Remix.run Logo
Remix clone Hacker News
new | show | ask | jobsGithub
▲ mirzap 3 days ago

You simply can't compare anything to MacBooks. I had a Dell that I paid about $2,000 for, and it was really good (or so I thought). Then at work, I got a MacBook Pro, and that's when I saw the difference.

Its not only the Pros, no "high-end" laptop running Windows or Linux with just 8GB of RAM can perform better than a MacBook Air with 8GB. I don't know how Apple has optimized memory usage, but my personal feeling is that 8GB of RAM on Macs is equivalent to 32GB on non-Apple devices.

I'm not some Apple fanboy—I've been using Arch Linux daily for the past month or two, and it's great. However, there isn't a day that passes without screen freezes during peak usage, and I need to reboot every day or two. This happens despite having 32GB of RAM, an RTX 4060, and a Ryzen 5 7600. That never happens with my 5-year-old MacBook Air.

I really wish Linux were as good as macOS, I really do. I'm pushing myself to use it even though I experience frustration every day, but this simply isn't the case. It's easy to optimize the system and applications for one specific hardware configuration (like Apple does), but it's very hard, if not impossible, to do this for every possible hardware combination available today. That's why Linux and Windows can't win this performance battle.

▲GCUMstlyHarmls 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

For what little an internet strangers comment is worth, I had similar issues and they disappeared when I swapped from Nvidia to AMD at the start of this year. Nvidia's drivers have had some kind of push since then but they have always been sort of wonky.

▲mirzap 3 days ago | parent [-]

This is interesting to hear. I bought Nvidia because I thought they had better drivers and have a lot of support for AI and stuff, but now, in retrospect, this seems like a bad idea.

▲PurestGuava 3 days ago | parent [-]

For AI, NVidia does have better tech, but on Linux at least the driver situation with AMD is infinitely better.

▲mirzap 3 days ago | parent [-]

Oh, this was a great thread. I just investigated a bit which drivers I use, gpu.. And it turns out my arch was using built-in GPU (how?)

glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer" OpenGL renderer string: AMD Radeon Graphics (radeonsi, raphael_mendocino, LLVM 20.1.8, DRM 3.64, 6.16.0-arch2-1)

I've added a few env parameters Claude suggested in ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf, and now it shows: OpenGL renderer string: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti/PCIe/SSE2

Will give it a try few days, to see how it behaves.

▲likeclockwork 3 days ago | parent [-]

Wow. Your original comment reads very differently now.

▲mbreese 2 days ago | parent [-]

It also inadvertently proves their point. The strength of Apple hardware is the OS integration. This level of integration and polish is only possible because of the limited components they have to support. Even if you have powerful components on the PC side (Windows or Linux), you're at the mercy of a few different vendors and how well they support the hardware. And even if you get supported components, it's possible to get yourself into situations where your configuration is sub-optimal.

Versus a Mac where you can just start it and get working. It's possible with PC hardware, but it takes more work for the customer (or vendor).

▲hermanzegerman 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You really come off as a Hardcore Apple Fanboy

> Its not only the Pros, no "high-end" laptop running Windows or Linux with just 8GB of RAM can perform better than a MacBook Air with 8GB

Doesn't matter because for the equivalent price you can load up your non-Apple Machine with RAM to the Max, same with SSD Storage. With a MacBook you would need to prepare to cough up, up to 9k more than the base model for a huge SSD and RAM. No more than 1k for this elsewhere

> ve been using Arch Linux daily for the past month or two, and it's great. However, there isn't a day that passes without screen freezes during peak usage, and I need to reboot every day or two.

I don't need to reboot for Weeks, I'm using Fedora though. It sounds like you're doing something terribly wrong, as most Linux Users also don't need to reboot ever 1-2 days. Maybe you should try a more beginner friendly distro if Arch is too complex for you

▲mirzap 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I use WebStorm, CLion, Cursor, 2-3 Claude Code instances, Chrome/Brave with 50+ tabs, Docker, and a bunch of other things on MacBook Air all at the same time. It works. Never freezes. Never crashes. I tried that on Windows recently, and now on Arch with a lot more memory (32), and it simply can't handle it. I reboot daily. Freezes in the middle of the work. It may be the issue with nvidia drivers as other pointed out, but that's precisely my point. Apple has very limited number of drivers to maintain, and they can improve them to perfection. They are not perfect, of course, but compared to alternatives, it's light-years ahead.

▲svelle 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I also use a MacBook as my daily driver, but have used different ThinkPads for years and there is no way that that workload should bring any medium specced TP to its knees like you're describing.

▲mirzap 3 days ago | parent [-]

Good to know. Many people recommend ThinkPads, but my experience has been with Dell. In the future, I might consider a ThinkPad or a Framework laptop.

▲rwyinuse 3 days ago | parent [-]

I use Dell at work, Thinkpad at home. Either gets the job done, but to me it's clear Thinkpads have superior quality, at least if you don't go for the cheapest model. Keyboard and battery life are so much better on my old Thinkpad compared to 2 years newer Dell of same price range.

▲wltr 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don’t know for sure, I need to confirm it, but it feels like my similarly specced Arch machine would just shrug at it. It’s a 10 years old PC, yet it feels like it’s a non issue for it to handle this. I bet my MacBook Pro from 2014 (with Arch too) won’t even start a fan. It depends on these 50 tabs, I guess, but the rest is just doesn’t feel like a big deal to handle.

▲altcognito 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ollama crashed my MacBook just last week, they definitely crash, as they might not have created the “report this application” feature if they didn’t.

▲sensanaty 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I dunno I use similar apps on my work-provided 32GB M1 Pro and that thing chugs along horribly after a certain point. I still get the spinning beach ball from time to time, and the massive work Vue codebase in Webstorm is so fucking slow that it can take upwards of 10 seconds for type intellisense to give me results in tiny files, with constant freezing. The same doesn't happen on my personal linux machines, my work codebase is incredibly speedy there.

Don't get me started on MacOS itself and its myriad of problems.

▲hermanzegerman 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My 10 year old ThinkPad can handle RStudio,PyCharms, VSCode with Copilot Agent and Firefox with 30+ Tabs open just fine on 32 GB RAM and Fedora.

Again, I don't think the issue here is Linux itself

▲ 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]
[deleted]
▲cycomanic 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> You simply can't compare anything to MacBooks. I had a Dell that I paid about $2,000 for, and it was really good (or so I thought). Then at work, I got a MacBook Pro, and that's when I saw the difference. > > Its not only the Pros, no "high-end" laptop running Windows or Linux with just 8GB of RAM can perform better than a MacBook Air with 8GB. I don't know how Apple has optimized memory usage, but my personal feeling is that 8GB of RAM on Macs is equivalent to 32GB on non-Apple devices. >

Thanks for confirming my point, we have actual benchmarks that objectively show this isn't the case but apple fanboys still make these sort of claims. The same with battery life, if you listen to apple fanboys you get the impression that battery life above 5h was simply unheard off until the M1 came along. I had a x200 in 2009 or 2010 that was giving me 10h+ in the large battery and I could even swap over to the smaller one to get another 6h (?) or so.

> I'm not some Apple fanboy—I've been using Arch Linux daily for the past month or two, and it's great. However, there isn't a day that passes without screen freezes during peak usage, and I need to reboot every day or two. This happens despite having 32GB of RAM, an RTX 4060, and a Ryzen 5 7600. That never happens with my 5-year-old MacBook Air.

The only thing I can say to that is that in my experience nvidia drivers have become objectively worse over the last 2 years. On my desktop I used to be able to play games without issues, but recently lots of them lock up after a while (only in games in my experience). My Intel laptop never has any issues. I'm now actively looking for an AMD GPU because it has become so annoying.

▲dijit 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Come on, let’s be real for a moment.

two things could be possibly true, people are sheep and people who interact with the platform can enjoy it so much that they become fans. This means that any person who actually enjoys using the technology is immediately dismissible because now they are fans. Right?

It’s so stupid because I’m a die hard linux user but I can definitely appreciate my Apple devices.

I’ve had this discussion so many times in real life, what is the value of a ThinkPad T-series over a ThinkPad E-series; or a HP Elitebook over an Ideabook? The specification looks the same, on paper. Why should I convince my employer to fork out an extra €500?

The truth is, the things that really matter to people don’t fit very well on a spec sheet. Build quality, palm rejection, colour accuracy, enjoyable sound, even the feel of the chassis. Apple seems to put a lot of care and attention into these things, so yes, they’ve optimised the operating system to be more pleasurable to use… and so it is, even in low memory conditions- they prioritise things the user might care about. (The currently active program, being responsive etc).

I’ll give another example, The Commodore64. It is so comically weak compared to even the micro processor inside my keyboard… so if compared to a full-blown desktop computer of the modern day (which is thousands of times more powerful still…) I should feel like the modern computer is better. Yet when I type on a Commodore 64 it is so immediate… there is no lag in typing, the words appear on the screen as quickly as they are pressed, it feels mechanical. It feels immediate. it feels direct.

Why? Clearly the Commodore 64 has much fewer resources, but it feels so much nicer to write text on a Commodore 64. Not because of the keyboard (I have a better one), not because of the processor (because it’s a weaker one). But because the latency of typing is so low that it is barely perceptible and that goes directly against the specification.

One cannot infer user experience from spec sheets.

And people interacting with the Apple ecosystem who become fans might have a point. No matter how much you don’t want to hear it.

▲cycomanic 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I can definitely appreciate that some people like apple hardware and software. I have a colleague who swears by it, he also only uses defaults on any software out of principle. It's not my thing, and I get frustrated every time I sit in front of a mac and can't change things the way I want. That's OK, everyone is different.

What is annoying and was why I posted is that a significant number of apple users become fans as you say and somehow view everything that apple does as extraordinary, that leads to statements like in the article that apple is "crazy good" because the used laptops for 5 years without having to repair them. Surely you can admit that that is nothing special?! Similarly, saying osx runs as good on 8 GB as Windows or Linux on 32GB that's just objectively not true. There's been plenty of objective benchmarks which showed differently and I have used macs enough to know that if ram gets tight they grind to a halt just as much.

I just don't understand the fanboyism about a brand that it becomes like supporting a football club. Do I like thinkpads, yes I had good experiences (and I have trouble with laptops without a trackpoint). Am I a fan? No, Lenovo is just a company which makes plenty of crap, i.e. the new X1 carbon i got from work is a hot piece of garbage.

▲udev4096 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> using Arch Linux daily for the past month or two

No wonder you are facing non-existent issues. Stop blaming it on Arch. If it was widespread, there would be a fix by now for it. You messed it up. It's upto you to solve it. Also it's not "your mac". Apple has full remote access and can brick "your mac" anytime. With apple, you get the feeling of owning without actually owning anything. Gotta give it to them

▲herbst 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've had a MacBook Pro for about a year. I've got actual burns from the case, I couldn't use a external screen without it being attached to power and it was incredibly loud, I didn't like the OS, the support I've witnessed was horrible, ...

I know many people like their macs but it's not that single perfekt machine people want it to be

▲p_ing 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

MacOS isn’t more memory efficient, you can’t be when using 16KiB pages vs 4KiB. That’s a lot of wasted memory.

▲mirzap 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

My experience running multiple bloated Java JetBrains IDEs, Chrome with 50+ tabs, begs to differ.

▲p_ing 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Reread my comment. Yes, macOS (or ARM, here) wastes memory. For every 1KiB page you have, you're wasting 15KiB of memory.

That's just how this works. It's a performance vs. efficiency tradeoff.

And there's nothing special about your workload. It's small in comparison to many others that many other OSes on many other ISAs, including Windows & x86 w/ AWE, have been running for quite some time with no issue.

▲tredre3 2 days ago | parent [-]

> For every 1KiB page you have, you're wasting 15KiB of memory.

Applications do not allocate memory through the kernel, though. There's a layer between the application code and the kernel, usually the libc or equivalent, that takes the page and fills it with smaller allocations. And most allocators out there usually request pretty big chunks at a time too, measured in megabytes/hundreds of pages.

So what you are saying might be technically true if you were to dispatch all mallocs to the kernel, it is not actually true in the real world.

▲udev4096 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

▲udev4096 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's definitely not. I use mac pro for work and it chugs around 16GiB (out of 64) of RAM on IDLE! It also has the worst keyboard I have ever used with a crazy big trackpad which I absolutely hate

▲saagarjha 2 days ago | parent [-]

I don't think you understand how memory accounting works on modern OSes? When the machine is idling, it will have a bunch of stuff in RAM because why wouldn't it?