte spilled all over it and thankfully the keyboard survived but the peace of mind that, even if it wasn't, a replacement keyboard is $50 was/is so valuable.
I have also noticed that when i'm dual booting to windows i get way more battery life than on manjaro with gnome, closed lid or active work. I guess it's much easier to oeganize battery optimizations in one house unfortunately
It’s crazy you have to go like four comments deep and into the sub convo before you find mention of windows on arm- apple silicon is just so dominant in the zeitgeist for people who think about this stuff
If there were a Windows on ARM laptop that blew peoples' socks off (the way the M1 MacBooks did initially), it'd make waves but that has yet to happen.
The initial round of Snapdragon laptops had battery life that was better than what Intel/AMD machines were capable of, but not quite MacBook level and performance wasn't quite there either. Then Intel's Lunar Lake came out and was about as good or better with none of the compatibility problems, basically stealing Qualcomm's thunder.
I quit Linux around 2010 and got a MacBook Air, partly because suspend/resume kept breaking. So pleased to know that 15 years later, it still doesn’t work. Proprietary hardware and software for the win.
I don't think Framework will be able to compete on efficiency with their design philosophy.
The NVMe disk is swappable, which means it has its own controller which manages power management itself. I did my research to pick an efficient SSD and ended up with a Lexar NM790. It tops Tom's efficiency charts and comes in third place for lowest idle power consumption [0]. This is still ~0.8W at idle. On a 60Wh battery an idling drive alone will kill the battery in 3 days.
Now technically there is the APST (Autonomous Power State Transition) feature in the NVMe specification. Is there some lower APST power state that can get the power draw down? Potentially, but that is a feature well beyond the purview of any SSD reviews I have seen, so I don't know- does this drive have reliable and well-implemented APST state support? How does this interact with the platform-specific sleep state implementation, which presumably wakes the disk sometimes to do some Modern Standby features- how often is it spending time in that 0.8W state versus lower? This can vary between board rev or BIOS version certainly. Beyond the actual drive configuration and ACPI interaction, there is also kernel interaction. Do certain drives behave poorly with Linux? Etc etc.
On the RAM side of things, they are using DDR5 and not LPDDR5. There is a lower voltage on LPPDR5 which is a constant inefficiency, but also LPDDR5 has dynamic voltage scaling and dynamic frequency scaling. There is also technically some voltage drop across the SODIMM connector which you don't need to contend with when you solder RAM, which would be a constant source of loss, but I am not sure how significant that is.
Beyond this you have different behaviour for every model of RAM. This post on the Framework forum shows the user could get 7.82 days of suspend time with the HMCG66MEBSA092N DDR5-4800MHz 16GB kit whereas only 2.25 days with the CT2K48G56C46S5 DDR5-5600MHz 96GB kit [1]. Consider that there are effectively infinite combinations of memory people can run, and even inside a model series, vendors can swap their chip providers, etc. Which kits give the best battery endurance? I can't tell you.
Now someone could certainly embark on a long adventure to test different drives, RAM kits, and measure their performance, recommend tunables for the Linux kernel you want to set for each particular set of hardware, etc. But this is effectively what Apple is doing for you with the MacBook. They are choosing their memory supplier, their flash supplier, and integrating as much as possible into their SoC with presumably an entire team focused on extracting the most efficient behaviour out of both.
Consider this same thing extends to display behaviour (beyond VRR support, which I believe Framework has now, you also have local dimming behaviour to tune on the MBP), wireless behaviour, all sorts of embedded controllers that Apple can wrap inside the SoC that I probably wouldn't think of... I don't see how a modular system like Framework can achieve anything close to the idle efficiency of a MacBook.
you folks should really try the lenovo yoga series. especially this year's yoga slim aura edition (which has the intel lunar lake chips). The ipex-llm extensions are fairly stable and work very well ( https://github.com/intel/intel-extension-for-pytorch )
and the build quality of the laptop is exactly like the macbook air - i have both.
The discussion is mostly around battery life. How's the battery life on your Yoga, how much power does it lose on standby, and what operating system do you use?
windows.
all day battery life. holds up pretty well to the macbook air 15 at similar workloads. macbook does get 1-1.5 hour more battery life.
The lunar lake is an insane chip.
The ISA has nothing to do with the battery life. Battery life is the result of getting details right at every level of the software stack. Framework doesn't control every level of the stack. Arguably they don't control any of it.
> Battery life is the result of getting details right at every level of the software stack
Exactly. Apple's way of doing things is about vertical integration of the stack, which is the polar opposite of how the PC market developed and largely still works.
The vertical integration approach (where you control all the layers beneath the customer facing product) has the benefit of allowing you to optimize that customer experience by tweaking things anywhere in the stack.
Power management in digital systems mostly comes down to being able to slow or turn off clocks when appropriate. Doing this well can be complicated, but you can tell that Apple has put a lot of energy into doing it.
The downside of the vertical integration approach is that components cannot be sourced or replaced with off-the-shelf components, as the interfaces are not really standard, they are tailor made for the use case.
For the Framework folks to pull off something like the M1's power sipping, they'd have to invest a lot of engineering time (a.k.a. money) and have strategic partnerships with hardware vendors and standards bodies to move the commodity chip market forward to support better power management.
The thing is, one of the strengths of the Framework is that the hardware is commodity, making their devices easy to repair. Also, any work that the Framework folks do to move things forward also benefit their competitors, which can shrink the potential reward for doing so.
Yes, it's this. I also own an M4 mbp and an AMD framework 13. With both on maximum screen brightness, side by side, doing similar workloads, battery life isn't that much better on the M4. I think the difference maker is that the mac constantly decreases screen brightness when possible, turns the backlight completely off when there isn't any activity, heavily leverages power efficient scheduling and efficiency cores, no doubt turns off power to all peripherals whenever possible, and so on. And of course lid-closed suspend on a mac lasts indefinitely. Arch does none of these things and even on cohesive distros like Fedora there's only so much you can do in user land. Linux is designed for compatibility across a huge breadth of devices; darwin only has to support Mac hardware and can extract every ounce of power efficiency from deep hardware integration.
IIRC the low power states of M series chips generally dips down further than most x86 CPUs do, and the way both the SoC And OS are designed are for racing to idle and coalescing tasks to reduce wakeups. On the MBPs specially the screen can also drop down to 1hz so the GPU isn’t wasting cycles redrawing static content.
The result is that in more typical usage where the machine isn’t under a constant load, battery life is much better. When it’s sitting there idle displaying a web page it’s barely consuming any power at all, where most competing laptops at minimum are pulling at least 2-3x as much power between the CPU not being able to scale down that far and constantly getting woken to perform poorly scheduled tasks.
When I switch my Thinkpad X1 to Arch, I was expecting a massive battery life downgrade. However, it lasts at least as long as Windows or possibly longer.
I love the Framework hardware but not all that impressed with the choice of operating systems that are available. That’s not really Framework’s problem though.
What does that mean? I thought they offer Windows and Linux options? If you are referring to distros of the latter, you can install whichever you like, no?
I have heard anecdotally that the Snapdragon arm window laptops have amazing battery life. I'd be interested in hearing from people who have used these as well as the Mx MacBooks.
I’ve never found the M4 on my work machine particularly impressive. Frankly I hardly use the thing because it takes far, far too long to switch between windows compared to hyprland.
I'm using Framework with Windows and AMD and I have excellent hibernate/sleep time... It is really a Linux thing. I remember a post on reddit that claims that the Bluefin distribution has excellent battery life.
It amazes me how the legend of ARM being more efficient than x86 took hold. I'm not saying that we don't have a more efficient ARM processors BUT it has nothing to do with the ISA. What you gain with a simple encoder (ARM) you gain with code density (x86) and after that it is converted to microcode. You wouldn't gain more than single percent if any.
Process node is by far more important (5nm , 3nm, etc) and usually Apple gets access to them first. Also placing the memory in the CPU package also proved to be great for efficiency (case of point is Intel's Lunar lake that can last like forever) and last but the least is the intergraded GPU that no one seems to talk about and their respective efficiency (cause there are like 30 people in the whole world that can truly make and educated talk about them and their ISA)
Imagine someone saying the same (“it’s awful and doesn’t really actually work but I want to love it”) about anything else than Linux or FOSS and you’ll be privy to an outside perspective on a very peculiar form of nerd delusion.
Why has no one cracked this nut yet? I transitioned full-time to a Linux workstation in 2023 after years of driving macOS. I have an M2 air that is one of the best laptops ever made - and it really is a complete game changer when it comes to battery. I really don't think about charging it, and plug it in maybe once or twice per week. But I am longing for a slightly larger chassis and something I can run Linux on without any compromises. I was considering a Framework of all things - but this post bolsters my concern that Apple is really on a completely different level. tl;dr the age of the Linux desktop is 100% here, but we still have a lot of work to do for notebooks
When I used to commute via company bus in the bay area, it mattered to me; also when I'm using my laptop out and about in the city, I'd prefer not to have to worry about finding a seat with a charger.
Of course, nowadays power banks are getting so cheap and lightweight, I just toss a couple in my bag, and don't really worry about it. I just ordered one of the Haribo power banks all the backpackers are raving about.
Yeah this seems like a complete non-issue to me. A laptop doesn't need to run all day on battery; if you are working any length of time you're going to be near an AC outlet at some point.
What mission do you love from Framework? Is it environmental?
If so, I seriously doubt that the lifetime pollution of a Framework laptop is better than an Apple Silicon Mac.
Macbooks tend to last a very long time. I used my Intel Macbook Air for 10 years. After that, I sold it and maybe it continued to get used by the second owner. While you can keep upgrading Framework laptops (parts require shipping/pollution to manufacture), I doubt it'll last a decade or someone wants to upgrade it for a decade to keep up.
Apple also has recycling programs and it seems to do quite well when it comes to using recycled materials. I doubt Framework is big enough to do these things as well as Apple.
Framework laptops are often more than doubled the price of similar spec'ed Windows laptops. They're also quite a bit more expensive than Apple laptops in the same class.
Framework is one of those things that is great for virtue signaling but doesn't make sense in real life.
Edit:
You can buy an M4 Air for $799 on sale frequently.[0] Meanwhile, a similar spec'ed Framework with a slower AMD CPU/GPU is $1,517.00.[1] So the repairability angle just doesn't seem worth it. If the Air breaks, just buy a new one.
Keep in mind that the M4 Air has a better display, significantly faster CPU, faster GPU, significantly more battery life, is fanless, better speakers, much better trackpad, and a thinner profile.
I don't own a Framework (yet), as I don't believe its the right product for me at this stage. I can't afford to get caught out without battery when out and about.
What attracts me is:
• Easy (self) repairs, especially OEM battery replacements. If I could carry two - three replacements that could be hot swapped, like old times, that would be acceptable too.
• Easy upgrades of RAM and SSD. I had to buy a new MacBook due to it hanging frequently from RAM filling up, even though rest of it would've been fine for at least three more years.
• Ability to make it "your own". Its a minor thing, but a little whimsy is nice in life. I also like the idea of my main machine being a ship of Thesus that stays with me for a long time, and shows marks of age.
It’s not 2x the price, I paid under $900 for a brand new one.
Battery is $60. How much does a MacBook battery cost? How long does a MacBook battery take to repair and how much skill do replace need to replace it? How do you upgrade the storage capacity on a MacBook?
Worse how? RAM, SSD and main board can be upgraded as an when needed, which is the point.
I like Framework's aesthetics more than MacBook already, and like the little customisablity (i.e bezel, mismatched coloured parts etc). I can accept a lower quality screen (compared to MacBook), speakers and camera no problem.
I'm willing to pay higher than MacBook price for the above package due to superiority of Linux over MacOs and supporting this model in general. However, I draw a line in the sand at battery life, so Mac it is for me for the foreseeable future.
"Specs" really do not mean a lot for Laptops. Most laptops are seriously bad quality, and I have not had one laptop in the past 10 years that did not require a major repair before the warranty period expired. With most laptops, you are buying e-waste. I can't afford buying e-waste. I would rather buy a laptop I can keep for 5 years without having to scrap it, and with framework I could just replace whatever breaks.
And for me Mac is not an option as I'm not using their crappy OS and I don't want to have the forever struggle of running Linux on their proprietary hardware platform.
MacBooks had historically tons of design issues with keyboards and GPUs. Which I guess can happen, but the problem with Apple is that they never admin anything until someone drags them to court and the out of warranty repair is always extremely expensive, usually not worth it.
The battery replacement can also be extremely expensive, especially if you live in a country without any Apple Store. Battery replacement for M4 Air is like $340 in my country, which is insane for a $800 machine.
The GPU solder joint issue was NVidia's fault. I remember also Dell and others were affected, and I think MacBooks used only AMD dGPUs afterwards.
But otherwise, between the Butterfly keyboard, Flexgate, and placing the backlight driver voltage pin next to a data pin on the display connector (Louis Rossmann complained a lot about that one, as debris or moisture could easily cause a short and fry your CPU), indeed Apple does have their fair share of design issues.
The hardware may last but there is planned obsolescence via software. You stop getting OS upgrades after 5 to 7 years and soon after most other apps. That alone I consider so wasteful and infuriating. My Linux machines don't ever have the problem, and at least Lenovo makes hardware as durable or more than Apple. I'm on Framework now and I hope it will last as long. I also have a Mac from 2020 or 2021 (last Intel Macbook pro) and I read they're already stopping OS upgrades.
I know Windows laptops are very finicky and unreliable. For example, loads of people complain that $3000 Razer laptops break after a few months.
I guess I'm mostly talking about Apple overall.
You're paying a lot more money for self-repairability. Frameworks are generally more expensive than Macs, sometimes 50% - 100% more expensive for a similar laptop. That's crazy.
Macs are tanks. Not a single issue with my 4 year old M1 Air. Even if there is an issue, I can still take it to an Apple Store to get it looked at.
> Frameworks are generally more expensive than Macs, sometimes 50% - 100% more expensive for a similar laptop.
Do you have an example? An 8tb m4 macbook pro runs over 7 grand; the comparable hx370 framework 13 is barely over 3 grand. I bought both within the last couple months and found the macs to be significantly more expensive in the segment i was looking at.
You can buy an M4 Air for $799 on sale frequently.[0] Meanwhile, a similar spec'ed Framework with a slower AMD CPU/GPU is $1,517.00.[1] So the repairability angle just doesn't seem worth it. If the Air breaks, just buy a new one.
Keep in mind that the M4 Air has a better display, significantly faster CPU, faster GPU, significantly more battery life, is fanless, better speakers, much better trackpad, and a thinner profile.
It is mostly valid for 16GB/256GB-SSD config and when you need performance in bursts. Consider sustained performance, more RAM, more storage, OS options etc and the value proposition changes.
I have maintained it for years that the base model M-series Air is the best computer for normal people if they plan to keep it for years.
That can't possibly be true. I was recently considering my first ever Apple laptop but I would be paying a fortune to get RAM and storage anywhere close to offerings from any other vendor. And I've heard they're difficult or impossible to upgrade myself, so I can't even select a base model now and add more later.
The enhanced repairability is basically insurance in case of a fault. Compared to a MacBook, or insurance for a MacBook, this insurance is overpriced.
As for the environment, the power consumption + larger design with extra parts to make it repairable + how few people ever buy parts makes this a virtue signaling wash.
I’m not the OP but for me, with my mid-2015, I had the battery replaced once. This was used almost every work day until 2023. My M2 Pro MBP I then bought, never so far (as you would expect for its age) and it still feels brand new.
Yeah, but that's the reality distortion field. It's true for many luxury brands where people just won't accept any criticism of the uber expensive products they bought because it makes them feel bad.
I have been buying Apple hardware since the early 2000s (the first thing I own was a 1.5 Gen iPod) and there is almost no product that didn't get an issue. Very often developing early in life because of bad design/engineering.
I think the most reliables have been iPhones but that's only if you don't count annoying battery swap and other minor repairs that came for aging (like port replacement).
But they look good and make people feel good, so they get bought.
That's definitely the problem with Apple, if you could run macOS on any machine, they would lose market extremely fast.
Linux desktop is a lost cause for me, simple as that with the fiasco that is Ubuntu post 2022, wayland, and too many other choices that make for a horrible user experience. Those probs with power management mentioned here are ones that systemd was supposed to solve weren't they? Only that systemd went into becoming an inner OS and can't be assed about such things. The prob as far as I'm concerned is not that Linux simply sucks, but that it used to be good (I even recommended it over Mac OS years ago here) and has regressed into a state that isn't anymore usable for me. Even using the terminal on Linux has become a pain in the ass. The priority here seems to be pack everything into containers to make further maintenance obsolete or sth? I guess if there's no one in the user seat and devs and managers have free reign over whatever grand refactoring they want to tackle that's what's happening. Back on Mac OS which has actually apps worth using, or at all.
The complaint about power usage in suspend is especially sad because it’s pretty much a common problem for Linux on laptops. Not sure if that’s what applies here, but the numbers about match what I see with my Framework. Basically: if you want to use secure boot you usually also want kernel lockdown mode, and you cannot hibernate a lockdowned kernel. At least not without out-of-tree patches.
IMHO that’s a giant issue. If you can’t hibernate (aka suspend to disk) you will never be able to get that power consumption low. And telling people to not run secure boot or lockdown is not really a good answer either. Especially since the default installer already sets those things up. I get that „Linux on laptops“ is not a priority big enough to get a proper fix for that. And that it’s not an easy issue to fix. But the current state is really really sad.
This is not a Linux issue (Though the hibernate issues are!). It's a PC issue. Microsoft went on a crusade making hardware vendors implement S0 next to S3 but most hardware vendors now _only_ implement S0. So that the laptop can keep phoning home and download updates etc whilst closed. Which means it's impossible to turn off the CPU during suspend. it's always on.
PC as a laptop platform is a complete joke.
Shouldn't that mean that the relatively open platforms like Framework should work better, since they lack the incentive to defy the user/owner like the locked-down platforms do? What would prevent Framework or anything similar from implementing the other sleep states?
Framework doesn't produce it's own CPUs. It buys them directly from Intel. Producing your own CPU is really difficult, if you want it to be competitive with other state-of-the-art CPUs.
They don't need to make their own CPUs for that. Framework can write its own BIOS and ACPI drivers for Windows and Linux to have proper sleep support. But that's more R&D expenditure they probably can't afford.
For example, for my home lab, I bought a used Intel 12th gen industrial PC from a specialized Taiwanese embedded systems company, whose BIOS allows very granular control of all sleep states plus individual power control of most peripherals, probably because that's a must-have for customers in that space over stuff like benchmark scores and bang for the buck.
So technically, IT IS possible to do, just probably not very cost effective for consumer devices.
I think it's worse than that, at least for the AMD-based Frameworks. Ostensibly, S3 sleep isn't supported by the CPU.
https://community.frame.work/t/responded-how-to-enable-s3-sl...
Do those settings actually work? My HP laptop with a 10th gen intel has an option for this. Windows manages to suspend, but it doesn't come back to life. Linux is broken, too.
As I remember, sleep state are mostly implemented by the CPU (or require the CPU collaboration), and neither intel nor AMD does s3 sleep on their proc anymore.
>So that the laptop can keep phoning home and download updates etc whilst closed.
On Windows, network connectivity in S0 standby is optional: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/146593-enable-disable-ne...
>Which means it's impossible to turn off the CPU during suspend. it's always on.
Hibernation is still an option, if you don't mind a slower resume.
With 32 GiB of memory it's just too slow. A laptop, to me, is supposed to be a device much like a phone in that I can just flip it open and do what I need to do, suspend is supposed to be that, but if I don't charge my Dell precision every single day it'll just run down to 0 for absolutely no reason.
I need high ram laptop for work. It it way too expensive and slow to hibernate 128gigs laptop every few hours
Ok but windows has better battery life.
S0 is a step forward. Disabling CPU entirely is just a "workaround". Both S3 and hibernation has a lot of security implications which S0 solves. Apple uses their own S0 alternative and it works... Perfectly?
The real problem is that both AMD and Intel S0 implementations are mediocre at best and this is what they should fix. Also most vendors are dickheads and cannot even verify that their system even goes to S0ix states without any problem before releasing it. Because of their laziness you can buy brand new certified "Linux ready" machine which won't even achieve S0ix states out of the box.
In other words, for the user, it's not a step forward. It doesn't matter if the spec is perfect.
Wasn't Apple the one to start with this? And it seems to work well there...?
Wouldn't that mean that Intel Macs would have a much worse battery life than they did while suspended? Even suspended they did better than the same laptop running Linux.
Intel Macs aren't PCs... Apple did a lot of the wider platform beyond the CPU themselves.
Microsoft is not to blame for Linux’s abysmal battery lift. Linux has never ever had good battery life. It’s the only issue preventing me from replacing my MacBook.
So this is why my parents laptop is constantly running it's fans while 'asleep'?
My personal machine is a Framework 13 AMD (first gen of AMD for them) and my work machine is a MB Pro M4. The Mac Book just keeps battery _forever_ while suspended, where as I've found the Framework (running Ubuntu 24) loses about 1% an hour while suspended. 1% per hour is acceptable for me, but the Mac Book's power to performance ration is just insane.
I can't blame Framework, of course. Upstart laptop manufacturer that is open about repair vs tech giant who's spent years optimizing hardware and batteries.
All that said, I'm optimistic for better batteries, better suspend software/hardware support, and more efficient mobile processors outside of the Apple ecosystem in the coming years. The M-series Apple processors are definitely kicking others in the industry into gear.
I don’t think there’s much framework can do about this. The same happens with Windows on HP and Dell laptops, except windows tends to quickly enter hibernation (if it doesn’t somehow hang and burn up your bag).
We used to have better suspend before, when s3 was thing, on both Linux and windows. Maybe not as great as Macs, but way better than the current shitshow. Now I’m not saying pcs are great hardware, but I think this particular issue should be pinned on Microsoft, who tried to copy apple’s power nap, only doing it halfassedly as they usually do.
>I don’t think there’s much framework can do
The MacBook is an existence proof that there is something they can do.
Does Framework operate at the same abstraction level as Apple? I thought because of scale, Apple can dictate terms from its suppliers to get everything custom. I would imagine Dell, Lenovo, and HP simply don't care enough and Framework and System 76 and the like don't have enough scale to get custom parts or custom code from vendors?
It's up to Framework what level they work at. If they want to make a competitive product rather than just throwing together what currently exists will dictate what they need to do. I would think it would be in Dell, Lenovo, and HP's interest to compete against Apple, but Framework shouldn't let others software that they should have bad suspend functionality.
I'm pretty sure your income is closer to Framework's revenue, than Frameworks's revenue is to Apple's.
Android's revenue is closer to my income than Apple's. I guess Google should just give up competing with the iPhone and give up on Android.
You'd probably want to compare Google's revenue for that. They wouldn't give up on Chrome.
My point was that it's probably the components themselves which don't consume little power, as opposed to the integration.
So, I guess Framework could start designing their own CPUs. I think having more competition in this area would be great!
Not sure how realistic this is, though.
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I really do not understand why hibernate under secure boot is not implemented on Linux and this continues for years.
It is as if the features are implemented by completely different people. But this is not obviously the case since systemd supports both and actively improving both.
Note for me hibernation is a security measure and not about saving battery. I am traveling sometimes with the laptop and risk of theft is non-trivial. If it is hibernated, then it is just a property loss. But with just suspend there is a chance that the data can be extracted. So I configured it to hibernate automatically after 15 minutes in suspension. Surprisingly it has been working reliably with Linux.
I have secure boot, hibernation, and full disk encryption working fine on linux, but I have never heard of kernel lockdown.
The solution I found involves making a custom initramfs to support hibernation and compiling the kernel into a signed EFI stub.
To add some context: man kernel_lockdown[1] reads "Unencrypted hibernation/suspend to swap are disallowed as the kernel image is saved to a medium that can then be accessed.". And to my understanding there is currently no way to tell a (mainline) kernel that allows "encrypted hibernate", i.e. no way to tell the kernel that its hibernation disk is "secure".
So its not a direct "linux prevents hibernate on secure boot", its "linux recommends kernel_lockdown when secure booting", "kernel_lockdown prevents hibernate with unencrypted swap" and "theres no well to make the kernel believe the hibernation disk is encrypted", but the result is the same.
You can "just" run secure boot without lockdown. Its a cmdline, you can just omit it. You can run custom patch sets that add cmdline options so the kernel allows hibernation in lockdown (if you pinky-promise the swap is encrypted).
But neither of these are easily accessible to the average user.
1: https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/manpages/kernel_lockdow...
It seems there should be a distro that eases this route with some configuration options. Is there none?
Does the system use a boot loader? Or does it boot directly into kernel bypassing bootloaders?
The term to search for is "UKI".
A UKI is a kernel+initramfs+boot-arguments bundle all as a single WinPE/UEFI executable using the "EFI Stub Loader".
You configure your system firmware to execute it, passing no arguments. It boots using the command line you set earlier. It's signed, and verified by the platform secure boot.
Hibernation works fine with this approach.
> Hibernation works fine with this approach.
Can you explain why it improves the hibernation behavior? I have seen UKI mentioned before but never heard that it improves hibernation.
It doesn't, it's just another bootstrapping method that happens to work fine with hibernation.
UKI allows you to extend your chain of trust from the bootloader to ramdisk, instead of just your bootloader and kernel. From there, you can enable kernel lockdown and checking of module signatures if you want to.
I think you can do the same thing without UKI (I forget tbh), but UKI simplifies it with one UEFI executable that doesn't even need a bootloader.
Does this mean that the hibernated image must be signed each time the laptop hibernates?
The swap file that memory is dumped to during hibernation is on an encrypted disk. Upon wake, you need to unlock the disk before you can resume from hibernation.
It boots directly into the kernel without a bootloader. You can specify built-in command line options when you're compiling the kernel.
To dual-boot, I boot from a removable USB drive on my keychain. When it's not plugged in, it boots windows instead.
This may or may not apply to your situation, but at least some motherboards have an integrated bootloader. You need to register the options with it (via efibootmgr for example). Then pressing a key (check your manual) presents you with the options.
This has worked with both Linux and Widows on all my machines: handbuilt 3rd gen intel with an asus MB, 6th gen with some msi, 10th gen with a cheap Gigabyte, and an assorted bunch of HP Elite desks and books with intel and AMD.
I understand there’s even a way for them to auto detect the options, but since this has been a set it forget it type thing, I never bothered to look into it.
You can do both.
> It is as if the features are implemented by completely different people
This is almost definitely true considering it’s an massive open source project
I have looked into this. It is possible, and documented on the Arch wiki. My main concern is constantly writing a large file to a small SSD.
Unless it's a really old SSD, lifetime is so massively extended over 15+ old SSDs, that it's not even a consideration any more. People use consumer grade SSDs for databases which last years, even when mostly full.
I expect many of the servers I have deployed, again consumer grade SSDs, would have more writes in a day than you in a year -- even with several suspends a day.
I cannot of course address the specific model you have, or the size of RAM you're suspending to swap space.
There’s also the fact that some laptops have laughably slow SSDs. I’m thinking my 2020 HP elitebook whose nvme drive is basically always slower than my 2012 sata drives… it takes forever to write the 32 GB of ram to it. It’s actually a better experience tu turn it completely off and on, unless there’s something I absolutely need to keep in its current state.
I was excited to see news about AMD beginning work on ACPI C4 in the Linux kernel (1) – my Framework loses about 10% a day in suspend, sometimes more, which is OK for me but of course I’d love for it to be better!
1: https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ACPI-C4-Linux-Kernel-Code
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-pm/20231114022503.6310-1-kelvi...
I authored a patch (I still use it to this day, and I think others do too) that allows this, and sent it to the LKML as an RFC, and was rejected, for some background.
"I've got to warn you that I have an allergic reaction to arguments that start with "the right solution is really hard, so let's pick the easier, worse solution." ;)"
Proceeds to continue enforcing objectively worse solution (evidenced by the existence of this entire thread).
Out of box hibernation support in popular Linux distros is also something we want badly. We’re watching this one eagerly: https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/pull/1417
Let’s see how long DHH & co can keep harvesting low hanging fruit of Linux laptop problems. I’d expect they’ll plateau soon but I would love to be surprised.
I’m torn between my instinct to classify anything from DHH as mostly hype, my faith in Linux kernel developers, and my cynicism toward Linux kernel developers.
I will be very surprised if DHH fixes something that hasn't been properly solved in mainline Linux distros for years. (decades?)
Honestly, given my experience from distro hopping, I am certain that collecting solutions across distributions and implementing them in one can go very far. It's almost as if distributions contributors too rarely try out other distributions to then steal what the other distribution does better.
Small enthusiast distributions with a bit of a hype can gain good features in by just pulling in knowledgable users missing things from their previous distro - and they can move a lot faster than the Debians or Fedoras of the world can, no committee decisions to be made first.
At the very minimum, omarchy and omakub already provide out of the box seamless fixes for all the common issues that are “fixed” but need tedious involved configuration nonetheless.
even the annoying OOM stuff that makes all OS stop to a crawl?
Haven’t checked, but luckily it’s just a PR away from being fixed for everyone using the Oma-distros.
The thing is - a lot if power saving is achieved by hybrid sleep (computer hibernating after a timeout).
Setting that up is pure hell on Linux, with poor documentation and security people actively fighting against making this easy.
On Windows/macOS it just works, on Linux you'll probably break secure boot with it.
> On Windows/macOS it just works, on Linux you'll probably break secure boot with it.
The way it works on my Windows laptop is it’ll stay in sleep overnight, then when I open the laptop in the morning it’ll wake up, then hibernate itself, then I have to wait for the computer to turn itself back on. Thankfully this feature can be turned off.
The way it works on mine is that I open it in the morning to find it powered off because it chose to force quit my running applications to apply updates.
That’s nice, at least it’s off. Mine usually hangs and ends up hot in the morning. I have to forcefully turn it off.
Luckily for me, I usually run Linux on this laptop which sleeps just fine.
That’s my experience too. It’s so infuriating!
The solution is to disable Wake Timers.
Maybe it just works on MacOS, but it's prone to all kinds of breakage on Windows.
That's because MSFT doesn't really do hibernate any more but does "modern sleep" where it functions like a phone with the screen off. It keeps active network connections, downloads patches and keeps checking for notifications and other such nonsense.
BIOS support for proper hibernation has been getting worse too because with MSFT demanding it, there is little reason to continue support.
I've had older laptops that do the sleep->hibernate setup without too much issue but now it is a crap-shoot on if it is even supported in the hardware.
>It keeps active network connections ...
You can disable that behavior. See: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/146593-enable-disable-ne...
That's because the goal is not to have functional hibernation, but to start up faster. If the goal can be achieved by using less power instead of shutting down the whole machine and restoring it identically and that's easier it's a valid alternative.
Interesting. I have yet to come across a computer that I couldn't hibernate in Window.
No, Hybrid Sleep is when the Windows machine goes from Modern Standy to full shutdown and power off.
All laptops support that though it's not always enabled as a feature by default.
You used to be able to edit ACPI tables to reenable S3 sleep but these days they're stripping the functionality from firmware entirely.
For example, HP's enterprise lines have S3 stubs in their firmware. If you enable them, nothing happens, because someone deliberately removed the S3 blobs entirely.
I've never had an issue on Windows. This is why I gave up on using Linux laptops for any purpose.
I've had sleep issues on a Surface Pro.
You edit one line in a file to enable hybrid sleep. Uncomment one line in /etc/systemd/sleep.conf:
AllowHybridSleep=true
Your Linux installer will also set everything up needed for it.
It's also a GUI option in KDE's System Settings.
I wish it would be this simple.
In most cases your kernel will tell you it's "locked down" and refuse to hibernate. In my case - on a cutting edge kernel no less with Fedora - it refused to believe that the default disk encryption setup with Swap on encrypted LVM actually is encrypted and locked me out.
Linux security bros followed Apple and others here and refused to add any ability for us to configure or tell kernel that it's wrong about that and to fscking allow resume.
This stuff just works out of the box on both macOS and even the mess that is Windows.
Yeah, kernel lockdown is a shitshow
macOS mostly doesn't hibernate. Apple Silicon is just good enough to not need it.
It will do it eventually, though if you don't have enough free disk space it'll fail.
What's exasperating is that this has been going on for literally 20 years:
> Pretty much exactly 19 years ago I got on a train to Oxford and made Mark Shuttleworth's laptop successfully suspend and resume using ACPI and that was the turning point in my entire career [1]
[1] https://nondeterministic.computer/@mjg59/111249766634985812
10 years after that I bought a Macbook Air, and haven't gone back to Linux on a laptop since.
Windows on my case, since Windows 7, although I kept a netbook with Linux around until it died.
While I can understand random Joe and Jane are at the mercy of reverse engineering while installing a Linux distro over the weekend, I expect that anyone selling Linux laptops as OEM, to actually get the specifications and have everything working as any other hardware vendor.
This is also something that is ideally fixed in hardware. Suspend to RAM should take extremely low energy (about 10 milliwatts). Apple has this down to an art while other laptops have quite of bit of random power draw from motherboard components. A laptop battery should be able to power suspend to RAM for months.
It does not make any sense to write 32 or 64G data to secondary memory every time you close your laptop lid, that will accelerate the lifespan of most SSDs.
This is a seriously annoying Linux problem that never get acknowledged by hardcore Desktop Linux fans. On any Linux thread on HN, one can argue till one is blue in the face, but they will always finally deflect with: it works fine for me on X hardware. Usually, the first response is that suspend works completely fine on Linux and it is Windows that is worse.
> If you can’t hibernate (aka suspend to disk) you will never be able to get that power consumption low
Does Mac hibernate? Because if it does, the wake up is literally under 100ms, it's just imperceptible. You open the lid and it's already awake.
> Does Mac hibernate?
Not by default. If you just shut the lid on your macbook and put it in your backpack for 2 days, it does not hibernate.
Which is why waking is instant.
That's what I thought, so I disagree with OP, we don't want hybernation for Linux, we simply need way better power management and hardware that can sustain low power drain for weeks.
Mac M series don't do hibernation, probably because sleep has so little impact on battery life (my MacBook lasts for about a month in sleep mode) and Apple doesn't like to burden users with questions like 'what sleep mode to use'.
That's just plainly not true.
Apple calls it "Safe Sleep" (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mh10328/mac) and you get a progress bar when it wakes from it. Yes, even on magical Ms.
Interesting, never heard of that specific mode before. Does it save the entire RAM or just the OS state and open files?
Most people don't encounter this. It only happens when your macbook battery is about to die while in sleep mode.
Ah yes, I think I've seen this before, it still resumes impressively fast from it, and I think since I normally notice the battery is almost dead it gives itself a good excuse.
It's proper hibernation with all your RAM
Right, that's what Linux laptop needs, not hybernation.
No, Linux is not the issue -- my System76 Lemur holds 14+ hours. Haven't used X1 Carbon for a while, but it also held way longer than Framework.
As I understand it, the complaint isn't about battery life during usage. The issue compared to a mac is that I could close the lid on the macbook air m1 that I'm typing this on mid sentence, and then open the lid in two weeks, and have lost basically 0% battery.
I'm not sure if that's possible on windows. I know my work laptop doesn't work that way, but then, it probably runs all sorts of enterprise settings.
How long does it keep its charge in sleep mode? Weeks or days?
System76 edits firmware to enable S3 sleep on their machines. S3 sleep uses less power than Modern Standby.
I've heard this isn't possible on AMD unfortunately.
I'm on an AMD machine that System76 wrote the firmware for, and they specifically wrote in S3 sleep functionality despite the base firmware missing it.
Do you have a source for that? The only thing I've found is S3 sleep under coreboot, which only applies to intel.
These[1] have S3 sleep enabled in their firmware thanks to System76.
[1] https://hpdevone.com/
That's cool, but the 5850u is from 2021, around the time Microsoft started pushing hard for modern standby. Other laptops of that generation also have a S3 bios setting: https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLaptops/comments/yvpae5/to_al...
The oldest AMD chip framework sells is two generations, and to me knowledge don't have S3 support.
Hopefully it can find it's way to Framework.
The firmware vendor contracted System76 to develop the feature specifically for Linux compatibility.
I'm unaware of how much access Framework has to the underlying firmware blobs. If they don't have source/license/keys/etc for the right parts, they might be at the mercy of their own vendors for S3 support.
I believe they mean it lasts 14+ hours in sleep.
No, in work mode. I'd keep using it if not for the keyboard (kept messing PgUp/Left and PgDown/Right).
Um, more details? My Lemur has never lasted anywhere near this long, though it's a few years old.
> If you can’t hibernate (aka suspend to disk) you will never be able to get that power consumption low.
This is cope. An Apple Silicon Macbook does not need to suspend to block devices to save energy (they only do this when the battery is empty). ChromeOS doesn't offer hibernate at all. The only reason that a Framework can't have good battery life in an operating state is that nobody is paying attention to the details.
Correct. I've got a ThinkPad T480s. Hibernation is disabled, but suspend works great. Keeps charge for at least a week. Running recent Debian. I think that Lenovo, for all their faults, just does better with Linux than Framework.
Thanks, I did not knew that. My understanding was that keeping the memory alive for suspend-to-idle was the main issue here. But that also might be something a vertically integrated Apple Silicon can win vs. that x86 madness there every day.
And to be sure, I do not claim that there is nothing to gain in s2idle. I bet theres still a lot of headroom to safe energy. Its just that it would be easy to safe a lot of power if s2disk "just worked".
Keeping memory alive is how sleep worked for over a decade and is incredibly power efficient.
The issue is that Modern Standby goes ones step further and keeps the CPU and peripherals in low power states instead of just the memory. This will use more power than S3 sleep by default, and each SoC will need deep integration with the kernel for that to ever be power efficient. That means it will require heavy investment from AMD and Intel to enable efficient Modern Standby in Linux, along with heavy vendor investment to ensure each model they sell implements Modern Standby efficiently.
It isn't a matter of Framework dropping the ball, it's matter of hardware platforms being shitty and platform owners not investing as much resources into Linux as they do Windows.
I dunno man Windows is pretty bad with drain in modern stand by too.
And what are those details? Sounds like you know specifics that I'd like to also know.
If you're claiming it is just an oversight, then please back it up.
While I don't have any suggestions on how to look at the relevant metrics, a big part of the issue is the parts selection and having them power off properly.
1%/h is just 0.5W (for a 50Wh battery) which isn't a lot, but fail to bring a component or two to shutdown or sufficiently low power state and you'll observe exactly this behaviour. Of course some drain is going to be almost inevitable just to keep memory contents sufficiently refreshed, but with proper power-saving states memory can go appreciably below 0.5W.
Timer coalescing, idle wakeup minimization, race-to-idle optimization, etc.
It's not a single oversight, it's a massive project that needs to be carried out throughout an operating system. Linux's usual advantage of decentralization and wide distro variety with massive customization potential is a disadvantage here. To have a power-efficient system you need all of the software to be working toward the same goal. One bad actor process can completely hose the system's power efficiency.
> Linux's usual advantage of decentralization and wide distro variety with massive customization potential is a disadvantage here.
How so? You need each thing to do its part, but that decentralizes perfectly well because it isn't actually integration at all, it's just a hundred different pieces each doing it right.
And open source has the further advantage that you're not beholden to the maintainer. If Framework notices that piece #37 is wasting power, they have the code and can fix it themselves. If the upstream isn't completely asleep at the switch they'll accept the patch, and even if they are you can still ship it on your own device.
Where this can get messed up is in one of two ways. The first is if something is not open source and then the vendor fails to fix it but also fails to supply anyone else with the capacity to fix it. But this isn't a problem with integration, it's a problem with filthy knuckleheads not keeping their heads on straight and calls for some new competitors to show them how to do it.
The second is something like an actual trade off, e.g. if you want the machine to be able to wake via network packet or pressing a key on the keyboard then you'd need the network controller or USB controller to stay in a low power state instead of being dead off. And then that might cost you half a watt, but you're paying it in order to get something, and then somebody has to decide if Linux users would typically want a default where that feature works or one where the battery can last a month in standby, since it's one or the other.
You’re right that it’s “a hundred different pieces each doing it right” but you gloss over the disadvantage of decentralization: getting everybody on board with the project. With a centralized product (such as at Apple) the CEO can say “I want to increase battery life on existing hardware by 20% before next release or you’re fired” and people will work 80 hours a week to get that done. With open source? You’ve got ten thousand different projects, each with their own leadership and their own priorities. You have no leverage at all to get them all to work on power efficiency, so naturally it takes a back seat to them working on their favourite features.
Because it's not actually a disadvantage, because if it's actually open source no one can stop anyone else from doing it. If you or your company wants to work 80 hour weeks to improve power efficiency on Linux, you can submit patches to all the different projects where nobody else is doing the work.
And that actually happens in real life. Most of the projects care to begin with because they use their own stuff and don't want to ruin their own battery life or have a competitive disadvantage over the alternative. Then other third parties that find business value in having it work pay someone to clean up the odd stragglers when one of them didn't do it or have the resources to do it themselves.
The main problem is when some vendor both doesn't do it and is hostile to anyone else doing it.
And that actually happens in real life. Most of the projects care to begin with because they use their own stuff and don't want to ruin their own battery life or have a competitive disadvantage over the alternative.
Sure, they try not to ruin the battery life, but who is investing the amount of engineering resources into Linux battery life that Apple invests into macOS's? No one, of course, because the ROI of doing that for Apple is much higher than doing the same for Linux. Linux's open nature means that going for SotA battery life does not yield a competitive advantage, so no one does it.
If you or your company wants to work 80 hour weeks to improve power efficiency on Linux, you can submit patches to all the different projects where nobody else is doing the work.
In other words, centralize the battery life project. Who is doing that?
> Sure, they try not to ruin the battery life, but who is investing the amount of engineering resources into Linux battery life that Apple invests into macOS's? No one, of course, because the ROI of doing that for Apple is much higher than doing the same for Linux.
The answer is rather that everyone is doing it. Then most people care about it a little so they do a little, but because it's most people that adds up to being the majority of what needs to be done. A smaller number care about it a lot but all that's left is for them to shave off the rough edges.
> Linux's open nature means that going for SotA battery life does not yield a competitive advantage, so no one does it.
How does it not yield a competitive advantage? If you're Framework, Dell, System76, Canonical, Red Hat, etc., you want people to use your product instead of buying a Mac or some competitor's Windows laptop.
> In other words, centralize the battery life project.
I don't understand how this is centralization.
Suppose Intel does the work to make good open source drivers and make sure their hardware has low idle power consumption, Red Hat does the work to make systemd behave in a way which is power inefficient in the hardware-independent ways, etc. Then Framework does an analysis of where power is going on their systems and finds that Intel and Red Hat did a good job but there's a bug in the third party network controller driver preventing it from going to sleep, so they fix the bug.
Where is the centralization? The work is being done by all different companies who aren't even necessarily interacting with each other. Some of the bugs in third party software are fixed by hobbyists or other vendors. Then Framework is left with a limited amount of work to do and they do it.
The problem comes when they go to do that analysis and find that the thing using more power than it should is a piece of hardware that the vendor both failed to document and failed to provide source code for the firmware, so that no one else can fix it when they don't. In other words, it's caused by a thing that isn't open source.
> who is investing the amount of engineering resources into Linux battery life that Apple invests into macOS's?
ChromeOS.
> Timer coalescing, idle wakeup minimization, race-to-idle optimization
These are important things, but they do not matter for power consumption in sleep, when the CPU is not executing instructions.
That's a hardware issue.
and yet my M1 manages to drain the battery in suspend mode in just a few hours
Something's wrong. Maybe a setting or a random app is preventing your laptop from sleeping properly. You have many threads here saying that MacBooks can go weeks on sleep, and that's also my experience (M1 Pro).
There was a thread about just this issue another day.
I don't daily drive an MBP anymore, only occasionally. But I had one for a week or so, and once or twice I've noticed that my backlit keyboard still had its lights on, which is unusual when the computer sleeps. The screen was dark, though, so it can be confusing.
Let me guess, you use docker?
I thought the issue with suspend on Linux was that swap had to be encrypted, but you could do it without kernel changes. There are some instructions here: https://techblog.dev/posts/2023/08/encrypted-swap-partition-...
Encrypted swap is a solved problem and has been for a long time
If the swap file is encrypted and memory encryption is turned on, I don't see why lockdown shouldn't be allowed.
You're already relying on the hardware platform for Secure Boot, it's not far fetched to apply the same view to hibernate if the platform protects memory and disk.
That said, S3 is still a viable option, and IMO, the best option. Some hardware vendors still implement S3 sleep for their Linux laptops.
Is the Mac actually hibernating though?
Typically a Mac will only hibernate if you ask it to or it's out of battery.
> and you cannot hibernate a lockdowned kernel
Why do you need hibernation? Apple gets the ultra low power without suspending to disk?
>power usage in suspend is especially sad because it’s pretty much a common problem for Linux on laptops
I don't know what you're talking about, is this an apple Silcon marketing ploy? my linux laptops lose less battery in suspend than my macbooks do powered down
Have you tried an apple silicon macbook?
While I don't deny that suspend is an issue on Linux I've just never seen this as a major problem? I simply turn off my laptop and turn it on when I need it - boot times are less than a minute so it really isn't a issue for me, just flick the power switch, wait for a bit then I'm good to go.
“Less than a minute” is going to feel horribly slow to people that are used to instant-resume and not having to think about shutdown vs. sleep.
You might be okay with it, but I suspect most consumers today won’t be.
This, so much. I read that comment and immediately recoiled at the idea of waiting "less than a minute" to be able to do anything. I'd estimate that 1/3 of the time I even open my laptop, I'm done with what I needed in less time than that boot up sequence takes and have closed it and moved on to something else. So often I just pop it open, do/check something and close it within seconds.
I go _months_ without rebooting/proper shut downs. And this is on a MacOS install that I've migrated from one Macbook to another for 5 macbooks now O.O
...recoiled... Some people go to work, switch on their computer and turn it off when they leave. I would say most in the world do that. Sure they don't know the diff between clapping their macbook shut or switching something off, but 1 minute does not make people 'recoil'. Very strange.
Totally understandable. You're right that those people are highly unlikely to really care between 2 seconds to being functional and 60 seconds. They're at the coffee machine anyway.
I've been obsessed with building things since I got my first lincoln logs set. I don't "clock out". There's no work computer and life computer, or even more foreign to me, no computer when not at work. I take my laptop nearly everywhere with me and have been known to pull over into the nearest gas station or any parking lot, pull it out and immediately write some code or make some notes due to something I'd just then had some breakthrough or idea about. There's no way I'm doing that if it takes a full minute to boot up and I'm there looking at a fresh rebooted OS. But if I can open it, touch my finger to the fingerprint reader and _immediately_ be productive? Happens all the time.
Hell, I'll walk across the room and open my laptop when my phone is in my pocket because it's just easier to use and it's immediately functional.
Different strokes for different folks, but I'd venture to bet that my experience mimics that of many others.
[dead]
I'm reminded of this Steve Jobs story: So it's the MacBook Air guy's turn. He comes in and places his prototype down in front of Steve. Steve opens the lid. Two seconds later he picks up the laptop and heaves it so hard it skipped across the table like a stone on water: "I said fxxking INSTANT ON!!"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44879509
I know it's poor form to speak ill of the dead in general and of St Jobs in particular, but I do not see how anyone gets much more from stories like this than "Steve Jobs was an ill-tempered dick of a bully" and "power made Steve Jobs immune to getting his head kicked in which is absolutely what happens if you behave that way outside of an air-conditioned Silicon Valley office".
I've never used sleep on my laptop. I always have the lid set to 'do nothing' when closed (i.e., stay on and keep running). In the past I gave up on using a macbook for many reasons, but a key one was that I couldn't keep the machine on when closing the lid. I can't fathom having to reconnect terminal sessions or other similar connections every time I want to move from one meeting room to another. Carrying my laptop awkwardly with the lid open between rooms just seems silly. I just close my lid and let the laptop keep running and then hibernate at the end of the day, resuming the next morning. True instant-on, and no downsides to me.
There is a command line tool for this: "caffeinate". You can add a script that runs it while there are SSH sessions open.
It's a failing that I need to pre-empt every situation where I don't want the machine to sleep and run a tool to prevent it from sleeping, when I could usually just say 'don't sleep when I shut the lid'.
That's probably because most people _want_ their laptop to sleep each time they close the lid.
The exceptions are really narrow. E.g. if you want your SSH sessions to stay alive, you also need to ensure that you never leave the WiFi coverage.
I don't disagree, but at least give me an option like windows does.
Not to mention open apps
S3 sleep is a solved problem and security issues around it are solved by Secure Boot and memory and disk encryption.
The issue is that firmware vendors disable S3 sleep in favor of s0ix/Modern Standby instead, which just puts hardware into low power states instead of stopping them entirely. This will inherently drain more power over time than just keeping memory powered in S3 sleep.
Modern Standby requires heavy integration with the OS to be power efficient. Turns out that takes a lot of reverse engineering because vendors will not release documentation or tune the kernel for their firmware.
Not just laptops but affects computers too. I have a brand-new Mini PC with Windows 11 and when you turn it "off" it continues to pull 6-10 watts. Not a lot but still over a year if you were to only used it minimally that's 52-83kwh or around $25-45/year at PG&E rates. Vendors are removing support for classic standby/hibernate so the only way to go to <1 watt is to pull the plug. It shouldn't be this way.
Anybody know why their so hell bent on removing S3?
My thinking is that Microsoft is basically the most influential in that, as they badly want to do their "stuff" while the laptop is not in use. Their "stuff" requires network connectivity and seemingly they believe they can do updates, or any other "optimizations" when the laptop is in "modern sleep" mode.
I'm surprised this required implementing a whole new sleep mode. Since it seems to be mostly used for async background tasks, why not configure the RTC to wake the laptop every hour or so (I think every laptop in existence already supports suspend with timeout) and go back to suspend if no tasks need to be done?
Microsoft wants laptops/PCs to mimic a phone and remain always connected to the internet and processing real-time emails/VOIP calls. It's all explained here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
My main use for laptops is as a notepad. If it takes a minute to start when I need it it's vastly inferior to a sheet of paper. If it can't remember what page I was on that's doubly so. Windows works more or less like a sheet of paper (though automatic reboots to apply security updates are a point in favor of paper that has no such issues.)
And I often use my laptop for things where seconds matter. I've got things on the stove that could burn, I may not have 5 seconds to spare locating the next step in the recipe.
For those use cases that I love my Chromebook. Underpowered, yes, but also it can basically sleep forever and also wakes up from sleep fast. Even if I need to turn it on if it is powered off it takes just a few seconds to boot.
There are often browser tabs and other documents windows I would like to keep openers and I want to jump back to exactly where I left off as soon as possible.
Let me preface this reply with that I'm not trying to preach or tell you how to live your digital life - everyone is different and if you have setup that works for you then great, keep on trucking.
That said, I worked the same way many years ago, with browser tabs and desktop sessions that were precious and I didn't want to drop them. But what I ended up realizing was that the stress of losing that state due to random power failures or software bugs was too much. I found it far better for my sanity and actual productivity to instead make sure I had a sane note taking system, where I could track what was actually important to me.
It was a great relief to my mental state and general stress to allow myself to shut down all processes and start clean every day.
While I understand your perspective here - let me counter with mine. I have the same issue where I maintain a 'state' that I'd prefer to maintain but my interest in maintaining it does have this anxiety you describe.
It's just a huge waste of time to get it all back. I see it no different than being in the middle of a heavy coding/mental task and being interrupted to the point that you have to 'start over' in the sense of getting all that context back in the right places.
Sure, I _could_ neatly close everything out and have a pristine perfect work/desktop environment. But, personally, when I see the work/desk environment of someone and it's absolutely pristine all I can think about is how they're spending energy to maintain that.
To give another example - in my workshop (woodworking), if I'm in the middle of something and need to take a break/leave the shop... I'm not putting _anything_ away. I turn off the lights and walk out. That way when I return I don't have to set everything back up. Now - when I finish something, then I go through and clean up and organize and get the state freshened up. Same thing with my laptop/computer.
Zero anxiety about it all - it's not about losing anything but time. And that's what's most important.
When I moved to Obsidian, I created a great note taking system that I use to track all my research. I didn't realize until you said this that I don't need to have my applications open any more because of this. Wow. Out of sight, out of mind I guess.
As suggested in the blog post, the battery life issue is complex.
You do need a CPU/SoC that’s efficient, and while Intel and AMD can do this it’s traditionally been a struggle for them.
Next, the OS needs to be capable of taking full advantage of the chip’s efficiency. Windows could be decent here in, but Microsoft doesn’t believe in an operating system that’s ever truly idle (and neither do the third parties living in your taskbar tray), so even on relatively efficient laptops much of that potential is wasted. Linux is kind of all over the place, depending on your hardware, which governor you’re using, how it’s configured, whether your browsers are configured to use GPU acceleration or are burning power intensive CPU cycles, etc.
Then there’s sleep. Most of the problems here come down to x86 laptops not implementing proper S3 sleep but only “modern standby”, which attempts to emulate the sleep mode that Apple uses that allows for emails to be fetched etc while in a near-sleep low-power state. The problem is that modern standby is not implemented well in Windows or Linux and how individual laptop firmwares handle it can vary a great deal, and the sum of it is that it generally speaking doesn’t work, which is why so many x86 laptops drain themselves after being “asleep” for a couple of days. My ThinkPad does this too.
It’s possible for x86 machines to manage this state correctly, as proven by Valve’s Steam Deck which can be put to sleep and drain its battery slowly enough to stay alive for a week or more. This seems to require a level of integration between the hardware and the OS (an Arch based Linux in this case) than practically all laptop vendors are either willing or capable of.
My Thinkpad X1 Carbon (gen 5) running linux can suspend for weeks without dying. There was definitely a window where battery life under suspending wasn't a huge problem in Linux, not sure what happened.
I also have a Framework 13 (11th gen intel) which has terrible suspend battery life (also loses 2-3%/hour like the newer AMD version)– I was hoping that the AMD chips would fare better, but it seems not.
For my all AMD ASUS TUF 16, I am having a great experience with sleep and battery drain. I’m running Nobara, a Fedora gaming spinoff. I can 100% treat it like my apple devices where I can close it and ignore it for several days, and maybe lose 1-5% battery over that time.
My understanding is that it being all AMD makes a difference, but I don’t know for sure.
That ThinkPad has S3 sleep support, unlike modern laptops.
My Framework has the same battery issues as OP.
My previous two Xiaomi laptops also held charge for a long time on suspend, though not weeks.
Are you using Modern Standby or S3 sleep?
Excellent point with Steam Deck. The machine is proof that x86 and Linux can do it and simply don’t.
While proof, I think it also highlights the root cause of the issue.
Linux is developed to be compatible with different hardware setups.
SteamOS and MacOS are both (supposed to be) locked to their respective hardware. It works on that hardware, but ymmv on anything else.
I guess that's an argument for Framework to start looking into working with the software that runs on their hardware. It's not like they need to support a whole lot of options either.
Valve is currently working on removing that assumption for SteamOS, though.
> Most of the problems here come down to x86 laptops not implementing proper S3 sleep but only “modern standby”, which attempts to emulate the sleep mode that Apple uses that allows for emails to be fetched etc while in a near-sleep low-power state.
That's strange because when I close the lid on my Framework laptop it disables Wifi.
> It’s possible for x86 machines to manage this state correctly, as proven by Valve’s Steam Deck which can be put to sleep and drain its battery slowly enough to stay alive for a week or more.
I had the original Steam Deck and the OLED Steam Deck and neither of them would hold a charge past a day or so. It's a constant annoyance for me as I don't want to leave it plugged in 24/7 but if I don't, it won't be ready to go when I use it. I often end up playing while plugged in which is just silly.
A week of battery (while it's "off") would be amazing, it feels like I can't get 24hrs without the battery being trash.
Compare this to my iPad or MBP and the difference is stark. I really only use my Switch in docked mode (the joycons suck) so I don't have a good read on how long it holds it's battery but I assume it must be better than the Steam Deck.
We got an ipad mini for my kid(s) and regularly leave it unplugged for weeks at a time, sitting on a shelf until we've got a flight or long enough car ride to justify bringing it out. I did that the other day and after not charging it since at least labor day, it was sitting at 90%. I'm just blown away every time.
Hey fyi and for posterity, on SteamDeck I have the same issue and the cause is the same as outlined above (modern standby). I would love to hear more from folks who don't have this out of the box.
The fix is simple but I have to wonder why it's not set by default
https://github.com/nazar256/publications/blob/main/guides/st...
Ideally the Steamdeck would come with hibernation after timeout and FDE enabled by default, but it doesn't. Still love it, and I'm glad/grateful it's open enough to enable these features on my own
Interesting to see this is so variable.
I got a Steam Deck OLED a few months ago. I haven't changed the standby behaviour at all. I can get a bit less than a week of standby + a few hours of gaming out of the box. Currently, my deck is on 52% charge after last charging it 4 days ago and playing ~3 hours of Silksong across those days.
Thank you for that link!
And yes, I'm surprised they don't do something like this out of the box. I really love my Steam Deck overall and I agree, the ability to tweak and enable these features really make it an amazing product. Especially in comparison to my Switch 2 which is great but 100% locked down.
No sleep battery drain issues on my OLED model. Stock OS. Got it a few months ago.
Can't agree on it. For whatever reason my deck OLED do have this issue. Do you use SDcard btw? Since it's really the only difference from a stock device.
I don't. I also have the highest end model FWIW.
BTW after making some research apparently OLED's could be waken up by Bluetooth devices and recently they added option to disable this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/188jgd7/howto_se...
Battery life is the only thing stopping me from getting out of the Apple ecosystem. As soon as a viable Linux laptop with "enough" battery life becomes available, I'll make the switch. At that point there's nothing on Apple side that couldn't be done better in Linux (with a bit of work, but that's okay).
I travel a lot, and often on standby for work during that time. I need to be confident that when I pull the laptop out, there's ALWAYS enough juice to respond to a situation immediately without worrying about anything else.
If Framework offered hot swappable batteries, even if a quick restart is required, I'd be fine with that because at least I wouldn't be stranded in that case. And I'd be happy to pay as much as a MacBook, or a bit more even, purely for ideological reasons. Apple's dominance is bad for all of us.
Instead of a hot-swappable battery, why not just carry a large battery-bank that can charge your laptop over USB-C? That way you don't even need to reboot.
Browsing around on Amazon, I see there's actually quite a few battery banks that with over 60W of output, and ~100Wh of capacity for under 100€
I assume for the same reason some people like integrated WWAN modems, it's annoying to have a device dangling off the side
Charging is a lossy process. Charging a battery, then using it to charge another battery isn't as efficient.
Plus, depending on how/where it's used, having to wait for it to recharge while connected to a power bank might be a non-starter. You also don't necessarily want to recharge while transporting in a bag either because of heat concerns.
> why not just carry a large battery-bank
Not being allowed to use those on an airplane could be one reason.
You can use a power bank up to 100Wh on a plane, which can be enough for a laptop
I specifically mentioned under 100Wh because that's the limit for planes.
> why not just carry a large battery-bank
And a mouse, because non apple laptops are hard to use with just the trackpad.
And the huge power adapter for the "gaming" laptop.
... sadly, it means I'll have to stick to Apple hardware for longer. As much as I think Cook is an idiot who's trying to dumb their products down to the point they're not even usable for power users, let alone developers.
> And a mouse, because non apple laptops are hard to use with just the trackpad.
Have you ever used a Framework's trackpad? It's very good.
> And the huge power adapter for the "gaming" laptop.
First of all, Framework laptops are not gaming laptops. Second of all, Framework ships smaller power adapters than Apple because they invested in Gallium Nitride chargers which are significantly more compact than other options.
Personally, I wouldn't even carry around a power bank, I just mentioned it because the person I was talking to said they wanted to carry around a hot-swappable battery, and I thought a power bank was a better option.
> And the huge power adapter for the "gaming" laptop.
Not if you get a properly standard-compliant laptop that uses USB PD for charging (like Framework)
I've actually bought a gaming laptop for someone this year. Asus. It comes with a brick proprietary charger that delivers the full power it can use and also with an USB PD that can't fully power it. Guess it works if not gaming, or gaming at reduced fps.
You know this isn't a thread about Asus, right?
Seems to be about the need for large accessories that double the volume and weight of a laptop.
When you say "Apple's dominance", are you referring to a potential dominance?
Because in terms of actual dominance, Apple is far from that in laptops. Lenovo, HP and Dell each sell more laptops than Apple, and those three alone make up 60% of the market.
https://www.industryresearch.biz/market-reports/mobile-compu...
Completely disproportionate, off the charts dominance (relative to everything else I have tried in (mostly hardware, but also software) quality, attention to detail and UI/UX would be my opinion. Power consumption would be part of that.
Granted, I haven't tried most of the newer niche Linux-focused laptops, which I intend to do.
Have to say that UI/UX suffered a lot at least on iOS side with the latest OS releases.
Dominance in power efficiency perhaps.
There's a few things for me, and the saddest part is I'm a very die-hard Linux user. Until a couple months ago when I had to start traveling, I've been using Linux exclusively for work.
1. The battery life, as others have mentioned.
2. The quality of the hardware: The screen is incredibly nice, the trackpad is VERY nice to use, and no other laptop has even come close.
3. It's so quiet. The fans almost never spin unless I've been compiling something for over a minute. I don't know how they do it but any other Linux laptop I've used, including desktops, have been super loud when running similar tasks.
How can LLM inference be done better on non Linux?
I can run models on my 96GB RAM MacBook Pro incredibly well.
As soon as someone tells me how this can be done in Linux, I'm ready to switch.
Just get a power bank for your laptop. I know it’s not the best solution but $100 and you have a battery pack you can use for all your devices
I really haven’t had a problem with my Lemur Pro from System76, which I got in spring of 2022. I did have to replace the battery once when there was noticeable swelling. Prior to this, I had always used a MacBook.
I think you could shut down a framework, swap the battery, and boot back up in probably 3 minutes or maybe only 1.
My first Apple laptop, a Titanium PowerBook, you could sleep the machine and swap the battery and not have to reboot.
> swap the battery
I count 14, 8 and 5 screws to swap the battery:
https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery/425
https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery+Replacement+Guide/85...
https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery/278?lang=en
Windows ARM laptops are quite good in that regard, but I'm not sure how close they're to Macs.
You are forgetting the touchpad, it does make a difference
I use a Mac M4 for work and have a Framework for myself.
The M4 is a beast, but I have a different priority for a device I want to call "my own". I want more control over "my" device, and I don't demand the highest performance or battery life. I grew up on Windows, and for a long time dual-booted with various Linuxes, and eventually used WSL on the regular. But now with my Framework I'm running Fedora, so for the first time in my life I don't have to deal with Windows at all.
It helps, I suppose, that I'm one of those weird types who likes to actually shut down their computer when they're not using it, instead of just closing the lid. I like a fresh start each time I open it up.
How quickly does your laptop start? I like this idea a lot, I am now going down the rabbithole of finding which distributions boot the fastest (I remember this mattered a lot to linux users about 20 years ago)
I want to say it's like 30 seconds to desktop with Fedora and KDE? I haven't timed it, it's probably less than that.
30s might be the threshold for me; any more than that it is distracting; since this is a laptop I might open it just to check my email for example
Are you really optimizing (for) the right thing here?
How many years will it take to get back the time you now spend researching boot time? :p
I used to have a computer that would use several minutes. I would just turn it on, then get some coffee and have a little pee. It was fine :)
> I suppose, that I'm one of those weird types who likes to actually shut down their computer when they're not using it
Erm, both windows and macs can be shut down
Edit: I'm getting downvoted but the way it's phrased I don't understand the issue with shutting down on macs / window. I always shut them down.
The point, I believe, was that their laptop battery lasts longer than many people's, with any OS or battery, because they shut it down much more often than most.
There was some discussion about Linux having trouble with battery life while hibernating. That hasn't been a problem for me because I just don't do that.
In my experience, most people like to just leave their computers on, or sleep or hibernate them. Some people specifically like returning to their windows etc. just like they left them.
I don't remember having "range anxiety" under S3 suspend on my old intel laptops. It just worked and they woke up reasonably reliably and quickly under linux if you had a regular thin and light with integrated graphics. I had an Apple intel laptop that might have been marginally faster returning to life but it basically just worked on either.
The move to modern standby has been a mess. It seems to have improved a lot but my kid always shuts down his windows laptop before putting it in a bag because it seems to have become urban folklore that laptops turn on in bags, overheat and get damaged. That is new. I carried laptops in bags suspended for years and nobody thought that. It just worked.
As someone whose job was to improve Windows fundamentals this makes me really sad. I worked on making Windows respect modern standby better, and there just wasn't a whole lot of interest in making it work. The whole OS needs a lot of considered improvement, and it's not getting it.
Thanks for your effort. I still have one of those early ARM based Windows machines: HP Envy X2.
While I rarely use it, when I do the instant-on still works pretty flawlessly. That is after running a few hours of Windows updates!
I'm in the same boat as the article. I actually use a Macbook Air these days for coding instead of the usual MBP and the battery life still surprises me.
I think it is more lived experience than urban folklore - it definitely happens.
can confirm, my MS Surface did it all the time, something about shutting the lid before removing the power supply. I can't recall now, but it was the thing that make me switch back to apple.
> it seems to have become urban folklore that laptops turn on in bags, overheat and get damaged
My previous laptop cooked its screen like that. Some of the layers warped into a wavy pattern visible through the backlight.
My Windows work laptop has a low-power CPU, so the danger is minimal, but still it consistently goes full throttle when asleep.
I've had it happened, sure it was with Linux but it was scary taking out a fire brick from my bag and praying it was still working. I had been using Linux for 10+ years until the M1 came out, and for as much as I love Linux unfortunately I haven't looked back, the hardware is just that good.
When it's time to replace my M1 air, if the laptop is still working (I tend to replace when they break), I'll try to install Asahi Linux to see how it is. It feels a bit too experimental/me being too inexperienced with OS to risk it on my main computer.
My M1 is suffering from a bug where there is runaway SSD writes and I have to restart it every few days. I've learned so many coping techniques. I'd never call this the best hardware I've ever owned, that was a 2011 MBA.
Yikes that sounds terrifying! What program is doing the writes? Apple or third party? Some demon going crazy with logging?
I've had my M1 Air since they launched, five years, and it doesn't show any sign of getting retired soon (except for the slight bend in my case where my lid jumped on it when it was open on the couch... but that mostly bent back.)
I had a 2011 MBA but vastly prefer everything about this one.
That's normally a sign of a dying ssd controller more than anything
I think I had that happen with a Windows laptop once like 6 years ago, I have used a couple MSI and Lenovo laptops and haven't had any issue. Windows has a much more wild driver ecosystem, and I'm sure there are bad drivers/motherboards/GPUs. (I do have some issues with my MSIs around USB-C docks causing bluescreens and refusing to resume from "screen shut off to save power" but as far as the laptop stuff it's been flawless.)
I’d noticed recently that my Macbook was consistently being warm even when I hadn’t used it in hours and it was closed and unplugged. I wound up doing a clean up of a bunch of processes that might be running in the backend, and it was resolved. I believe in the end it was some daemon for a built-in app, the contacts app maybe.
I’ve certainly had that particularly with older Dell XPS computers. So has Linus at LTT, which I suppose how it entered folklore.
I say this as my lab mate had his laptop do exactly that just last week, with up to date windows and a newer XPS laptop. It simply has never happened to my Macs
Modern standby is a disaster.
Only mildly relevant, but I dualboot windows and arch on my xps and decided to disable the grub boot screen timer... Accidentally left my laptop in grub mode for a few hours and it was toasty
I have never observably damaged a laptop in a bag, but I absolutely have had them burning-hot-to-the-touch after they decided not to sleep properly.
As a Linux user I feel you.
The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world (for power users) but the hardware is so, so good.
For me it is about having a completely silent setup. It is so, so hard to go back to noisy fans.
I really hope Asahi Linux keep going so I can have the best of both worlds.
Saying that the macOS desktop is vastly inferior to Linux desktops is absolutely nuts. I've tried to get my relatives on Linux desktops so many times, just for it to go completely wrong a couple of weeks after and having to reinstall Windows. It's just not made for average (or below-average) users, so I don't see how it can be VASTLY inferior to something as easy and polished as macOS.
I don’t need polished and superior, I need to get work done. I want the OS to get out of the way, not slow me down with animations, stage managers and pretty docks. I don’t even need customization, I just need it to stop trying to outdo itself and fall over.
I’d run kde or even gnome on my work MacBook if it let me without a second thought.
PS just installed ios 26 and what is this? If this low contrast blobby window thing makes its way to the laptop I’ll be very, very not impressed.
if you are power user, why bother with GUI at all ?
TUI is GUI with a focus on keyboard control. All the TUI apps people regularly use could be at least as good with a GUI, ssh and DX are the only good reasons for TUIs and ssh does X forwarding, too.
> If this low contrast blobby window thing makes its way to the laptop I’ll be very, very not impressed.
You have quite a bit of control over all of these features. Dark mode, contrast controls...
There is a lot there you can tweak to have it look how you want and it stays that way through pretty much all upgrades.
> animations, stage managers and pretty docks.
You can turn all this off for the most part.
Spend as much time and effort customizing your Mac as you do customizing your Linux desktop and a lot of your laments will go away.
I use both often enough to know that linux on the desktop is a much steeper investment if you want it to work for you.
Finder can't be replaced.
Finder the least flexible file explorer of any OS. There's no location bar. You can't have a dynamically resizing grid of icons, so if you resize your windows, the icons are constantly outside of the horizontal scroll blinds. The view modalities make it difficult to sort and find files. Major system paths (eg. Applications) are locked down and hidden.
The window manager can't be replaced.
Window manager placement hacks exist, but they are not first class. You'll never have first class tiling windows in Mac.
Many of the window manager quirks are forced upon you. You can't change how to cycle and alternate windows. Exposé is flakey...
> There's no location bar.
Option 1: View > Show Location Bar (you can right-click or double-click on any folder to interact) Option 2: Option-click the folder name in the Finder Window's title bar to immediately jump to other folders Option 3: If you want to type a location and go there, press Command-Shift-G for Go > Go to Location
> You can't have a dynamically resizing grid of icons, so if you resize your windows, the icons are constantly outside of the horizontal scroll blinds.
Of course you can. Select View > Clean Up By > and choose the option you like best.
> The view modalities make it difficult to sort and find files.
Name a built-in file explorer with semi-spatial (Sidebar off), browser icon mode, hierarchical list mode, gallery, and column view. Bonus points if they have anything remotely like QuickLook.
> The view modalities make it difficult to sort and find files.
What is difficult about Command-1, Command-2, Command-3, Command-4 to switch views? What is hard about Command-J for granular settings?
> Major system paths (eg. Applications) are locked down and hidden.
Applications is visible at the system-wide and user level. Applications folder is listed in the "Go" menu, present in every Finder menubar. Applications is, by default, on the left sidebar of every Finder window. If you want to type, Command-Space brings up any Application at a whim.
Can't find an Application or want to see EVERY app on the system and connected drives? Hold Option while going to Apple > System Information and click the "Applications" listing on the left sidebar.
> Window manager placement hacks exist, but they are not first class.
Moom wants a chat. BetterTouchTool wonders if you've heard of it. Heck, DockDoor is free and excellent, too! They're only second-class in the sense they won't bring down your system when they act up.
> You can't change how to cycle and alternate windows. Exposé is flakey...
This is either a configuration error or not being familiar with how to use it. Exposé works better than any similar system on any other platform I've tried - what do you think is a better example of a systemwide Exposé alternative on another platform? Wait, I don't need one because Mission Control & Exposé are bulletproof.
> Finder the least flexible file explorer of any OS.
Tell me how you getting around your system on linux?
Search is and remains a first class citizen on Mac, and is for the most part on Linux. Spotlight still edges out linux choices. Windows has all the "power tools" to root through folders cause its search is such hot garbage.
> You'll never have first class tiling windows in Mac.
No you have ones that work.
Because the moment that you plug in mismatched or non standard monitors into a modern linux distro all bets are off. To make that work your going to end up with some pretty intense setup where your forced into window management rather than a traditional desktop.
Can you do it... You sure can... But I run an out of the box IDE on a basic Mac with a few tweaks for a reason: because playing games with my tools isnt getting work done. I have an arch, ubuntu and windows desktop and I have a Mac laptop. Is the linux box fun. It sure is. Does running it involve doing a lot of chores, you bet it does.
> Because the moment that you plug in mismatched or non standard monitors into a modern linux distro all bets are off.
I do this daily with different displays and have no problems whatsoever. I've probably used over 30 different displays over USB-C and HDMI on Linux and have had no problems.
They were all different sizes, DPIs, panel types, brands, etc.
Meanwhile, I can't even do fractional scaling when using macOS lol
> I run an out of the box IDE on a basic Mac with a few tweaks for a reason: because playing games with my tools isnt getting work done.
I hear this sentiment often, but I think it's missing the main reason why most people prefer Linux, whether that's for work or leisure.
What you call "playing games" to me is actually configuring our tools and environment to function optimally according to our needs and preferences. Yes, we spend an inordinate amount of time doing this, but it ultimately leads to a more comfortable and enjoyable experience, which is well worth it considering we spend most of our day using our machines.
This is not unlike a carpenter who has very specific preferences about their tools, and how they might spend a lot of time organizing and honing them. Sure they can use a pre-built workbench from IKEA, but chances are that they prefer using one they've customized or partly built themselves over the years.
Dealing with jank and the occasional frustration is unavoidable in Linux, but no operating system and machine are perfect. There are always trade-offs. We just prefer the freedom and flexibility over a corporation forcing us to use our computers the way they think we should.
We all have different priorities and preferences, and I'm not saying yours are in any way inferior, but I wanted to clarify the other perspective.
My parents can never understand windows because they keep changing the ux design and my parents can't tell the difference between Microsofts AI ad stuff and the real os. My parents will literally type "email" into the Google search bar and hope to find their email address.
Windows has failed them.
Linux Mint/Cinnamon is closer to windows 95 than windows 11 is. It's cleaner, simpler, better.
Mac osx is annoying compared to cinnamon. I hate the empty space around the dock. I hate how Mac windows don't always consume the same amount of space for some reason so I can see the different rounded corners on different "maximized" windows. I hate Mac osx's full screen mode forcing each fullscreen app onto a different desktop. I prefer cinnamons default window tiling/desktop switching/fullscreening keyboard shortcuts and animations.
Finder's default mode of unaligned randomly placed folder icons is so wild. .DS_Store is so annoying. The lack of a system tray meaning you have to use the dock in order to see if you have a DM in slack. Spotlight opening the "spotlight" app when I type the "spot" of Spotify. Idk I just truly prefer cinnamon.
There's things about Mac osx that are great. The central nature of /Applications and of ~/Library is great. Lots of things are great.
Mac hardware is by far best in class but Mac osx is honestly pretty ugly compared to Cinnamon imo. I'm not biased. I paid through the nose for my MacBook. But I like the esthetics of Cinnamon on my desktop much more than osx.
I just got a work Mac and I have spent around 20 years now on linux before it. I was making a list compared to KDE (not pros/cons just differences) It is still a work in progress since its only a couple of days since im using it.
1. No delete button. I know you can do Fn delete but It is more problematic. And I do use delete often.
2. System keeps important system stuff in Library directory in home. Do not do remove any directories.
4. Os x doesnt quit apps and then expects me to go through all apps in windows switcher.
5. The spaces dont wrap around.
6. Finder is always in your alt +tab? Causes issues with switching.
7. Corners are round. How to Disable it control the roundedness
8. Alt +Tab doesnt automatically restore minimized windows.
9. App store is quite weak compared to archlinux
10. There is no spaces pager (a small bar at top where I can immediately see which desktop im in)
11. It seems that I cannot have windows of same app in multiple spaces.
12. Same app has only one window. Apple mail for example. Cannot copy text from email to settings.
13. How to Disable HTML display in apple mail.
14. Kmail has much better interface for signing
Both for viewing rhe signed emails and for deciding which key to use
15. Opening a new windows from spotlight is not possible
16. Download multiple wallpapers at same time is not possible
17. All operations related to an app should be inside an app. Alt+w for tab and ctrl+tab for switching makes me move two fingers instead of one.
18. Spectacle is so much better than screen shot on MAC os
19. Ramdisk on mac os x
21. Threads view in emails isnot possible in apple mail
22. Application specific power optimization (for good battery life) on OS X
23. Better security and access on OSX for apps.
23. Switching between apps of same windows on OSX does not bring up a visual aid..
24. Long press leads to accents which is very cool but also I didn't use it.
25. Left-clicking in a window to raise it _sometimes_ performs actions in the app (e.g. clicking a button or scrolling the window) and _sometimes_ only raises the window. It seems to depend on the app.
26. No ability to use focus-follows-mouse.
27. Home/End keys send you to the top/bottom of the whole document instead of the start/end of a line. The latter is much more useful to me and I use it all the time. You can change this behavior with a terminal command followed by rebooting, but some programs still do whatever they want.
28. Automatic text replacements change the text you entered into the text that Apple thinks you mean. (Can also be disabled.)
29. Holding down an alphanumeric key brings up an accept/symbol selector, as on iPhone. This isn't compatible with many terminal applications like vim.
30. The dock has a tendency to move automatically to another display when there is a maximized window on that display. (I know how to move the dock by going bottom of the display and moving the mouse down, this isn't that.)
31. The camera notch can hide icons and you have no way to get to them without either connecting and external display or a workaround like https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden.
> The spaces dont wrap around.
Indeed. I would love it if I could name spaces too. Amazing how little details improve productivity.
> It seems that I cannot have windows of same app in multiple spaces.
Right-click app icon in dock.
For different app windows in the same app, appearing in different spaces: Options->Assign to Desktop->None.
For app windows appearing across all spaces: Options->Assign to Desktop->All Desktops.
("Desktop" here actually refers to spaces, for some reason. And it would be nice to be able to do "All Desktops" at the window level, but nay.)
Thanks.
I feel your pain here; I remember my transition from Debian to MacOS. I’ve used DOS, Windows, Linux, and MacOS — each full-time for more than a decade. The switching pain is real, and some things still feel wrong to me after I got to love them on a prior OS.
E.g., in Windows apps, menu items are keyboard-addressable by default. This is brilliant for accessibility, and for accustomed power users. MacOS has no _by default_ equivalent.
E.g., managing virtual desktops in Linux are exactly as flexible and powerful as you want them to be. MacOS does it One Way (more or less), and you’d better like it.
I still love MacOS the most. Some of the things you list are real misses (#1). Some of them, I believe, are things you haven’t found yet (#11, #15, #16). Some are MacOS-specific metaphors which I’ve come to love compared with the alternatives (#4). Some I don’t understand but would be happy to discuss with you (#17).
> E.g., in Windows apps, menu items are keyboard-addressable by default. This is brilliant for accessibility, and for accustomed power users. MacOS has no _by default_ equivalent.
Cmd-Shift-? (really, Cmd-?)
You can begin using arrow keys from there, or start typing to search the menu items of the foreground app
You can also assign arbitrary hotkeys to any application's menu items in the OS system preferences
Yeah, I know about this; it’s not the same. In Windows apps following the standard (which all good ones do) _every menu item_ is keyboard addressable. Something several submenus in is trivially accessible by muscle memory: ALT-I-R-C to resize an image without constraints, e.g.
MacOS allows easy navigation of the menu, but does not guarantee that each item is hotkey-addressable.
4 - in macOS apps != windows (some apps don't respect this)
8 - minimize in macOS is more like "get this window out of the way without closing it", and it is related to 4)
15 - because of 4
23 - wat
Personally, once I got used to cmd+tab and cmd+` for window management, I can't go back, but it needs a different mental model than the one on Windows/Linux.
> 19. Ramdisk on mac os x
It has ramdisks (`diskimagetool attach ram://`) and tmpfs.
To be fair a lot of these might be because OS X was unveiled in 2016 /s
MacOS is just missing way to many core features. It feels more like a demo than actual software to be used day to day for a variety of computing work. I know the technical under the hood are all solid but the software the user interacts with is bad, all the default apps are barebones with bad defaults and no settings to fix it. My final point is: finder.
When I put non techy people on mac they end up having a good experience because they learn quickly there is no reason to touch anything except the web browser. I also want to highlight Macs are high end hardware in a premium package compared to Linux where people usually try it on a really old low/mid range device.
What are your relatives doing?
If they're like 95% of computer users, they use them to check their email, their FB/IG/etc and browse the web. A Chromebook would suit their needs, but in my experience, so would a modern Linux installation + a browser.
The biggest friction in my experience is UI differences, but that is solved by just mimicking Windows/macOS UI in KDE. Put buttons and components where they expect to find them and it seems to just work, in my experience.
You can also just tell them to get an M2 MacBook Air for $800. You'll have to do near zero troubleshooting, it'll last them the better part of a decade, they get unmatched battery life and hardware reliability, and if they do run into issues they'll have top-of-its-class support from Apple.
I know Linux guys don't mind putting up with the Linux experience but if your family is trusting you as "the techie," you'd be doing them a huge favor by not making them put up with that stuff.
> You can also just tell them to get an M2 MacBook Air for $800
Yes, you will find that most material problems can be solved by buying more stuff. If they wanted to buy a new laptop, they would have done that.
> You'll have to do near zero troubleshooting
That's the case now.
Meanwhile, with the Macs they use, I have to explain that there's a difference between Intel and ARM Macs, that no, their software won't work in MACOS_VERSION because Apple deprecated some API, and no, you can't upgrade to MACOS_VERSION+1 to use something that works, no the hardware they've been using for years won't work because the driver for it is no longer compatible with their Mac/macOS version, the simple thing they want to do actually requires $30 paid software to do, I can't help you when Apple sold you a small hard drive at a premium and macOS takes up half of it, etc.
> I know Linux guys don't mind putting up with the Linux experience but if your family is trusting you as "the techie," you'd be doing them a huge favor by not making them put up with that stuff
Yeah, having a fast computer that just works must be tough lol
> I have to explain that there's a difference between Intel and ARM Macs
No you don't? Why not tell your grandma about PowerPC and Motorola 68000 Macs too while you're giving her pointless information about CPUs Apple used in the past.
We're half a decade into the Apple Silicon transition. Intel Macs are not relevant to anyone except people who purchased a Mac within a couple years before the M1.
> no, their software won't work in MACOS_VERSION because Apple deprecated some API, and no, you can't upgrade to MACOS_VERSION+1 to use something that works, no the hardware they've been using for years won't work because the driver for it is no longer compatible with their Mac/macOS version, the simple thing they want to do actually requires $30 paid software to do, I can't help you when Apple sold you a small hard drive at a premium and macOS takes up half of it, etc.
I... can't even imagine what scenario you could possibly be running into any of this so I don't know how to argue against it.
I was already speaking on the scenario you brought up where this is someone that is gonna be living 95% in their browser. I don't know what weird proprietary software non-techie users are needing that's apparently not compatible with new Macs. Anything beyond web browsing - e.g. word processing, light photo editing, dealing with PDFs, etc - can be done with very high-quality, free software baked right into macOS.
You describe using a Mac like the black and white "before" footage from an infomercial showing that previously the only way to cut a tomato is smushing it with the side of a dull knife. If a Mac is too difficult for someone, Linux is not the solution.
> No you don't? Why not tell your grandma about PowerPC and Motorola 68000 Macs too while you're giving her pointless information about CPUs Apple used in the past.
Yes, I do, when Apple advertises new features in macOS and for whatever reason, they just don't work on their Macs. Why? Because some of their machines are Intel-based and Apple chose not to implement certain features they expect on their Intel hardware.
Similarly, I have to do the same for software. While fat binaries are common, sometimes they end up with ARM binaries that just won't work. Similarly, the ability to run their iOS apps doesn't exist on Intel Macs and they don't know why.
> I... can't even imagine what scenario you could possibly be running into any of this so I don't know how to argue against it.
My family member spent thousands of dollars on software licenses for their business. For years, they could use that software on their Macs, until they couldn't. I'm talking about things like Office and tax software.
Similarly, try using an old macOS version that older Macs get stuck on. You eventually cannot even get a working safe browser anywhere, because the APIs Firefox and Chrome depend on change between macOS versions due to API churn, eventually deprecating old macOS versions altogether when it comes to new releases. Eventually, the entire Mac app ecosystem does this and the only solution is to either upgrade your macOS version through hacks or buy a new Mac with an updated macOS version and then experience that again in a few years.
Then there are driver issues. I have family members that have perfectly good music production hardware that drivers no longer work for. For some of it, it looks like 3rd party companies developed paid drivers for new macOS versions. Same thing with touch screens, had to go down the paid driver route for those, too. That's just not a problem on Linux.
> You describe using a Mac like the black and white "before" footage from an infomercial showing that previously the only way to cut a tomato is smushing it with the side of a dull knife
I mean, that's one way to interpret being honest about my experience as tech support for my family's Macs and other computers over the years. The Intel -> Arm transition + Apple's propensity for API and OS churn affects their users who aren't buying new hardware every time a new version comes out.
> If a Mac is too difficult for someone, Linux is not the solution.
I'd stand by the statement that if a Chromebook would suit a user's needs, so would Linux. Both require a curated experience and there should be no expectation of users setting it up themselves. You can make computers running Linux into solid email/Facebook/Zoom/office/web/etc machines a la ChromeOS, and in my experience, that keeps people happy.
Obviously, Linux is not a universal solution, Macs or other software/hardware might be the right solution. I wouldn't subject musicians in my family to Linux, but it has kept my older family members online and safe.
I'm a huge Linux fan but "it just works" is not a phrase I'd use in the same paragraph as Linux. Try explaining to your grandma that she needs to open a terminal and run "sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade"
Why would grandma do that when there's been an update manager service GUI for two decades?
Either set it to do upgrades in the background automatically or tell her to hit "Install updates" when she sees a notification about it. Ideally you'd click the checkmark that enables the former.
The great thing about Debian and Ubuntu LTS releases is that they're rock solid and nothing changes for like a decade or however long they're kept on life support.
It seems that you haven't used it in a long time then. You don't need to go the terminal to update the system. Mostly you get a message that there are updates for the system. You click it, click update all and your done.
Yeah, and my fisher price car is a lot easier for my 3 year old to drive than my car.
Sometimes powerful tools need sophisticated users that have time to invest in learning to use the tool. "Inferior" might depend on who is trying to accomplish what, but it's hard to argue that if you're trying to do or build the most sophisticated and cutting edge things that computers are capable of doing, you probably don't want to be using macOS or window.
That doesn't mean that it doesn't work marvelously when you have 0 time to invest in learning to use your computer, and all you want is to access web applications and manage a few files on a screen bigger than your smartphone and with a physical keyboard.
People's habits have nothing to do with "superior" or "inferior" qualities of a certain OS. No matter how good or bad, the habits have a strong resistance force against any change. That's not necessarily bad, but let's not make it part of judging OSes qualities.
You're forgetting the target market here. Linux is better for power users. Not average joes.
Clearly this is a matter of opinion and opinion requires belief and belief means facts don't matter.
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I do all my software development in remote clusters/supercomputers. I’d consider myself a power user. My laptop is for running a terminal, vscode, a browser and the various applications my company requires, e.g. Teams, Slack. So I want reliability, low configuration and maintenance overhead on my part and good battery life. Linux can’t compete on these fronts.
All those pros you list have nothing to do with the desktop environment. Maybe low configuration but you can have that on Linux too.
I totally agree that the hardware and the underlying Unix is decent. Audio on Mac is also way less of a hassle. I am not saying that a power user wouldn't have good reason to chose a Mac, just that the desktop is for me the weakest part of it compared to Linux.
I do the same and I prefer KDE much more than Mac OS X apart from battery part.
It’s more subjective of a thing than many would like to admit. As someone who’s been working as a dev for a decade and writing code outside of work for twice that, one of the things keeping me away from Linux is that there simply isn’t a true Mac analogue DE.
It's funny how polarizing this is. Seemingly based on whatever system you grew up on, or are most accustomed to.
I find Mac's window management to be something of a joke, and can't imagine why anyone would want to replicate it. I do see the value of the global menu but everything else feels wholly unintuitive to me. I can't stand that cmd+tab takes you to the last app, not the last window, and raises all that apps other windows as well. I literally never want that.
The way Mac window management works, ironically, is that you manage windows as little as possible. You don't even go as far as to maximize or tile most of them. Instead, windows are sized to fit their content and sit where they may, overlapping each other and allowing the most relevant portions of each to peek through, like the digital analogue of a desk with a pile of odd-sized papers. Windows are foregrounded by either clicking a bit that's peeking out or triggering Exposé and choosing a thumbnail.
It's a very different mindset than that of a Windows-like desktop or tiling window manager.
Sometimes jumping through random hops to solve things just work on other operating systems is fun (not sarcasm).
hey, i don't know if you've considered it, but this comes across as a pretty unnecessarily-insulting way to state a personal preference.
Desktop Macs do have fans so they're not completely silent, but if you were under the impression there aren't any then that reflects well on how good their tuning is. AFAIK the MacBook Air is the only passively cooled Mac.
I know that they have fans but I really can't hear them. Maaaybe when gaming but I would to have to really concentrate on that. And I am super sensitive to noise.
It is so sad that apparently no one else bothers to tune their fans properly. It is such a killer feature for me.
for real. the only brand that comes close are the chromeboxes, or passive industrial computers, though the speed there isn't flawless, or close to it.
> The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world
I have to use Mac, Linux, and Windows desktops in my work.
They all have their pros and cons, but I can’t say I’d ever argue that the Mac desktop experience is vastly inferior to the Linux desktop experience.
Edit: Getting a lot of downvotes but most of the comments are about someone’s highly customized Linux desktop compared to completely vanilla Mac desktop. I’m referring to apples to apples comparison where they’re either some standard out of the box version or when customized with available tools and mods. Comparing your highly customized Linux desktop to a completely uncustomized Mac setup with no attempt at other tools or utilities isn’t an interesting comparison because it’s not apples to apples, it’s just a statement about your current preference.
On a Mac, you can switch between apps with Command-Tab or windows of the same app with Command-` but there's no way to cycle between all windows or bounce between to two most recently used windows.
Maybe this used to make sense when apps were single purpose but I do basically everything in a web browser or a terminal so not being able to bounce between the previously selected window(of whatever kind), as I can with Alt-Tab on linux or windows, is frustrating.
Also Command-` switches to the next window, not the previous one like I would expect.
MacOS removed subpixel antialiasing, honestly for understandable reasons, making rendering on low-ppi displays blurry, but high-ppi displays are still super expensive. I got a 32" 4k monitor(~140ppi) at Costco for $250. A >200ppi display of the same size costs 20x that amount.
For web apps, spinning them into “installed” apps (doable in both Chrome and Safari now) is the move. This unclogs your tab bar, gets rid of the pointless persistent browser chrome, and gives you the benefit of OS task management capabilities.
You can add Shift to both Command-Tab and Command-` to move in the reverse direction.
Woah, I did not know about this installable web app feature - this is a game changer. Thanks for sharing.
Also I find the default Command-` to be unintuitive, especially on non-US keyboards (` is next to left Shift for me). I remapped Command-` to Option-Tab so you only have to move your thumb.
32" 6K monitor from ASUS costs $1400, 27" 5K Dahua monitor is $500, it's not $250, but we are slowly getting there ...
Not bad! Thanks for pointing those out.
Betterdisplay is $20 or so and solves the ppi problem for the most part.
It’s the dumbest thing apple has ever done and hats off to betterdisplay dev. Best money ever spent on a desktop tool easily.
The solution is subpar, even if it's nice to have one. What windows and linux have is hinting for text and good antialiasing on vector elements. They map these those the actual hardware pixels so you won't have wobbly lines.
These don't matter as much when you have high PPI. But they're a lifeline on low PPI displays (and there are a lot of those).
I completely agree, having gone through that frustration myself a couple years ago, but it at least makes the experience sort of good enough for my backend swe usage instead of making my eyes hurt. It’s still much better on other oses on the same display, absolutely.
Most macOS keyboard commands that let you cycle between things (like windows or applications) can be "reversed" by adding the SHIFT key.
So CMD+TAB+SHIFT cycles in the opposite order of from CMD+TAB, etc.
> I do basically everything in a web browser
Then you are deliberately handicapping yourself, this isn't something you can blame on the OS. It's like complaining that a car has bad fuel economy because you always stay in first gear.
As for the displays, you are comparing apples to oranges. You can get a high DPI monitor which is smaller than 32 inches for cheap. Which is plenty of screen for the distances where DPI differences are important.
Well, I don't do everything in the browser and the terminal. I also use my IntelliJ IDEs.
But other than that? Most macOS apps are now inferior to browser-based analogs. Calendar, contacts, email, iMessage, Music, TV - they all just suck.
My experience is just the opposite. I have never encountered a cloud app which is anywhere near the best paid apps in quality. What cloud app is better at photo editing than Affinity or Photoshop? What cloud calendar is better than BusyCal? What cloud spreadsheet is better than Excel? IDE and text editor? Etc.
>Then you are deliberately handicapping yourself, this isn't something you can blame on the OS.
The classic "You're holding it wrong" defense. Especially when the alternatives don't have this problem.
If you think that the purpose of OS X or Apple devices is to live in the web browser or live in the terminal, then you've been very misinformed. It's on the level of buying a motorcycle and expecting it to have a roof. And then complaining about the manufacturer. Apple stuff has worked like this for decades.
Man just give me a way to switch between only the two most recent windows using a keyboard shortcut (without requiring some janky 3rd party program). Windows-style alt-tab. It's not a big ask and would make the macOS experience go from "barely usable" to "perfectly fine."
Does Command tab not do this?
It brings up a list of applications in most recently to least recently used order, so two apps switched to/from will constantly switch places.
Not if the windows are both from the same program. Then it's a different keybind, CMD-~ which doesn't have the same priority order style as CMD-Tab. I get caught up on this constantly, to the point where I decided to stop using one Chrome window under my work profile, and one under my personal profile, just so I can have my personal browser under a different program so CMD-Tab works better.
I actually use Edge for personal stuff on my work MacBook for this exact reason. The workflow simply isn’t possible otherwise.
Is that window priority order governed by the OS or the application?
I don't recall the difficulty you mention happening with Safari.
> It brings up a list of applications
"Applications" is the problem. I want to switch between windows.
cmd-tab does this. what are we missing? cmd-tab, cmd-tab. terminal, browser. browser, terminal. has for years.
That switches between apps, not windows. Open two browser windows and two terminals. Try to switch between one terminal and one browser without bringing all the other windows to the fore. You can't do it.
Windows (and most Unix WMs, I don't know where it actually originated) style alt-tab maintains a stack of recent windows. So you can hit alt-tab repeatedly to swap between the two most recent, or hit alt-tab-tab-tab to bring up only the 4th most recent window, etc.
Use contexts app.
I'm using virtual desktops in FlashSpace for that. There's also a third party utility called Alt-Tab that can do that.
Are you a gnome user?
Linux Mint with Cinnamon is bliss. Or well anything else, you are absolutely spoiled for choice with Desktop Environments in Linux. There is the perfect one for everyone. At least if you use X11, wayland is still a turd.
I found the Mac Desktop absolutely unusable for any development work as it comes out of the box. You need a metric ton of third-party extensions for simple stuff like proper alt-tab support or custom shortcuts. An configuration is supper limited.
And it will get so much worse with the whole glasses ui thing.
> Linux Mint with Cinnamon is bliss.
This is one of my go-tos when I need a VM, so I’m familiar.
> I found the Mac Desktop absolutely unusable for any development work as it comes out of the box.
But why are we comparing vanilla macOS to an extreme customized Linux setup as if they’re the same thing? Why one set of rules for one platform but those criteria are suspended for Linux, where we get to assume some specific set of perfectly configured everything?
This is the hyperbole that I can’t really take seriously. Calling it “absolutely unusable” just isn’t something I can take seriously.
I understand that some people like to customize their environments to the Nth degree and can’t live without their personal set of customizations, but that’s personal preferences. Calling other platforms “absolutely unusable” or “vastly inferior” is just an exaggeration when millions of devs use them just fine.
> But why are we comparing vanilla macOS to an extreme customized Linux setup as if they’re the same thing?
Your assumption that these Linux setups are "extremely customized" is wrong. Personally, I hate configuring or customizing much at all. The appeal of Linux is that there are distros that come configured out-of-the-box pretty much as I like it, whereas MacOS and especially Windows requires configuration and constant upkeep and maintenance. (MacOS doesn't even come with a decent terminal, for starters.)
For me, my main problem with MacOS is that it's full of looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong animations that you can not disable or remove. Disabling animations (or setting them to be <10ms long) is one of the few configurations I like to do. But this is not even an option on Apple's operating systems. It's like running through molasses in a dream-- it's so damnedly and artificially slow.
What makes you say it isn't an option?
defaults write com.apple.finder DisableAllAnimations -bool true
Because there is no option to disable all animations. Despite the name, that doesn't disable all animations. (In fact, I couldn't even find an animation that does remove.)
You said "Disabling animations . . . is not even an option on Apple's operating systems."
That is quite simply false.
One can not disable the animations on MacOS. I would very much like to be wrong. Please tell me I am wrong and how to disable animations, especially when swapping between desktops.
> disable animations, especially when swapping between desktops
When I first started using a mac for dev at my current job, I tried their virtual desktops implementation as a workaround for macOS's lack of alt-tab support. That desktop switching animation is so long it's honestly really funny, I just sat there for a minute switching around and laughing my ass off in disbelief at how slow it is. Unfortunately it does also make the feature completely unusable, so we're just stuck with one desktop and a gimped alt-tab. Just an absolute usability train wreck going on over at Apple.
You can do that by installing FlashSpace. It reimplements the desktop management just to get rid of that stupid animation.
Apple is at this point maliciously incompetent...
I'm surprised and happy a third party solution exists for this. It's a shame a Mac requires so much third-party software to get it to a usable state. But it's a good thing supply-chain attacks are a long solved problem, and Macs can not get malware.
(For posterity: I am being sarcastic, to highlight how Apple's UX stance increases users exposure to supply chain attacks. "Macs can not get malware" is a long-standing myth.)
> But why are we comparing vanilla macOS to an extreme customized Linux setup as if they’re the same thing? Why one set of rules for one platform but those criteria are suspended for Linux, where we get to assume some specific set of perfectly configured everything?
My Linux Mint installation is actually barely customized. It absolutely works out of the box. I disabled a few animations and selected a different theme and added like three extra shortcuts but that is it. Nothing that would take more than ten minutes.
I was comparing the vanilla experience.
And yes, I should have specified that I am talking about my needs. I totally believe that the Mac Desktop might be better for the average user but that is no me.
Other OS’s handling of “alt-tab” does not make it de facto “proper”.
You are trying to use macOS like your other favorite OS(s). This is not how macOS has ever worked, and the macOS approach is more than fine for millions of people.
I doesn't matter if it is fine for millions of people if it isn't fine for me.
None of that matters when it was your poor description being corrected.
> You are absolutely spoiled for choice with Desktop Environments in Linux.
That is both a pro and a con. For someone offering tech support or writing documentation it's a pretty big negative.
> as it comes out of the box
This doesn’t seem like a fair way to evaluate MacOS given the effort involved in configuring a Linux installation
Depends how you configure it. If you like things like tiling window managers and keyboard driven computing, Linux is in a category of its own.
There are a dozen or more options for tiling systems and keyboard-driven computing on macOS. Personally, one of the reasons I use macOS over Linux is because I find it easier to create custom keyboard commands and shortcuts. It’s all doable on Linux, sure, but on macOS there are several apps that make it easy.
If you haven't used something like i3/sway/awesomewm/hyprland on the linux side you won't know what you're missing.
While there are several apps to create custom keyboard commands, only yabai+skhd come close to what's available on linux, and it's not even that close tbh.
I’ve used i3 and awesomewm and bspwm etc etc. I’d be happy to never use them again!
> I’m referring to apples to apples comparison where they’re either some standard out of the box version or when customized with available tools and mods. Comparing your highly customized Linux desktop to a completely uncustomized Mac setup with no attempt at other tools or utilities isn’t an interesting comparison because it’s not apples to apples, it’s just a statement about your current preference.
Perhaps you missed the parent's "(for power users)"?
So here's an apples-to-apples comparison: customizing Mac desktop for one's preferences compared to Linux.
I've been on Mac for 10 years because of Work. Before that I was on Linux, using the AwesomeWM tiling window manager.
I dearly miss AwesomeWM. I've tried most 3rd-party window managers for Mac, and nothing comes close to the snappiness and functionality of Linux's tiling managers like AwesomeWM. Nowadays I just use window-movers like Rectangle [1], and I feel handicapped.
The simple fact of the matter is that Mac does not allow the level of customization that Linux inherently does. MacOS' UI hooks are through the Accessibility framework, and in my user experience, it's just a slower, jankier emulation of what a more deeply integrated WM can do. As a specific example, the author of DisplayMaid [2] has complained elsewhere on HN that macOS does not provide reliable identifiers for the displays, so they had to implement their own heuristics. Side-note: for a system so inherently dockable as macbooks, it's a tragedy that I have to rely on a 3rd-party app to re-position my windows for one of my 2 regular work setups.
I'm sure Apple could implement the hooks for better WM customization, they've certainly done their few updates with Spaces and their own poor-man's tiling, but the years with no update to integration demonstrate that they consider the Accessibility hooks to be Good Enough.
[1] https://rectangleapp.com
[2] https://funk-isoft.com/display-maid.html
yabai is as close as I've seen, but yeah nothing close to awesomewm or even something like sawywm
The point is that Linux allows you to customize it to your liking, almost infinitely. There is almost nothing you cannot do.
People are comparing them to vanilla Mac setups because Macs don't really let you have a non-vanilla experience.
> The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world
Asking out of curiosity, why is this? What's the functionality you miss on Mac?
Most of it is there but you need a crap-load of third party extension and some even cost money.
Like proper alt-tab, better keyboard configuration, Finder is the worst file manager I have ever used, a classical task bar and so on.
You can manage but the defaults are really bad for power users.
Honestly Apple just needs to let me install a proper Desktop Environment like KDE on it. The unix base is decent, just give me more freedom.
To be fair KDE is also pretty wonky out of the box (basic stuff like turning numlock on boot is unnecessarily buggy or confusing).
you usually also need a bunch of extensions. And 50% of them are broken due to various if you try to use KDE builtin extension thing.
The one I have always missed is proper focus-follows-mouse support. The mac desktop always feels really clunky without that when working with multiple windows.
FWIW, this is now possible albeit with a third party app: https://github.com/sbmpost/AutoRaise
Proper focus-follows-mouse does not autoraise the window when it gives it focus. I see that that app does offer "don't raise the window" (which I think is an improvement from last time I was researching this some years back), but only under an "experimental feature" flag that relies on undocumented private macos APIs that might go away in any future macos version...
Personally, most of my problems with MacOS (and Apple's operating systems) would be fixed if it were faster. The OS is full of very lengthy animations that aren't necessary, such as when switching between desktops.
Looks like on Windows it possible to disable all animations, including switch desktop, but you have to press two buttons to switch.
This sounds like the so-called "modern standby" (S0 vs S3, if I remember correctly). I bought a thinkpad a while back with "modern standby" and the thing wouldn't last the night suspended, and would often wake me up with its fans howling and end up being very, very hot while suspended. I disabled "modern standby" in the BIOS and it was back to sleeping for weeks without losing charge. I have no idea if that's what's going on with Framework laptops, but "modern standby" is one of the dumbest changes I've ever seen in PC hardware. To my understanding it's to make laptops behave more like phones, but I've never experienced any meaningful difference in resume behavior between S0 and S3 suspend.
The standby issues with Framework laptops (at least the early ones, I don’t know about recent developments) was a well known issue.
I recommended Framework to someone looking for a laptop a while ago and they were bit by the standby battery drain issue. I felt bad having recommended it to them because I assumed such a basic issue would have been addressed in a laptop that was so highly regarded.
Some of the issues have been addressed. For example, iirc, there was a bug where pulling out the power plug while the lid was closed would trigger the device to wake up.
Some other issues remain. Largest I am aware of is independent from the hardware, but an issue with suspend-to-disk & kernel lockdown, which prevents deep sleep.
The idea behind modern stanby is a good one, when it is implemented correctly (like how Macbooks do it). Unfortunately most PCs have a terrible implementation and instead get hot and drain the battery overnight.
I had* an 11th Gen Intel NUC that couldn’t sleep at all for something like a year due to EFI bugs… They finally did eventually fix the regression but really, it’s just incredible - if one company should be able to do EFI right it’s Intel!
I’m not sure if this was related to “modern standby” (it was around that time if I recall) but that hasn’t really helped anything. This is a desktop so why they insist on deprecating real standby for everything is beyond me…
* I actually still have it but it became my home server, so now doesn’t ever need to standby, luckily.
Honest question, how is it possible that Macs are so much better in terms of hardware? Context: I use a MacBook at work and a Lenovo with Linux at home and now I might need to change my personal laptop, but I struggle to find (hardware) reasons why not to buy a MacBook, a MacBook Air is actually cheaper than another laptops with similar specs. There's still the ideology of repairability and openness which still plays a big role for me, but from a hardware perspective I see a clear winner. How is it possible that no other manufacturer can come close to the apple offering? There are big players (Lenovo, Dell, HP etc...) that I would have thought they would have the capabilities for producing similar products, why do they lag so far behind?
I think one factor is that other companies (rightfully or not) think they have to offer a range of products that uses lots of different hardware.
Looking for a laptop at dell.com, for example, they seem to offer a choice of 7 different CPUs in 5 product lines (Latitude, Inspiron, Dell Pro, Dell Plus, Dell Pro Plus) with at least 3 different graphics cards (Intel Iris Xe, Intel Arc, and HawkPoint - UMA. I also spot a generic “Intel” that may indicate a fourth one)
Their desktops use different hardware, again, with, for example, Intel® UHD Graphics or Nvidia cards.
To me, that suggests they internally somewhat act as multiple smaller companies with smaller budgets to tune products.
Also, if they ask one of their suppliers about a performance issue, chances are the answer is “get out newest product”, not “let’s help you fix that”.
Apple doesn’t have that problem anymore for most of their hardware.
I HATE this. I regularly look at really high end products I'll never buy for the fun of it in a "What's the best X that money can buy?" sort of way. And it took me half an hour to find what's the "best" Lenovo laptop money-no-object . Not even ChatGPT could figure it out easily (as far as I can tell it's the P16s). Apple? Well they sell 2 laptops: the MacBook Air and Pro. Select the Pro, spec it out to the max, done. Even the 13/16-inch choice is part of the spec process, and not a separate product.
PC manufacturers, please, for the love of all that is holy, make FIVE laptops: the thin, the tablet-laptop, the "pro", the gaming (the "pro" with RGB) and the workstation (as in Xeon/Quadro). Keep the name you give each of them year-after-year-after-year. And just offer me a lot of CONFIGURATION options to each of these, not a lot of different products.
Dell seams quite reasonable by comparison with Lenovo.
Huge barrier of entry. It requires a lot of integration and investment. Getting another supplier to move usually involves handing over big bills. Even then it is not guaranteed that the change is (fast) enough. I see it all the time, nobody gets their ass up unless it’s on fire. Still some companies will claim „at least it’s warm now“. „This is fine“-meme is real. Resist change at all costs.
I’ve seen companies losing their by far biggest customer because they refuse to hire real engineers instead of juniors to fix their software. The customer tried YEARS of complaining before.
Another customer: different suppliers use different barcode patterns for deliveries, some including nasty stuff like NULL as separators (but only sometimes, can be space, tab, whatever) or non-unique IDs. They rather spent the effort to fix everything else with workarounds than change the contract and demand proper barcodes/delivery data.
CPUs are the main reason.
They’re about 1-1.5 generations ahead of AMDs mobile offering, and OEMs have sweetheart deals with Intel, which is more like 4-5 generations behind.
So flagship business laptops (which are the only comparable laptops in terms of build quality to Macbooks) are hamstrung, and everything else is built like a matchbox even with AMD cpus.
It's everything else where MacBooks excel too. The build quality is insane, I've never seen a laptop with as little flex as a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. The keyboards are now finally great, and the display is amazing as well. Trackpad is best in class too.
Another thing: the displays are glossy, but still not very reflective. The Windows laptops glossy displays are so much more reflective, they are unusable outside. Also something worth mentioning, the MacBook displays get really bright. A high-end OLED display hardly goes above 400 nits. A MacBook Pro can go to 600 nits and outside it goes to 1600 nits. This is the difference between being able to use a laptop outside, and not.
Durability: if you're not doing anything crazy the MacBook will look brand new even after years of usage. Notable exception is the cheap plastic key caps which degrade very quickly, a bummer.
So the MacBooks beat the competition easily from a hardware quality perspective, and we haven't even talked about the elephant in the room yet: CPU performance, battery life and fan noise, obviously Apple is even further ahead in this area.
And then price, as strange as it sounds, both the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are cheaper than the competition.
Disclaimer: I don't own a MacBook personally because I think macOS is not great, but that's probably the only reason why I'm not buying a MacBook. I would happily pay same the price of a MacBook Pro for a similar Windows laptop if it existed. It does not. There are always compromises.
That’s a factor, but I’d still rather have an M1 MacBook Air than any other laptop with a comparable form factor. Surely AMD and Intel can offer something that’s at least able to compete with an M1 in terms of performance per Watt. But Apple’s competitors are just nowhere near offering a comparable product.
Doesn't Intel still win out for single thread?
no, and even if they did, the way they operate is “thermal and power headroom is free performance gains!” - which is a sucky philosophy with laptops, as they get hot and lose battery much quicker than they need to by constantly boosting.
[dead]
>how is it possible that Macs are so much better in terms of hardware?
Mac are premium hardware, and they earn higher margin. Apple use that to reinvest into their own hardware. And has been doing so for 30+ years.
Better quality PC generally dont sell as well. They have less incentive to do so. The whole PC business is also cut throat, in the old days you could have most of the margin on PC going to Intel. While others are fighting for what is left.
Recent example speakers. PC Laptop have had appalling speakers for years if not decades. It wasn't until Youtuber start pointing out some of these flaws which became competitive advantage for certain brands did PC marker start paying attention and R&D to it.
Is your theory that PC's bad reputation is from people only having experience with cheap ones? If so I'm not sure if I buy it.
At my work, all non-developers are given Microsoft Surfaces. They're not cheap machines by any means, but they have nothing but problems with them. Overheating, battery drain, lag, full-on lockups, requiring regular daily reboots, needing replacement after a year, etc.
I'm guessing they just give everyone PCs because it's what most people are familiar with, but I have to assume they're spending more on those units than a base-spec MacBook Air that would get way better mileage and cause less tickets for IT.
> the ideology of repairability
The best kind of repairability is not having to repair something.
The article is pretty light on details. Whether the Framework is worth it to you really depends on your use case. I never leave a laptop in my bag for three weeks, and if I do I have the foresight to actually shut it down rather than sleep it. So the battery drain while sleeping is less of a problem for me.
My Framework 13 has the Ryzen 5 AI 340 Chip, and I get 5-6 hours of work on a charge. The Macbooks definitely beat this, and their hardware has other benefits (silent if you opt for the Air, bigger/better trackpad, etc) but for me, being able to run Linux is worth the trade-off by far.
I like that on Linux (GNOME) I have all the functionality I need out of the box without having to install a paid app for window snapping (I heard they fixed this recently?) or to make my mouse buttons work. I also find that since I work with containers a lot, developing on Linux removes a lot of friction. I can run docker/containerd natively without having to babysit a VM that likes to eat all my RAM or hang randomly (no docker/rancher desktop layer). Even just having the same coreutils and package managers as I do inside the containers really simplifies things. Our MacOS devs are always struggling with homebrew putting shared libraries weird places that can't be found by the python bindings and this "just works" on Linux.
My Framework is a personal device, not for work. I might use it once a day or less for a couple hours or less. It was 100% charged this past Saturday night when I picked it up off the charger. I used it for an hour or two looking for doing some planning for Halloween. Nothing serious, just browsing with Firefox. I shut the lid and placed it on the coffee table. I picked it up Sunday night to find the battery had depleted to below 20% and Windows was in Power Save mode.
This happens every time. I get one and half evenings of light usage out of it before having to charge it.
You can change the action for "shutting lid" in windows settings. Mapping it to hibernate can help. You might have to enable hibernation first if you haven't already.
Windows has automatic Modern Standby to Hibernate support (by default after 5% battery drain in standby). If it is not entering Hibernate, there may be an application keeping the system awake.
This works great for me on my Lenovo, I don't even have to close the lid, it just works. I think I configured it to be a little more aggressive about going to sleep when on battery than the default, but the settings work.
this sounds like a dumb workaround for fundamental issues that should ideally be addressed by beating app, driver, and hardware developers into submission in a way that would probably fall afoul of antitrust law
What about the other 95% of the time?
5-6 hours? In 2025? That's... really bad. My 5 year old Macbook Pro lowest-spec M1 gets at least 10-12 hours of work on a charge and lasts for weeks in sleep mode.
I love my Framework but the battery life is indeed horrendous no matter how you slice it. Combine it with the sleep drain and if I use it for a bit then close it overnight without shutting it down it's probably dead by the morning.
To me it appears that the screen is a huge power hog - at least in the 16.
My idle power consumption at 0% display brightness is around 7.5W, but I've seen people get to as low as 6.5W. Not great, not terrible. With the display at 50% it jumps to the teens(13-17W).
Meanwhile the display in the MBP peaks at 6.2W:
https://andytran93.com/2021/12/05/power-consumption-implicat...
I guess herein lies their secret sauce - with the rest of the device idling at ~5W total power consumption in this state doesn't go beyond 11W.
I've seen the whole MBP (not just the display) using just 4.5 W while browsing HN with little else running.
Let's me try to give you the solutions to your problems using Mac.
1. Homebrew: I use Nix package manager (with home manager, though you don't need to) and get rid of homebrew completely.
2. Docker: I assume you referred to Desktop version. You can just just Colima and the Docker/Compose CLI. You will get rid of all the bloats coming with Desktop. Bonus: see #1 for installing Colima and Docker CLI.
The parent's complaint about non-native docker is not solved by colima. It's not bloat from the desktop app it's the fact that you have to run a VM to run any sort of container runtime on a mac.
This is no longer the case with macOS 26.
Edit: each container still gets its own vm but the container runtime is now native.
https://github.com/apple/container
"The container runtime is now native" is a meaningless phrase. The containers are VMs and they will always be VMs.
Colima constant take a lot of cpu, but issue gone after switching to orbstack which is not FOSS unfortunately.
I really, really want an ARM laptop with great Linux support. It's very difficult to justify buying an non-M series laptop today, when the M series laptops outperform x86 laptops in battery life by such a wide margin. I'm sure some of that is because Apple controls their entire hardware and software stack and can optimize macOS for battery life, but it's hard not to believe that the processor architecture (i.e. x86) is mostly to blame for the terrible battery life of most laptops.
I think it's still up in the air whether a decent non-Apple laptop/desktop class ARM chip will come to market before Intel and/or AMD narrow the efficiency gap enough that the hassle won't be worth it.
Who would make it? Do the likes of Broadcom have the vision & ambition to push into that class? I could see it happening if AMD decided Arm was the way to progress, but that would be bold too. (AMD does already have an architecture licence though I believe.)
The M Series doesn't get battery life rep due to it being arm its purely due to Apple optimizing for battery life and partly marketing it a ton. You can get x86 chips that can do 24HR playing a video which is 5 hours more than the M2/M3 laptops and keep in mind thats running bloated ass windows which probably uses 2-3x the system resources of macOS. I'm pretty sure the snapdragon chips out preform Apple silicon at almost every metric.
> I'm pretty sure the snapdragon chips out preform Apple silicon at almost every metric.
No, not even close.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Air-15-M4-review...
I have extremely low trust in the methodology of that website. Just seeing the multi threaded benchmarks alone is enough to know they've cooked most of those tests on the snapdragon Elite machines. The Snapdragon chips came out before the M4 to compete vs the M3 which they won in almost every metric except single core. Since the X2 is soon to be released they appear very likely do that again.
The Arm architecture isn't why Apple Silicon is so good at this. Apple's silicon engineers have been very good at designing a system of power states that is extremely efficient, and have tight coupling with the OS. Linux on a framework laptop gives you none of this co-design.
Exactly - Apple hardware is designed for its software, and vice versa. They get battery gains across the stack.
I remember when the M1 Macs first came out, an Apple engineer revealed they'd optimized the hardware so one specific low-level operation macOS does all the time was 5x faster than on Intel [0].
[0]: https://daringfireball.net/2020/11/the_m1_macs
> Apple hardware is designed for its software, and vice versa
Sometimes I find it hard to believe that Apple Silicon implements 2 different togglable memory models, just so that Rosetta can better emulate x86
https://www.sra.uni-hannover.de/Publications/2024/wrenger_24...
It’s not even a particularly obscure low-level operation: atomic add. Every computer in the world performs that exact instruction a huge number of times running normal, non-Apple software.
The key insight is the kind of “vertical integration” providing the kind of feedback loop to spot the opportunity.
Funny side story is years ago when AMD was developing the Opteron A series I commented somewhere that AMD is making a terrible blunder and is going after the wrong market. They needed to start the other way around, and build a kick ass Arm + GPU SoC that was more akin to a PC in terms of performance and not a throw away raspberry pi SoC. Bigger caches, wider memory bus, PCIe e.g. for NVMe, powerful GPU. Essentially something general purpose that could power a mid range laptop/work PC/Desktop/Embedded but designed to be cost effective and crazy power efficient. "There is totally a market for it." I said.
People responded along the lines of "And what is going to run on that?" And they were right. At the time there would have been no killer app, not even Linux could propel it IMO. Of course Apple has the ability to steer their entire ship just like they steered from PowerPC to x86-64. So kudos to them for proving I was right ;-)
Though I still want my AMD Arm GPU SoC...
For that, you'd actually need a high performance ARM core on one side (and frankly, it's just Apple at that point, they needed well over a decade to get there), and you need some way to make legacy x86/x86_64 applications to run smoothly to get over the chicken-egg effect, and you need some way for all the legacy hardware devices that people plug in into their computers.
Apple could do it not just because of their experience from the iOS device family and the IP they acquired for it, but because they didn't need to take care that much about the issues in the Windows ecosystem. Apple has long since discouraged third party hardware that can't be driven with libusb from userspace as kexts have been deprecated, Apple has been pretty ruthless in forcing developers to keep their software compileable, and their ARM Architecture License allowed them to do tweaks and extensions to make performant emulation of x86 code possible.
Well the architectural backwards compatibility issues are Apple's problem really. I was thinking of a pure Arm machine running Linux/BSD/9.
The problem is, without the backwards compatibility and a high-performance core design, the customer base is really, really small - and that's the reason (in addition to Qualcomm having had an exclusivity agreement with MS, but only putting out crap designs) why every attempt of pushing a non-x86 Windows machine so far just completely and utterly failed.
The lower/ultra-low end market is a different thing - just look at the absurdly massive popularity of Raspberry Pi and their clones - but as said these are toys, not capable of being an actually usable general (as in: general population) computing device.
> and their ARM Architecture License allowed them to do tweaks
FWIW, both Intel and AMD also have architectural licences from ARM.
This isn't just a question of direct power management features or use of custom silicon, but there has been curious noise for years out of Apple over a major cause: memory management.
In modern systems memory becomes a major source of power consumption, so reducing how much if it you need to keep active results in big gains, on top of all the other benefits of doing this. This is partly used as the reasoning to explain why Swift has evolved in the direction it has, but also various apps that suspend/resume their state at a higher level than simply relying on the OS to do it.
It would take a gargantuan effort, which would likely annoy almost everyone, to get a desktop Linux distro to do this.
I believe that's also why Apple has been conservative with the amount of RAM in their phones.
I don't think Apple does anything particularly special with memory management as it relates to power.
I think Apple's success at using power management data from their mobile products to make computer hardware with really good power management is highlighting just how bad computer power management has been.
When you close the lid on a laptop, there are a lot of layers that all have to do the right thing. How is Windows configured? How do the drivers installed on that laptop handle the Windows state transitions? How do all the pieces of hardware on that laptop (CPU, etc.) work together to implement the various states?
I think it is possible for a computer manufacturer like Framework to work with operating system vendors like Microsoft and Canonical, and hardware vendors like Intel and AMD to improve how power management is implemented in their hardware.
There is always some level of "friction" involved when you are trying to integrate across different vendors. Some of the best Windows hardware I've used was made by Microsoft. The Surface line, at least in my experience, is really good.
It will require an investment of course, but I think it is possible.
I want to love framework, and I really do want to get behind their mission, but a few things stand out.
First and this is the elephant in the room, it's probably better for the environment to buy a refurbished think pad. The most environmentally friendly product is one that gets reused instead of going to a landfill.
The 13-in framework only offers one SSD slot, The expansion Bay offers a nice storage option but these are a bit overpriced and then you're down to three ports. The design itself feels really prone to failure, if you're popping in and out expansion cards all the time eventually the ports are going to fail which seems like a really weird design choice. It probably would have been smarter to do something that requires actually screwing in components.
To get comparable specs, you seriously need to spend about 50% more on average, and this is just me comparing ThinkPads to Frameworks. If I wanted to look at laptops on sale you can easily find framework specs at half price.
Finally the support issues don't really inspire confidence, if my Lenovo laptop has issues I can walk into a variety of authorized repair centers and just let them sort it out. Framework simply doesn't have this, I don't have the appetite to pay a premium price and not have this as an option.
Extended warranty options are iffy. You have to first pay more for the prebuilt laptop, and then at the performance tier ( Amd 350) you have to drop $1,690 to get a 3 year warranty. It's out of stock anyway.
The Lenovo E14 Gen 7 with a Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 255H Processor is about 1030$ direct from Lenovo with a 3 year warranty (2 years is available, and is my risk tolerance sweet spot, so I can save 60$ there).
The only reason I'm looking at the E14 is I REALLY want two SSD drives. If I'm ok with just one I can buy a refurbished P14 for around 780$.
I think the core issue is Framework is still a boutique brand, if they ever reach the size of a major OEM then they're pricing will be more competitive.
> if you're popping in and out expansion cards all the time eventually the ports are going to fail
If you're plugging and unplugging USB-C cables all the time, eventually the ports are going to fail, but we generally consider plugging things into USB-C acceptable.
The Framework expansion modules are just USB-C ports, but they're not subject to much twisting or bending when using the modules so they should last longer.
Even if the internal USB-C ports which the expansion cards plug into fail, which to me also seems like a long time away, the mainboard is designed to be replaceable so I think you'd be in a better position than with another laptop with a failed power plug.
There are also clips that hold the expansion cards in place. My HDMI one started coming out when I unplug the cable even from really early on, even without pressing the button which should be required to remove the card. That is another way they could fail - in getting loose enough that they weren't securely held in place to be useable. The internal USB-C port would still apply some force in holding them in place though. In my case, this is not related to the socket, but to the card. I'll need to open it up and take a closer look, but hopefully they're designed so the cards fail long before whatever is in the chassis which holds them in. Plastic on the cards vs metal on the chassis would seem robust to me. Otherwise, if the mechanism fails on the chassis side, that would be a much bigger replacement.
Disclosure: I was a big supporter of Framework and bought an early 13 inch (11th gen Intel). I would no longer recommend them due to the mounting list of problems I've had, and despite their responses always being friendly and prompt, they are unable to send any replacement parts, because I've moved to a non-supported country and there is no way they can send anything to the maritime capital of the world. I try to be neutral in my comments, but sarcasm creeps into my disclosures.
Your last paragraph is exactly why I'm avoiding the brand.
It's a premium product with subpar service.
You have Framework the ideal. Right to repair , replaceable parts, ownership rights.
Vs
Framework the company, weird QC issues, parts out of stock, iffy supply. Prices so high you might as well just buy a better laptop whenever you'd swap the main board out.
I think I'm just going with a Thinkpad for my next computer. I also prefer the all black look.
> there is no way they can send anything to the maritime capital of the world
That just blows my mind. Not shipping to one of the richest and tech savvy countries in the world which happens to be less than 5 hours away from Framework's assembly base Taiwan.
> if you're popping in and out expansion cards all the time eventually the ports are going to fail which seems like a really weird design choice
Anecdotally, I've developed a bad habit of fidgeting with my expansion cards by popping them in and out. I've probably put them through several hundred cycles like that and they still work fine - I think the fact that the cards are "rail-roaded" into the slots helps a lot, since it makes it very difficult to apply pressure at an angle to the internal USB-C port.
I spent a ton of time researching this. I wasn’t able to find any thinkpads that are relatively lightweight, have a hi res screen, and new CPUs for even close to the price of the framework 13 which can be purchased with a reasonable spec for less than $1100.
It’s entirely possible that I missed one. But honestly that also makes me root more for framework - just sell me one high quality product instead of offering 40 models, some of which are shit, half of which are so niche they don’t even get a proper review anywhere.
The ThinkPad E14 he mentioned is available with a 120Hz 2880x1800 display.
In order:
Nothing is stopping you from buying a used Framework. Admittedly, the market is much smaller than for refurbished Thinkpads, but it's smaller on both sides (demand and supply), I found several both on Frameworks own community marketplace and on ebay. And considering the fact that after you buy the first one, you will re-use the chassis and other, non-mainboard components across at least a few upgrades, I actually still think that a framework is the correct "environmental" decision. Plus, if I were to buy a used/refurbed Framework, I would be _supremely_ confident that if some sub-component of it came broken (or broke shortly after purchase), that I would be able to get the laptop as a whole up and running and not need to ewaste the whole thing.
Price-to-performance. This is true....the first time you buy the laptop. On subsquent upgrades, you are not paying the full price of the laptop, but only the mainaboard. Over a few upgrade cycles, the framework comes down _significantly_ in price. This is, in fact, close to the entire point of framework.
I can't speak to support. I have had no issues with my 16. I've heard stories in both directions (very good and very bad support). I guess I will say that it is reasonable to be more skeptical about the level of support one will receive from a new company wit a very small team.
The mainboard cost as much as a new laptop.
https://frame.work/products/mainboard-amd-ai300?v=FRANTE0009
AMD Ryzen™ AI 300 Series - Ryzen™ AI 9 HX 370
1000$
https://www.newegg.com/asus-vivobook-s14-14-0-non-touch-scre...
ASUS Vivobook S14 Laptop, Copilot+ PC AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 32GB RAM 1TB SSD
1000$.
The pricing just isn't competitive imo. Plus PC laptops go on sale pretty often.
Except for Framework.
The issue IMO is a lack of scale. If Dell did this they could probably offer cheaper parts.
Plus the warranty options drive the price up, I can add a 200$ warranty on the above Asus and get 3 years.
1200$ vs 2000$ on the Amd 370 framework.
That said, I want Framework to succeed. It's good for the industry. It doesn't mean I'm personally ready to make the investment.
I recently made the move from a Framework to a M4. And god that’s so convenient to simply be able to close or open the lid to instantly use the laptop.
On the Framework, I had to get it plugged before I could turn it on, due to a problem with the RTC battery [0]. There is actually a known defect here but they provide a free replacement _and_ a guide to help you perform the swap [1].
[0] https://community.frame.work/t/viability-of-an-ml-1220-recha...
[1] https://knowledgebase.frame.work/fr/how-do-i-replace-the-rtc...
TFA suggests ARM64 might be the answer. It's not that simple. Asahi Linux on Apple silicon still uses substantial energy when the lid is closed, compared to MacOS on the same hardware. With Asahi you might get a couple of days of sleep before the battery dies but you definitely won't get a month.
That might be down to the weirdness of (or Linux's unfamiliarity with) Apple silicon, not ARM in general.
Author here. I'm posting this before bed. If there are any suggestions or questions I will answer in the morning.
FWIW, I use Arch Linux with XFCE on my Intel Framework 13 and I only lose a few percent battery per day in sleep mode. I suspect you could find some software settings to make this better, maybe worth digging a bit further.
What sleep modes does that support? The 7840HS only supported the "modern standby" mentioned in another comment.
Sorry, I have no idea, it just worked this way out of the box so I never had to do any digging into it.
I've wanted to buy a Framework to have a linux laptop for so long, but exactly this issue of battery life is what's holding me back.
As soon as Asahi supports TouchID, I think my M1 will become a linux laptop...
It seems to be also (still) missing support for external displays and USB-4 in general?
And according to use reports battery life seems quite awful compared to macOS?
I wish Framework offered a laptop with an ARM64 processor.
I have a Surface Laptop 7 with a Snapdragon CPU on Windows 11 and it's been awesome so far. Insane battery life, especially in standby. I can reopen it after 48 hours and it only lost 3% of battery, while it stayed connected to WiFi and received notifications all along.
The difference here is Windows vs Linux, not ARM vs x64 (unfortunately) . Windows on Intel/AMD works just as well.
My wife loves her (ancient) Surfacebook and is thinking of upgrading. Any comparability issues with the ARM chip?
No issues so far, almost 1 year in, but I don't use specialized software: only web browsers, Office suite, Obsidian, Dropbox, PowerToys, FileZilla, Putty, VLC, Notepad++, WSL and random .exe utilities. I've found the emulation to be pretty good, but avoid it if you plan to do any gaming.
This is what I'm really waiting for.
This! Would be an immediate buy from me.
i also want an arm laptop running linux with good hardware. hearing it a lot too. fingers crossed.
I wish I didn't have to optimize the Framework battery myself.
Buying an SSD and RAM that uses less power when idling helped, a handful of settings helped, but then I realized, this laptop is near perfect, and it stands out even more that I have to compensate for lack of a power management setup out of the box.
It was early for Framework though, and it otherwise ran flawlessly. I hope battery power management can be a first class citizen on Framework one day soon.
The rest is so solid and I wish Framework sustainability for a long, long time.
For now, I need my laptop to be invisible so I can do what I need.
> I haven’t measured it but I read that I should expect it to lose 3-4% in suspend every hour. Is that a joke?
That has to be a bug. I have a thinkpad with a Ryzen 7 6850U, running debian, and lose at most 3% per day.
As with all things, it’s all dependent upon the details. OS, Bios, chip, they all can have an impact on battery consumption while sleeping. The linked (from the post) Reddit thread has many suggestions on how to fix this, but for the author, I don’t think it was ever resolved. The author of that Reddit post was also shocked.
The reason why it works well for Apple is that they control everything. There are limited numbers of parts they have to support, so they can make sure it all works.
In the PC world, there are many… many variables, even from the same OEM. It’s a legitimately hard problem and manufacturers aren’t particularly motivated to get it to work better (particularly with Linux). In fact, at this moment, there’s another post on the front page that talks about this exact issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45288440 . It is about debugging an ACPI bug that has existed for years.
Reminds me of the windows laptop-closed-but-loses-power-while-hibernating bug that’s been around for ages (10+ years at minimum). Linus (LTT) has made multiple video regarding that over the years.
Obviously, that’s windows. But I do wonder why sleep modes in Linux/windows don’t actually work effectively. I mean they ‘work’ as in slowed battery drain, but still nowhere near any of the MacBook series (with/without the M* chips). Idk something about them, they get it right..
It's a shame indeed. I've been a long, long time Linux user and just trained myself to always power off (although I feel that in the old days this was less of an issue? Can that be? Just install ACPI-tools or something?), feels more tidy anyway. But yeah that's what it does to you to always grab a laptop that either has 0 battery or is cooking, from a backpack.
On the other hand, yesterday my sons Windows Laptop (we keep an open mind in this family + school requires it) was also cooking in his backpack so there is that...
How are System76 laptops in this regards? You'd think somehow because of the hardware control they should have this down? At least when sticking to Po#@Po!s!.
Ah well, you can see that the money is on the server part when it comes to Linux ;)
The difference is fundamental. A product where the hardware and software is built by the same entity will always work better in the long run. It all comes down to decades of iteration and low-level optimizations that aren't easy to do any other way. This is why you'll pry my Apple devices from my cold, dead hands. Even if a super magical alternative device manufacturer with the perfect open source OS appeared tomorrow they wouldn't be able to replicate the decades of compounding interest that have been invested into the Apple ecosystem. The value of that compound interest far outweighs any other concerns I might have about Apple devices, such as "lock in" or declining software quality (valid concerns, still worth bearing the cost). Apple devices are objectively and measurably better not just on metrics like battery life. Linux nerds like DHH and his heroic Omarchy effort are simply wasting their time because they hate Apple.
"I still love my Framework, despite its flaws. I will just keep it plugged in so that it’s ready to go when I want to use it."
That sounds like a plan!
I suppose that if I was distant from an outlet for a long enough time, the battery life would be great, but I'm rarely if ever. It's nice not to be tethered to a wire, but it's not bad really overall.
For me when it comes to laptop it's less about how long I can last with the battery but more about efficiency and termals - I just love that my MPB M1 is basically cool & silent for 99,9% of the time.
I was on the fence a few years back when upgrading ancient MPB 2013 and in the end went with M1 instead of "PC" laptop with Linux because of that...
I do hope that the recent surege of ARM laptops and MS finally embraicing it well will result in more machines like that available.
The same points made about battery life with Apple Silicon in this blog post equally apply to Snapdragon Elite X laptops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFMTJm3vmh0
People need to switch to Snapdragon processors. No issues like that with Snapdragon processors, the X Elite chips is about as good as an M2 or M3
And the X Elite 2 with 18 cores will likely be announced today :D - https://www.qualcomm.com/company/events/snapdragon-summit
But is it really a cpu issue? For example, the intel macs don't have that problem at all IME.
Thanks but no thanks. Trying to avoid qualcomm, broadcom and other open-source hostile companies.
Fair enough. There will be Ubuntu support just to let you know - https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-24-10-concept-snapdrag...
Apparently they're working with Qualcomm to make this happen.
The standby experience is so bad on Linux laptops that I almost always shutdown and optimise for boot speed.
On the MB a shutdown is quite rare and getting into the system takes 1s with the fingerprint reader. That’s such a huge difference it feels like magic.
I've mentioned it elsewhere in this thread, but installing TLP makes a huge difference for suspend on Linux laptops. https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html
As someone who moved from an MacBook Pro I share the pain, but I also made the following adjustments:
1. I just shut down the computer fully more often. It’s annoying so I don’t always do it, but I’ll do it if I know I’m not using the computer as much.
2. I carry a 98Wh battery pack with me. If my laptop is fully dead it’s not a big deal because a full battery pack charges it all the way up, or if both are full it extends the battery life to be MacBook level. Since the framework is lighter than my Mac was anyway it’s not such a big deal.
Someday I’ll be able to go back to Linux.
In the meantime, Return of the Mac.
That’s a fun song
I run NixOS on Framework 13. For battery life, I just shutdown fully. My system boots back up in no time. I then just restore my Firefox session and I’m 99% back to where I was when I shut down.
Somehow related, there is a new firmware upgrade available this morning: Beta Software update for your Framework Laptop 16 (AMD Ryzen™ 7040 Series) - BIOS 3.07. Among other things, one update states "Fixed non-functional “Force Power for Input Modules” setting".
I guess it's a bit on how various technologies are optimized within the system. My Steam Deck can hold quite some battery juice for a while, but i will never be more amazed than my original Nintendo DS, that still has lots of battery capacity even after years and years of neglect.
For my current laptops i have been ignoring the battery completely. I rather have max performance, so every energy saving thing gets disabled. Most of the time it's connected to power anyway.
I wish framework would sell in Brazil.
I can see they releasing a ARM model in the near future int order to compete with Apple.
Specially because a lot of people who buy framework uses linux, and linux still have better ARM support than windows.
I am forced to use a MacBook M4 at work but I have and love my Framework 13 Intel.
Battery management is superior in MacOS but I can leave my Framework suspended for more than at least a week (I never measured how long it can stay like this).
I run vanilla Ubuntu with TLP, though, which might be the trick.
TLP is definitely the trick. TLP makes a huge difference in improving battery life while on suspend in Linux - especially since laptop makers stopped supporting S3 sleep.
What’s TLP?
https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html
> Apple Silicon is built upon ARM64 which is apparently core to such great battery life.
Not really, actually. ARM isn’t terribly more efficient to decode than x86, and both are converted into micro-operations that are internal to the CPU.
The real strength is Apple’s custom ARM cores; as evidenced by the failure of Qualcomm and MediaTek to make anything quite like it, even with the same manufacturing nodes.
I think as jeffbee said below it's not even the custom ARM cores, but rather Apple's ability to control not only the hardware but the software on-top of it. In a typical Windows machine you are dealing with your CPU and microcode made by AMD/Intel/Other, then the BIOS/Driver code written by your motherboard manufacturer, and your GPU from either the on-board, or dGPU from Intel/Nvidia/AMD and then Windows made by Microsoft. All of this leads to silly things like the ASUS ACPI driver bug [1] or Dell [2]. Apple does not suffer from this lack of control and communication, instead allowing tight integration.
[1]: https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive
[2]: https://triangulatedexistence.mataroa.blog/blog/i-uncovered-...
Indeed, we've seen a serious lack of care for ACPI by firmware teams on the x86 side.
Qualcomm is getting there with the Snapdragon X Elite.
It's still significantly slower than the M4 but you can at least meaningfully compare them nowadays which is a strong come back from where they were when the M1 was introduced.
We are likely to see improvements now that Microsoft buys Arm chips for their Surface laptops. I guess it was hard to justify the investment before.
Can someone tell me if hibernate works on the kubuntu Focus IR14. I love kubuntu but as I’ve mentioned elsewhere really don’t like inability for my thinkpad to hibernate without losing charge. I’d buy a Linux first machine if I knew it would just work.
The best thing about owning a framework is that you can easily recover from silly events like spilling an entire latte on your laptop. I've done this twice so far and both times it cost me $99 to swap out the keyboard and get back to a stock look and feel.
I just got a framework 12 and the first day I set it up a latte spilled all over it and thankfully the keyboard survived but the peace of mind that, even if it wasn't, a replacement keyboard is $50 was/is so valuable.
Or you could get a Mighty Mug or similar one that doesn’t spill.
I keep reading the argument that x86 laptops have horrible battery life & sleep draining issues because of the laptop OEM incompetence.
If that is the case then why the snapdragon CPU laptops don’t face these issues?
I have also noticed that when i'm dual booting to windows i get way more battery life than on manjaro with gnome, closed lid or active work. I guess it's much easier to oeganize battery optimizations in one house unfortunately
I have the opposite experience.
My MacBook M1 Air draws a lot of power with the lid closed, while my new Framework 12 doesn't.
But I'm using Linux on both. Fedora Asahi Remix on the MB, BlendOS on the FW.
It’s crazy you have to go like four comments deep and into the sub convo before you find mention of windows on arm- apple silicon is just so dominant in the zeitgeist for people who think about this stuff
If there were a Windows on ARM laptop that blew peoples' socks off (the way the M1 MacBooks did initially), it'd make waves but that has yet to happen.
The initial round of Snapdragon laptops had battery life that was better than what Intel/AMD machines were capable of, but not quite MacBook level and performance wasn't quite there either. Then Intel's Lunar Lake came out and was about as good or better with none of the compatibility problems, basically stealing Qualcomm's thunder.
I quit Linux around 2010 and got a MacBook Air, partly because suspend/resume kept breaking. So pleased to know that 15 years later, it still doesn’t work. Proprietary hardware and software for the win.
I don't think Framework will be able to compete on efficiency with their design philosophy.
The NVMe disk is swappable, which means it has its own controller which manages power management itself. I did my research to pick an efficient SSD and ended up with a Lexar NM790. It tops Tom's efficiency charts and comes in third place for lowest idle power consumption [0]. This is still ~0.8W at idle. On a 60Wh battery an idling drive alone will kill the battery in 3 days.
Now technically there is the APST (Autonomous Power State Transition) feature in the NVMe specification. Is there some lower APST power state that can get the power draw down? Potentially, but that is a feature well beyond the purview of any SSD reviews I have seen, so I don't know- does this drive have reliable and well-implemented APST state support? How does this interact with the platform-specific sleep state implementation, which presumably wakes the disk sometimes to do some Modern Standby features- how often is it spending time in that 0.8W state versus lower? This can vary between board rev or BIOS version certainly. Beyond the actual drive configuration and ACPI interaction, there is also kernel interaction. Do certain drives behave poorly with Linux? Etc etc.
On the RAM side of things, they are using DDR5 and not LPDDR5. There is a lower voltage on LPPDR5 which is a constant inefficiency, but also LPDDR5 has dynamic voltage scaling and dynamic frequency scaling. There is also technically some voltage drop across the SODIMM connector which you don't need to contend with when you solder RAM, which would be a constant source of loss, but I am not sure how significant that is.
Beyond this you have different behaviour for every model of RAM. This post on the Framework forum shows the user could get 7.82 days of suspend time with the HMCG66MEBSA092N DDR5-4800MHz 16GB kit whereas only 2.25 days with the CT2K48G56C46S5 DDR5-5600MHz 96GB kit [1]. Consider that there are effectively infinite combinations of memory people can run, and even inside a model series, vendors can swap their chip providers, etc. Which kits give the best battery endurance? I can't tell you.
Now someone could certainly embark on a long adventure to test different drives, RAM kits, and measure their performance, recommend tunables for the Linux kernel you want to set for each particular set of hardware, etc. But this is effectively what Apple is doing for you with the MacBook. They are choosing their memory supplier, their flash supplier, and integrating as much as possible into their SoC with presumably an entire team focused on extracting the most efficient behaviour out of both.
Consider this same thing extends to display behaviour (beyond VRR support, which I believe Framework has now, you also have local dimming behaviour to tune on the MBP), wireless behaviour, all sorts of embedded controllers that Apple can wrap inside the SoC that I probably wouldn't think of... I don't see how a modular system like Framework can achieve anything close to the idle efficiency of a MacBook.
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/lexar-nm790-ssd-review/...
[1] https://community.frame.work/t/impact-of-ram-density-on-susp...
Is this person using deep sleep? I always make sure I'm on deep sleep.
I know it's gross:
Put this in a file:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="mem_sleep_default=deep
In
/etc/default/grub.d/90_memsleepdefault.cfg
Then run
update-grub
And reboot.
Run this to check if deep sleep is enabled:
cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
If it says [deep] your good
This is "obsolete" S3 sleep. Newer CPUs don't support this.
I will try this. Thank you
you folks should really try the lenovo yoga series. especially this year's yoga slim aura edition (which has the intel lunar lake chips). The ipex-llm extensions are fairly stable and work very well ( https://github.com/intel/intel-extension-for-pytorch )
and the build quality of the laptop is exactly like the macbook air - i have both.
The discussion is mostly around battery life. How's the battery life on your Yoga, how much power does it lose on standby, and what operating system do you use?
windows. all day battery life. holds up pretty well to the macbook air 15 at similar workloads. macbook does get 1-1.5 hour more battery life. The lunar lake is an insane chip.
The ISA has nothing to do with the battery life. Battery life is the result of getting details right at every level of the software stack. Framework doesn't control every level of the stack. Arguably they don't control any of it.
> Battery life is the result of getting details right at every level of the software stack
Exactly. Apple's way of doing things is about vertical integration of the stack, which is the polar opposite of how the PC market developed and largely still works.
The vertical integration approach (where you control all the layers beneath the customer facing product) has the benefit of allowing you to optimize that customer experience by tweaking things anywhere in the stack.
Power management in digital systems mostly comes down to being able to slow or turn off clocks when appropriate. Doing this well can be complicated, but you can tell that Apple has put a lot of energy into doing it.
The downside of the vertical integration approach is that components cannot be sourced or replaced with off-the-shelf components, as the interfaces are not really standard, they are tailor made for the use case.
For the Framework folks to pull off something like the M1's power sipping, they'd have to invest a lot of engineering time (a.k.a. money) and have strategic partnerships with hardware vendors and standards bodies to move the commodity chip market forward to support better power management.
The thing is, one of the strengths of the Framework is that the hardware is commodity, making their devices easy to repair. Also, any work that the Framework folks do to move things forward also benefit their competitors, which can shrink the potential reward for doing so.
Yes, it's this. I also own an M4 mbp and an AMD framework 13. With both on maximum screen brightness, side by side, doing similar workloads, battery life isn't that much better on the M4. I think the difference maker is that the mac constantly decreases screen brightness when possible, turns the backlight completely off when there isn't any activity, heavily leverages power efficient scheduling and efficiency cores, no doubt turns off power to all peripherals whenever possible, and so on. And of course lid-closed suspend on a mac lasts indefinitely. Arch does none of these things and even on cohesive distros like Fedora there's only so much you can do in user land. Linux is designed for compatibility across a huge breadth of devices; darwin only has to support Mac hardware and can extract every ounce of power efficiency from deep hardware integration.
IIRC the low power states of M series chips generally dips down further than most x86 CPUs do, and the way both the SoC And OS are designed are for racing to idle and coalescing tasks to reduce wakeups. On the MBPs specially the screen can also drop down to 1hz so the GPU isn’t wasting cycles redrawing static content.
The result is that in more typical usage where the machine isn’t under a constant load, battery life is much better. When it’s sitting there idle displaying a web page it’s barely consuming any power at all, where most competing laptops at minimum are pulling at least 2-3x as much power between the CPU not being able to scale down that far and constantly getting woken to perform poorly scheduled tasks.
The ISA not but the platform does.
Like you can make an x86 computer that is not a PC. PS4 is one example: https://fail0verflow.com/media/33c3-slides/#/22
But when you make a PC, you are stuck with multiple layers of legacy crap, any of which can prevent proper low power states or suspend.
And worth noting that it isn't even vertical integration that is the advantage here.
Sleep/Hibernation works fine on the Framework under Windows. It's just Linux that has this problem.
I use MacOS because of this - I'm never going to use a Windows laptop, and I'd prefer Linux but power management just isn't there.
When I switch my Thinkpad X1 to Arch, I was expecting a massive battery life downgrade. However, it lasts at least as long as Windows or possibly longer.
On a side note. I dont need expandable ports in laptops. But I wish I could get a thin and light, easily repairable laptop.
> But why is the battery life of modern laptops (other than Apple Silicon) so bad?
But Core Ultra laptops have great battery life.
Same issue I've had - the issue is specifically for Linux (Win on Framework doesn't suffer from this).
One thing I found was certain modules like USB-A or HDMI drawing power even when suspended.
I had to upgrade my Cloudflare plan for this!
I love the Framework hardware but not all that impressed with the choice of operating systems that are available. That’s not really Framework’s problem though.
There is a choice of operating systems, which cannot be said about macs.
What does that mean? I thought they offer Windows and Linux options? If you are referring to distros of the latter, you can install whichever you like, no?
Yes, you can even bring your own, the problem isn't with Framework in my case.
I have heard anecdotally that the Snapdragon arm window laptops have amazing battery life. I'd be interested in hearing from people who have used these as well as the Mx MacBooks.
It’s hard when you’ve had such amazing hardware. I’m still intrigued by framework myself and hope to get one in the near future!
I've been on Linux for over a decade, and honestly, getting lured into fixing things has become second nature.
I've been using the Core i7-1165G7 mainboard for the 13, which works well enough with a large amount of RAM and has mature OS support.
My Thinkpad P15 battery was also great after two weeks vacation, with Windows 11 Professional, and Intel CPU.
This will never happen, but the ideal laptop for me would be a Framework Laptop 13/16 with an Apple Silicon mainboard and OLED display.
The soldered RAM of the Framework Desktop has already opened the door to soldered RAM on Framework Laptop mainboards.
I wonder if this is just the S0ix problem.
I’ve never found the M4 on my work machine particularly impressive. Frankly I hardly use the thing because it takes far, far too long to switch between windows compared to hyprland.
you just cant beat apple silicon battery life
I'm using Framework with Windows and AMD and I have excellent hibernate/sleep time... It is really a Linux thing. I remember a post on reddit that claims that the Bluefin distribution has excellent battery life.
It amazes me how the legend of ARM being more efficient than x86 took hold. I'm not saying that we don't have a more efficient ARM processors BUT it has nothing to do with the ISA. What you gain with a simple encoder (ARM) you gain with code density (x86) and after that it is converted to microcode. You wouldn't gain more than single percent if any.
Process node is by far more important (5nm , 3nm, etc) and usually Apple gets access to them first. Also placing the memory in the CPU package also proved to be great for efficiency (case of point is Intel's Lunar lake that can last like forever) and last but the least is the intergraded GPU that no one seems to talk about and their respective efficiency (cause there are like 30 people in the whole world that can truly make and educated talk about them and their ISA)
> had a short stint with Arch Linux. It wasn’t stable enough
It is all fun and games until they break libc on the next update.
I've never had this issue, because I simply power off my laptop when I'm not using it. Am I the only one?
Imagine someone saying the same (“it’s awful and doesn’t really actually work but I want to love it”) about anything else than Linux or FOSS and you’ll be privy to an outside perspective on a very peculiar form of nerd delusion.
we need to do to UEFI what Stalin did to the intellectual classes
Why has no one cracked this nut yet? I transitioned full-time to a Linux workstation in 2023 after years of driving macOS. I have an M2 air that is one of the best laptops ever made - and it really is a complete game changer when it comes to battery. I really don't think about charging it, and plug it in maybe once or twice per week. But I am longing for a slightly larger chassis and something I can run Linux on without any compromises. I was considering a Framework of all things - but this post bolsters my concern that Apple is really on a completely different level. tl;dr the age of the Linux desktop is 100% here, but we still have a lot of work to do for notebooks
Are people away from power sources that often?
Don’t think I’ve thought about battery level on my work (windows) laptop once. Home, office, conference rooms - everything has usb C docks
When I used to commute via company bus in the bay area, it mattered to me; also when I'm using my laptop out and about in the city, I'd prefer not to have to worry about finding a seat with a charger.
Of course, nowadays power banks are getting so cheap and lightweight, I just toss a couple in my bag, and don't really worry about it. I just ordered one of the Haribo power banks all the backpackers are raving about.
Yeah this seems like a complete non-issue to me. A laptop doesn't need to run all day on battery; if you are working any length of time you're going to be near an AC outlet at some point.
What mission do you love from Framework? Is it environmental?
If so, I seriously doubt that the lifetime pollution of a Framework laptop is better than an Apple Silicon Mac.
Macbooks tend to last a very long time. I used my Intel Macbook Air for 10 years. After that, I sold it and maybe it continued to get used by the second owner. While you can keep upgrading Framework laptops (parts require shipping/pollution to manufacture), I doubt it'll last a decade or someone wants to upgrade it for a decade to keep up.
Apple also has recycling programs and it seems to do quite well when it comes to using recycled materials. I doubt Framework is big enough to do these things as well as Apple.
Framework laptops are often more than doubled the price of similar spec'ed Windows laptops. They're also quite a bit more expensive than Apple laptops in the same class.
Framework is one of those things that is great for virtue signaling but doesn't make sense in real life.
Edit:
You can buy an M4 Air for $799 on sale frequently.[0] Meanwhile, a similar spec'ed Framework with a slower AMD CPU/GPU is $1,517.00.[1] So the repairability angle just doesn't seem worth it. If the Air breaks, just buy a new one.
Keep in mind that the M4 Air has a better display, significantly faster CPU, faster GPU, significantly more battery life, is fanless, better speakers, much better trackpad, and a thinner profile.
[0]https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/27/200-off-every-m4-macboo...
[1]https://frame.work/products/laptop13-diy-amd-ai300/configura...
I don't own a Framework (yet), as I don't believe its the right product for me at this stage. I can't afford to get caught out without battery when out and about.
What attracts me is:
• Easy (self) repairs, especially OEM battery replacements. If I could carry two - three replacements that could be hot swapped, like old times, that would be acceptable too.
• Easy upgrades of RAM and SSD. I had to buy a new MacBook due to it hanging frequently from RAM filling up, even though rest of it would've been fine for at least three more years.
• Ability to make it "your own". Its a minor thing, but a little whimsy is nice in life. I also like the idea of my main machine being a ship of Thesus that stays with me for a long time, and shows marks of age.
> What mission do you love from Framework? Is it environmental?
The fact that I can repair it, exchange every part, get every part, upgrade every part, and I never have to use a hairdryer or heat gun to do so.
Are you willing to pay 2x the price for a Framework and get a worse overall experience in exchange for repairability?
Keep in mind that the Framework spare parts are generally also pretty expensive.
It’s not 2x the price, I paid under $900 for a brand new one.
Battery is $60. How much does a MacBook battery cost? How long does a MacBook battery take to repair and how much skill do replace need to replace it? How do you upgrade the storage capacity on a MacBook?
I like Framework's aesthetics more than MacBook already, and like the little customisablity (i.e bezel, mismatched coloured parts etc). I can accept a lower quality screen (compared to MacBook), speakers and camera no problem.
I'm willing to pay higher than MacBook price for the above package due to superiority of Linux over MacOs and supporting this model in general. However, I draw a line in the sand at battery life, so Mac it is for me for the foreseeable future.
"Specs" really do not mean a lot for Laptops. Most laptops are seriously bad quality, and I have not had one laptop in the past 10 years that did not require a major repair before the warranty period expired. With most laptops, you are buying e-waste. I can't afford buying e-waste. I would rather buy a laptop I can keep for 5 years without having to scrap it, and with framework I could just replace whatever breaks.
And for me Mac is not an option as I'm not using their crappy OS and I don't want to have the forever struggle of running Linux on their proprietary hardware platform.
> Macbooks tend to last a very long time.
MacBooks had historically tons of design issues with keyboards and GPUs. Which I guess can happen, but the problem with Apple is that they never admin anything until someone drags them to court and the out of warranty repair is always extremely expensive, usually not worth it.
The battery replacement can also be extremely expensive, especially if you live in a country without any Apple Store. Battery replacement for M4 Air is like $340 in my country, which is insane for a $800 machine.
The GPU solder joint issue was NVidia's fault. I remember also Dell and others were affected, and I think MacBooks used only AMD dGPUs afterwards.
But otherwise, between the Butterfly keyboard, Flexgate, and placing the backlight driver voltage pin next to a data pin on the display connector (Louis Rossmann complained a lot about that one, as debris or moisture could easily cause a short and fry your CPU), indeed Apple does have their fair share of design issues.
Well they switched to AMD and had pretty much the same issue, known as "Radeongate" ...
The hardware may last but there is planned obsolescence via software. You stop getting OS upgrades after 5 to 7 years and soon after most other apps. That alone I consider so wasteful and infuriating. My Linux machines don't ever have the problem, and at least Lenovo makes hardware as durable or more than Apple. I'm on Framework now and I hope it will last as long. I also have a Mac from 2020 or 2021 (last Intel Macbook pro) and I read they're already stopping OS upgrades.
For me it's the repairable nature. Prior to the Framework 13 I had a bunch of Thinkpads until the enshittification by Lenovo in recent years.
I know Windows laptops are very finicky and unreliable. For example, loads of people complain that $3000 Razer laptops break after a few months.
I guess I'm mostly talking about Apple overall.
You're paying a lot more money for self-repairability. Frameworks are generally more expensive than Macs, sometimes 50% - 100% more expensive for a similar laptop. That's crazy.
Macs are tanks. Not a single issue with my 4 year old M1 Air. Even if there is an issue, I can still take it to an Apple Store to get it looked at.
> Frameworks are generally more expensive than Macs, sometimes 50% - 100% more expensive for a similar laptop.
Do you have an example? An 8tb m4 macbook pro runs over 7 grand; the comparable hx370 framework 13 is barely over 3 grand. I bought both within the last couple months and found the macs to be significantly more expensive in the segment i was looking at.
You can buy an M4 Air for $799 on sale frequently.[0] Meanwhile, a similar spec'ed Framework with a slower AMD CPU/GPU is $1,517.00.[1] So the repairability angle just doesn't seem worth it. If the Air breaks, just buy a new one.
Keep in mind that the M4 Air has a better display, significantly faster CPU, faster GPU, significantly more battery life, is fanless, better speakers, much better trackpad, and a thinner profile.
[0]https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/27/200-off-every-m4-macboo...
[1]https://frame.work/products/laptop13-diy-amd-ai300/configura...
It is mostly valid for 16GB/256GB-SSD config and when you need performance in bursts. Consider sustained performance, more RAM, more storage, OS options etc and the value proposition changes.
I have maintained it for years that the base model M-series Air is the best computer for normal people if they plan to keep it for years.
It likely still has better sustained performance. If you need more, then just go up to MBP.
That can't possibly be true. I was recently considering my first ever Apple laptop but I would be paying a fortune to get RAM and storage anywhere close to offerings from any other vendor. And I've heard they're difficult or impossible to upgrade myself, so I can't even select a base model now and add more later.
How often have you needed to repair a MacBook?
The enhanced repairability is basically insurance in case of a fault. Compared to a MacBook, or insurance for a MacBook, this insurance is overpriced.
As for the environment, the power consumption + larger design with extra parts to make it repairable + how few people ever buy parts makes this a virtue signaling wash.
I’m not the OP but for me, with my mid-2015, I had the battery replaced once. This was used almost every work day until 2023. My M2 Pro MBP I then bought, never so far (as you would expect for its age) and it still feels brand new.
That's 8 years of being used daily and the only thing you had to replace was the battery. That seems like a super reliable machine.
In the 15 years I've known her, my wife has needed to repair each of her 3 MacBooks at least once (One of them twice).
In the same time, I've had to repair one Gigabyte laptop. The second Gigabyte that needed repair, I trashed and just stopped buying Gigabyte.
That's the problem with Apple. They're build quality isn't that great, but you don't have an alternative.
Yeah, but that's the reality distortion field. It's true for many luxury brands where people just won't accept any criticism of the uber expensive products they bought because it makes them feel bad.
I have been buying Apple hardware since the early 2000s (the first thing I own was a 1.5 Gen iPod) and there is almost no product that didn't get an issue. Very often developing early in life because of bad design/engineering. I think the most reliables have been iPhones but that's only if you don't count annoying battery swap and other minor repairs that came for aging (like port replacement).
But they look good and make people feel good, so they get bought.
That's definitely the problem with Apple, if you could run macOS on any machine, they would lose market extremely fast.
Were they they the butterfly era crappy Macbooks?
Funnily enough, I had to get my M1 Pro repaired on day 1 of receiving. It had a defect in the screen that caused a white horizontal line. I was livid!
> I am sure that the Apple Store just handed you another one to replace a DOA Macbook, though.
Actually no. Where I live there is no local Apple Store. I had to take it to an authorised repairer, and it was there for 1.5 weeks.
That’s called a shipping accident, from which Framework is hardly immune.
I am sure that the Apple Store just handed you another one to replace a DOA Macbook, though.
Depends, once you get a crumble or a speck of dust in the keyboard there aren't that many options.
The whole thing is fragile as hell; macbooks don't get dents, they turn into dust on impact, just like iphones.
Linux desktop is a lost cause for me, simple as that with the fiasco that is Ubuntu post 2022, wayland, and too many other choices that make for a horrible user experience. Those probs with power management mentioned here are ones that systemd was supposed to solve weren't they? Only that systemd went into becoming an inner OS and can't be assed about such things. The prob as far as I'm concerned is not that Linux simply sucks, but that it used to be good (I even recommended it over Mac OS years ago here) and has regressed into a state that isn't anymore usable for me. Even using the terminal on Linux has become a pain in the ass. The priority here seems to be pack everything into containers to make further maintenance obsolete or sth? I guess if there's no one in the user seat and devs and managers have free reign over whatever grand refactoring they want to tackle that's what's happening. Back on Mac OS which has actually apps worth using, or at all.