Given that this is your stance and demands for laptop hardware I have to assume that you have never once participated in the laptop market prior to the M1 releasing?

That’s the only way your unrealistic expectations make sense.

Of course, people have been parroting that about Linux on laptops for over a decade. I never understood it, since I’ve never had any significant issues with Linux on my laptops.

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pjmlp a day ago | parent | next [-]

Indeed nothing other than being the only device that dropped connections on some of my routers, no hardware video decoding no matter what tips from Linux forums I tried, OpenGL 3.3 when the card supported OpenGL 4.1....

And when during 2024 I looked for a replacement after it died, I was so lucky that I got one with an UEFI that refused to load whatever distro I tried from SSD, while having no issues loading the same, if it was on external box over USB.

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iam-TJ 21 hours ago | parent [-]

"refused to load whatever distro I tried from SSD" sounds very much like a feature in AMI InsydeH2O firmware (and possibly others) where-by one has to manually "trust" the boot-loader file the boot menu entry points to. This doesn't seem to apply to Microsoft Windows boot loaders so I've always assumed the signing certificate is checked directly against the MS UEFI CA root rather than the intermediate 3rd party certificate that is used by Microsoft to sign distro shim files.

I have kept a screenshot of the firmware setup for years to remind me where the option can be found; looking at it now:

menu: Security > "Select UEFI file as trusted"

That would bring up a file-chooser where one can navigate the files in the EFI System Partition and select the distro's initial boot-loader file. For example, for a Debian install it would either or both of:

/EFI/debian/shimx64.efi /EFI/debian/grubx64.efi

	▲	pjmlp 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, because that wasn't even an option on that device.

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raw_anon_1111 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes and I also had a flip phone before the iPhone came out and a 90 pound CRT before large CRTs got affordable.

In fact my first computer was a 1Mhz Apple //e with 128KB of RAM.

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xerox13ster a day ago | parent [-]

I’m not sure what your point is?

You were ahead of the curve on displays and behind the curve on phones and I guess congrats on the 2e start, I had an early Mac.

What does this have to do with the price of CPU cycles in clamshell PCs?

You abstained until ARM because you could see the future and you knew that the specs you demanded we’re gonna be available eventually?

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raw_anon_1111 a day ago | parent [-]

My point is that because something is acceptable before something else came along better doesn’t mean it’s acceptable now.

Would you have been okay if Android phones had still been BlackBerry clones 7 years after the iPhone came out?

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xerox13ster a day ago | parent [-]

I don’t know what to say to that other than I pity that mindset.

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raw_anon_1111 a day ago | parent [-]

So I should still be using an Apple //e and an 80 pound CRT TV?

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xerox13ster a day ago | parent [-]

Please be serious, that straw-man is clearly not my point. (I thought you said it was 90# of CRT)

There’s definitely a balance between the newest of the newest bleeding edge hardware that we could only have dreamed of five years ago, and still functional hardware from five years ago.

Just like engineering is a balance between technical optimization and cost.

Seems like your mindset is one that chooses optimization at any cost, which is pitiable.

I bought an M3 when it was brand new but I also have a Dell XPS laptop that’s running an Intel 8th GEN processor. Both have their uses, and the existence of the M3 does not make the Dell worthless or unacceptable.

	▲	raw_anon_1111 a day ago \| parent [-]
		A 6 year old M1 MacBook Air that is still being sold new for $699 at Walmart is not “bleeding edge” and not expensive. Even the latest MacBook Air with 16GB RAM is $999. And a 27 inch CRT was between 70 and 100 pounds…

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carlosjobim a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Battery life was always better on Macs, along with a bunch of other things.

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raw_anon_1111 a day ago | parent | next [-]

Apple did some OS optimizations. But the next to last x86 laptop generation (the butterfly keyboard era) was really bad. The keyboards were bad and they had poor thermals

	▲	carlosjobim a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, those were far from perfect. Keyboards were horrible. Still superior in many other aspects.

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hecifato a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember battery life on my Late 2015 MBA was great for the time. It easily got through my post-secondary classes, 3-8 hours depending on the day, with leftovers. IIRC Apple claimed 12 hours of battery life. That was a significant improvement over the suggested 5 hours of my previous laptops.

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xerox13ster a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, but that’s Mac, not Linux on Laptops of the era designed for Windows