This has kept me on Mac laptops as well. There's always some compromise made elsewhere, even on high end laptops. Usually it's the trackpad, or poor thermals making it unusable as a laptop or just super loud (comparing to the Apple Silicon line here, my intel MBPs were furnaces). Plus, if you want anything other than a 1080p screen you are pushing close to MBP prices anyway.

You say this as if Apple didn't spend 5 years selling keyboards that were nearly guaranteed to die after a years worth of usage in a slightly dusty environment.

People love Apple hardware because they have a terrible memory for all the flawed hardware Apple always releases and pretends isn't flawed. There are significant design flaws that affect a significant portion of their customers that they just never acknowledge. For example, I only recently learned that my previous work macbook failed in the way it did because a specific short ribbon cable was made shorter for no discernible reason and so some revisions of the 2015 macbook pro just have indescribable screen corruption as a failure mode. Apple doesn't tell you that though, just send it in, let us charge you $1500, and replace half of the computer.

I didn't test sleep/wake consciously while I docked my laptops, but I don't remember they start making sounds when they should be silent. Maybe you're seeing PowerNap cycles, but mine is not doing any noise in PowerNap, either.

Need to test with leaving Firefox playing something and see what it does.

...all in all, interesting sentiments. I'm using these things for ~15 years at this point, and while they did funny things in the past, this was not one of them.

When you close the lid, macOS directly sleeps, shutting down fans in ~10 seconds if you have them, reaching S3 (Suspend to RAM) state. Radios stay alive a little longer to keep any BT/Wireless connections to speed things up if you're just moving places, then they go dark as well.

If you enabled PowerNap on charging, your laptop will wake up briefly after some time (Every hour or so) after you plug it in, check mails if Apple Mail is open, check for any system updates, and sleep if there's none after fetching the mails (It'll download the updates if there are any, IIRC). If you have setup Time Machine, and the drive is available (locally or via network), PowerNap will wake the system and take a backup every 24 hours, making sure that your backups are always up to date.

Per factory settings, PowerNap on battery is off, so it'll sleep without any disturbance up to a month or so, and will hibernate when the battery is low.

So, yes, the laptop sleeps as soon as you close the lid. But wakes up periodically to make sure that everything is fetched and ready (if it's connected to power, by default).

BTW, There's an actual method called Power Nap involving short naps to recharge. It's not an Apple naming gimmick [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_nap

It has never happened before...

MNCs are like local governments levying property taxes.

e.g. you need a phone much like you have to live somewhere. Your "Tech Government" is determined by a highly constrained choice like your local civil government is determined by your zip code. Maybe you can move at great disruption and cost but it's only to the jurisdiction of another government and some variation of autocratic laws and taxes.

However, you have no vote and there is no pretence at serving your interests. You are not a citizen but cattle to be farmed... just maximal exploitation to please the mighty Mammon.

So wrong. Every dollar that $FOO_COMPANY shovels to Google and Apple to spend on advertising is a dollar that you, the consumer, end up footing the bill for; a dollar that does not go towards improving the product you receive in any way whatsoever.

The advertising industry itself is a tax on the price of everything.

Megacorps are adopting the level of competence of governments.

I see no contradiction here.

Corporations do not force you to pay taxes YET. When the corporations get in total control and you cannot even vote just wait to see what a slave you are.

Is this something you know firsthand or something you think you know because a huge amount of money has gone into spreading that message for political purposes? Anyone who’s worked for or with a multi-national knows that they’re hardly as efficient as the marketing would have you believe, and anyone who’s looked at libertarian media knows that it’s almost entirely funded by rich people seeking tax & regulatory reductions, banking on you confusing their interests with your own.

Speaking of competence devoid of context misses the point. They are resembling each other greatly in the sense of misaligned incentives with their "users", which supersedes run-of-the-mill competence in terms of importance in this context. I'm not going to give points to some moron who is swimming competently in the wrong direction.

> MNCs also don't force you to pay taxes or buy their products.

An oddly naive comment given all that has been written about how Amazon operates, to give one example.

yeah, because the only kid bigger, told them to knock it off, as to not hamper their own racket.

If you think a mega-corp won't go AWOL and attempt a Banana Republic/Dutch East India Company again, but with more proxies, lawyers, SAM's, and corrupt officials to "YAS" them into integration, then you really haven't been paying attention to what globalization is really about.

The US had to ask for money back from the oil barons.

Bezos/Musk/Zuck/{untold billionaires} will have much better bargaining chips when they possess the monopoly on surveillance, money, and influence, and have proxy chairs at the U.N.

And I bet those countries would be better run in every way.

They are both using the innate incompatibilities between browsers to further entrench their mobile device market share positions.

Safari is (unanimously) shit - even without Google's PWA's moot gloating.

Apple disallows browsers other than Safari, and have deprecated Windows/Android versions.

  >how why the “walled garden” metaphor applies more to a niche browser than the dominant one

Don't buy Apple products?

at least until they clear their act...

But you are right that more local government has advantages over more centralised government. For example, it's easier to change your local government, if you don't like it: just move to the next town over.

You have definitely maimed and killed a non-zero amount of humans indirectly by the stochastic math that tallies the bodies on your Luxury products.

We are bias. Your gas wouldn't be less than $10 a gallon if we didn't drop $10b a year policing the Canals, Gulfs, and ports.

The higher your standard of living, the more dependencies, the more complexities, the more abstractions, and more susceptible to changes/perturbations until the "millionaire if not for taxes" thinks he can go without the "taxation without representation" route.

How they are financed is up to the operators. Perhaps they want tolls, perhaps local stores want to chip in to improve their business? Perhaps something else that would take someone more than 30 seconds to imagine?

(In any case, roads being provided by local government isn't all that bad. It's relatively easy to change your local government by moving from one town to the next. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity)

MacOS, for all it's faults, can be tamed with little snitch and a slower update cycle, and then you have a relatively solid system. There's still some things to hate, like when I take my airpods out if I accidentally click one of the buttons Apple Music opens (no one wants to use Apple Music, ever). But, that little frustraition pales in comparison to the build your own experience a poweruser in Linux faces on a weekly basis.

This randomly came front of mind last night when I thought, I can't remember the last time something broke on my laptop. It's been literal months since I've had anything weird or unwanted that I've _had_ to deal with. Contrast that to the last time I tried to daily Linux, about 2 years ago when I bought a framework and couldn't even log in due to trackpad issues, sleep / hibernate issues, screen resizing issues, issues issues issues.

I always have at least one Linux machine around that I use primarily, but it's never been reliable. Either Debian or Ubuntu, I always, without fail, have issue with sleep/wake/hibernate and will never bet it'll wake properly when they sleep.

My current Ubuntu desktop with AMD cpu doesn't sleep and has to be manually hibernated.

My HP Dev One laptop with PopOS will fail to wake roughly 1/10 times, requiring a hard reset. Other times it'll fail to sleep and overheat in my backpack. Occasionally, it'll stop recognizing USB peripherals, or the trackpad/keyboard will stop responding to inputs.

I prefer Linux on nearly every front, but having a totally unreliable computing environment makes it a deal-breaker for me.

> "Have you tried $THING"

No I really have grown tired of waking a machine to a blank screen and having to ssh into it to kill gnome or any of the other crap.

My Macs very occasionally freeze on wake too--but that's exceedingly rare compared to the myriad issues with Linux usability.

> That was four or five years ago.

Linux moves way faster than commercial OS IMO.

Reconsider linux. Commercial OS isn't going to 'get better' for IT literate users. :/

Meanwhile my work Mac every so often decides my external monitor just doesn't exist anymore and I have to reboot with it unplugged, then again with it plugged in to get it back.

I remember this sort of thing about 15 years ago, but in the last 8 years of nixos, I've maybe hard rebooted twice. I've also only ever rebooted after an upgrade. otherwise I go months with just sleep/wake. I wonder if you have some interesting hardware...

In modern days, you can daily drive linux without issues. If you were having issues, it was most likely you were doing something wrong, or you were using a company configured laptop that the IT department didn't set up right.

Bit offtopic but since you nudged it:

The oldest Polish localization of MacOS was done by a private company that insisted on using more "appropriate linguistically" terms that have roots in the 70s Polish IT. Tho, some people claimed it was just an attempt to separate Apple's system from Microsoft's even more dramatically. And for example instead of "icon" - "ikona" that translation introduced "stamp - "znaczek"; "edit" menu item - "edycja" (sometimes "edytuj", depending on program) was "change" - "zmiana", "folder" that stayed as it is become "teczka", "briefcase". The most prominent example is the "cancel" translation, which elsewhere become "anuluj" but the team opted for "abandon", "cease" - "poniechaj", tho some argue it should be "desist" - "zaniechaj".

The first official Leopard translation followed let's say, the 'industry standard', tho "desktop" still is being called there "biurko" while Linux and Windows uses term "pulpit" which is more close to "dashboard".

The discourse that happen around "cancel" translation is still bring up on few occasions, as an example of trying to preserve origins of that old IT glossary and also of being nonconformistic to the ridiculous levels for some weird personal reasons.

Echoes of that translation can be seen in the Polish KDE localization - there's one contributor who insists for using these rather obscure and weird terms: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=404286 and since there's no official community nor team (to my knowledge), that translation gets approved and makes KDE looking weird for someone coming from Windows

A default setting you don't like and have to adjust? How horrible.

>At least it's not as bad as Ubuntu, which allowed me with a simple warning to install Nvidia drivers without a full system update

So...user error?

>And Debian is horrible too, it doesn't even have a task bar of any kind (you are forced to Alt tab to switch apps, or even see which other apps are running)

Now I get it, this is satire for someone complaining about the Linux experience. Good one!

There are literally thousands of possible combinations of accessibility features alone, that are vastly more difficult to impossible to access. Or simply don’t exist in any form. Once you add in all the default apps and functions of Mac OS, there’s likely millions of possible combinations that would take a fortune in time and effort and knowledge to replicate maybe a quarter of, on a hypothetical laptop installed with Linux.

Not to mention many peripheral manufacturers for many of their product lines simply don’t officially support any version of Linux released in the past few years.

Edit: Of course 99% of these combinations are irrelevant to any particular individual, but they are all relevant to at least a few small groups.

Linux promoters don’t seem to understand that alienating a few thousand users each time is a big deal if that alienation process happens thousands of times…

And my guess is that your "operate as the should" is probably some very personal opinions about how an OS should function based on your personal workflow, that you assume should be the defacto standard.

But for the sake of the argument, lets just assume that your standard is actually optimal from an efficiency standpoint. In that case, the argument to make in case of Mac would be this: Out of the box, Macs are closer to optimal, but technically Linux is is better because you can customize it to be exactly optimal.

One difficult bit, though, is interoperability. Even absent monopolist BS (and there’s plenty of that) it makes the OS market tend toward winner-take-all.

For a whole bunch of other installations, following official linux instructions on Nvidia works incredibly well. Im probably up to like 30 installs of linux mint on laptops and desktops, without issues. I had a personal laptop with manjaro that suppored nvidia prime, I didn't even have to do anything special, just installed nvidia-smi, and prime-run worked out of the box.

And generally, for equal comparison, I wouldn't consider laptops with discrete graphics to be in the same family as more business oriented Macs, the more apt comparison would be those with AMD chips with integrated video drivers, for which you don't need to fuck with any drivers.

  > If you want to use CUDA as a simple example,

If your "CUDA" needs are pytorch, tensorflow, whatever, pip install (or uv pip install) and you're good to go.

When was the last time you even needed to? If you need to do actual kernel writing and thus actually need CUDA (this is pretty uncommon and I think most people that do that wouldn't be asking this question), then most of the issues are not actually issues.

I'll give an example of my latest CUDA error. I run EndeavourOS (Arch based) and so yes, using bleeding edge drivers. Did an update, reboot, oh no... I get to lock screen, login and black screen (but cursor).[0] What's the solution? Roll back cuda. Didn't work? Roll back kernel. Now it works. The problem? nvidia-560-35.03-9 was incompatible with kernel 6.11. I even was able to find in the forums (quickly) the exact issue[1].

But why am I saying this is no biggie? Well... I'm fucking running 560 drivers, which are beta. If you worry about these issues, don't. If you don't want that power, don't run Arch, Gentoo, or other bleeding edges. You know the most confusing part of this all? Was people posting their driver versions with `inxi -G` and so you only see `560.35.03` but I had to roll back `560.35.03-9` to `560.35.03-6`. But also, Nvidia could be better about their namings.

I will also concede that there is a lot of shit information out there and actually parsing what the real answers are takes experience. So here's my advice when you run into your next issue:

  Getting Information:
  - Start with journalctl and dmesg (try `journalctl -b -p 3` and `dmesg -L -l "err+"`. `-b` is only messages since last boot and the other flags are to only give you errors or worse). These are your "logs" 
    - There are others, and they *should* go under `/var/log` but just like in OSX how random junk goes to {~,/}Library/{Caches,Application Support}
    - Check versions, especially if you did an update
      - (side note): For all those confused where files should go, try `man hier`
  - Good chance you can get through by reading the man page, but this doesn't always apply 
    - also remember you can do `man 7 man` or `man man.7` (replace second man with any command). Also see `man -a man`
    - Don't know what man page you need? Try `man --regex cuda`
  - Visit the Arch Wiki (even if you're not on Arch) -- maybe even the Gentoo Wiki. RedHat docs are also pretty good
    - After that, try your distro's (or their parent's) forums.
      - Archwiki is good, Arch forums are a toxic hellhole occupied by people who's idea of grass is entirely contrived from what is visible on a screen. Use the forums of the children. I'm sorry to those who've experienced that place.
  - Then try Google, focusing on things from your logs. This would be up higher, but you can put quotes around things or dates and Google will outright disrespect you now)
    - If it is a specific program that looks to be the issue, try the Git{Hub,Lab} issues page too. Feel free to open an issue. Most devs are pretty nice, even to noobs, though there are also many who will insinuate you RTFM after quoting and linking to it. I'm also sorry about this.

  Solving issues:
  - First try rolling back. If you're not messing with your system, this can make most problems go away VERY quickly. 
    - If you're on a rolling release distro (like Arch) then this is your goto. Unless you like problem solving. But then why are you on Arch? 
    - With `pacman` this can usually be done quickly with `pacman -U file:///var/cache/pacman/pkg/thing-you-want`. You can use other tools, but this is good to know, and you know where things cache :) (`downgrade` is the common tool but it just does this) You can even do kernels this way!
    - Things like `timeshift` are useful (and the `pacman` or `apt` "autosnap"). But beware if you aren't using `grub` to just not do that option. Also check out `btrfs`
    - If need to reinstall an old kernel and it isn't in your cache check out the command `reinstall-kernels` (try `cat /usr/bin/reinstall-kernels`). This is a uncommon task and might only be because you've filled up `/efi` and deleted a kernel.
  - Stop fucking with the kernel if you don't know what you're doing. 99% of the time this is ***NOT*** the solution[2]
    - For nvidia you might want `nvidia_dr.modeset=1` and ***maybe*** (probably not) `nvidia_drm.fbdev=1`
  - Use `find` and `grep`.
    - I'm not joking, `find` is a crazy powerful tool and people sleep on it. (Seriously, how do people jump into large codebases blind and get running without `find`, `grep`, `awk`, and such tools?)[3]

[0] For the fun of it, I asked GPT and gave it logs from journal and dmesg, it did not get the answer, and listening to it would have sent me down a rabbit hole where I'd be messing with the kernel (I use systemd and dracut, these were communicated to GPT and it was asking me to run mkinitcpio and mess with grub lol)

[1] https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/only-black-screen-after-logi...

And hey look, an update: https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/attention-nvidia-gpu-driver-...

[2] For me `/etc/kernel/cmdline` looks pretty much like `nvme_load=YES nowatchdog rw root=UUID=<that> resume=UUID=<blahh> nvidia_drm.modeset=1 nvidia_drm.fbdev=1` It should be short

[3] Here's a free one for you. Got a python project and you forgot to place `__init__.py` in the folders? `find src -type d -exec touch "{}/__init__.py" \;` (replace `src` with your root source directory)

Lmao WHAT?

The ANE system isn't even remotely useful, since is primarily designed for running Apple AI stuff. This is why its integration is so spotty. IIRC, Tinygrad is faster on apple silicon than pytorch at this moment, solely because they did a whole bunch of reverse engineering.

Laptops for ML is just a lost cause as far as matrix multiply is concerned. Nobody is actually doing any serious work on ML stuff on laptops.

>In fact, the terminal integration in macOS is one of the biggest things over windows for me.

Which is funny, because Windows has WSL2 which works incredibly well, has native CUDA integration for ML tasks thats quite good, has an X server that lets you run GUI apps, and is actually linux (not BSD), without anything to get in your way, and its better because its an isolated system that you don't have to worry about bricking and not having a usable computer.

> stopped using Linux mint after installing it on my desktop and having the screen saver require a hard reboot -sometimes- when trying to wake.

The standard argument of "here is a particular bug that doesn't exist on Macs, therefore Macs are better" lol.

Like I said, its not really that difficult to say that you just prefer the Mac OS experience and end it there. You don't have to go on these weird tangents.