Aaron44126

Does it have to be SCP? I use FileZilla for SFTP (I think most servers that support SCP would also support SFTP) and it is free / open source, and works fine on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Easy enough for a dummy to use if if they have basic understanding of files and folders, and you get a server connection bookmark set up for them. You can drag and drop from Finder to the "server" side of FileZilla as well (or vice versa) and it will work. A note -- When going to install it, if you click the download link on this page you will get a "sponsored" version which includes optional bundled software (at least on Windows). Use this page instead for the clean version. For a text editor, BBEdit has a free version that is working well enough so far for me. You can grab it from the App Store and ignore the "30 days evaluation" thing that pops up. It will revert to "free" mode when the evaluation ends. (If you need a hex editor, "Hex Fiend" seems decent and it is also free.)

Eh. Forget third-party apps. You can do some terminal magic. This fully disables sleep. The system will not sleep when the lid is shut or under any other circumstance. sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1 If you do this, you will notice that the "Sleep" command is even greyed out in the top-left Apple menu. Get it back by doing: sudo pmset -a disablesleep 0 The change is immediate, no need to reboot or anything. While sleep is disabled, a script like this can be used to put the system to sleep. sudo pmset -a disablesleep 0 pmset sleepnow sleep 3 sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1 I noticed that while sleep is disabled, the screen will not turn off if you shut the lid. You can lock the system and then the screen will power off after a few moments, so no big deal really. Fortunately, macOS will not activate the screen in this case if you happen to move the mouse. You have to actually interact with the keyboard or touchpad. I added "pmset" to the sudoers config so I can script all of this stuff and it won't ask me for a password or fingerprint scan when I put the system to sleep. I'm also using pmset scripts to switch the system between "low power", "high power", and "automatic" performance modes. One minor annoyance is that the system automatically powers on or wakes up if you open the lid of press any button on the keyboard. (The dedicated power button is kind of pointless.) There doesn't seem to be a way to disable this. There was an NVRAM "AutoBoot" variable you could tweak to disable this behavior for Intel Macs, but the same method doesn't work for Apple Silicon Macs. I ran the system with the screen off (but not sleeping) for nine hours today and the battery level was reported at 89% afterwards. I wasn't really using it for much, but there were about a dozen apps open, and a Windows VM.

Yeah, like I mentioned in another thread, the fact that GPTK is a thing at all baffles me and I'm not sure where Apple is going with it. Putting all of that work in for an emulation environment that devs aren't even allowed to use to ship games doesn't make sense, unless they have some other future plans for it? I am wondering if they will use it to offer a tool to allow ordinary users to run Windows games at some point, but that doesn't fully make sense either, as Apple would definitely rather that devs make proper ports so that their hardware can be used at its full potential. I do think that GPTK being a thing means that Apple intends to keep Rosetta 2 around for a good long while. (Otherwise, again, why would they put in this effort if it is just going to be thrown away in a couple of years...?) I did see that there was an updated 1.0.2 version (I think that the original version would work in Ventura but the new one will not), and I also saw that people have worked out how to get it working within CrossOver, though that currently seems a bit hacky to me (even though it "works"). I am hoping that between now and the release of Sonoma, some tooling will build up around it or maybe CrossOver will offer official support. CrossOver is due to release version 23 in "late summer" and they are clearly paying attention to GPTK. There's another new project called Whisky that seems to be getting some attention. (It is basically a Wine/GPTK GUI frontend.) What would be amazing is if Valve would wake up and offer something similar to what they have going on Linux to allow Windows versions of games to be fired off through Wine right from the native Steam client; I'm not holding my breath for that, though, as the Mac Steam client seems to be an afterthought for them at this point.

Gaming first impressions. No issues connecting a PS5 DualSense controller. I had to toggle support on in Steam before it would work with Steam games. I do find it a bit obnoxious that gamepad input causes the keyboard backlight to illuminate, if you have it set to time out on inactivity. I'll have to do something to disable the keyboard backlight while gaming. First off, I started Shadow of the Tomb Raider which is a few years old at this point, but a reasonably high-end game (graphically speaking) and has a Mac version. At 2336x1510 resolution, and graphics settings at the "highest" preset, it runs fluidly at ≈70-90 FPS in all scenes. Not bad, considering that the system doesn't even have a "discrete GPU" and it is also running through the Rosetta 2 x64->ARM emulator. "ProMotion" (VRR) seems to work fine and the game looks great with this setup. I did find that loading times seem a bit longer than I would have expected, though. Some games use the "modern" full-screen API introduced in Mac OS X 10.7 and they get launched isolated on a separate "virtual desktop", but some games use older APIs and behave more like Windows games, taking over the main desktop for the duration of the run. (You can still Command+Tab out in most cases to get to the desktop while the game is running.) Games that want to run using the entire display (rather than at 16:9 ratio) can blow up into the camera "notch" area, and to avoid this you can set a compatibility flag on those games to "scale the app to below the camera area". When you do this, the entire desktop is shrunk down a little bit while the game is running so that it can fit below the camera notch. The effective resolution and aspect ratio do not change when this happens, so this also means that some black border is added to the left and right side of the display in addition to the top. (It looks pretty black with the mini-LED system in place so it is hard to notice unless the game is running a dark scene and the backlight bleeds out into the cropped black area a little bit.) I ran a number of Steam games that have Mac ports and didn't have any issues firing them up. I also installed the Battle.net app and StarCraft and StarCraft II, those work fine. I have not tried running Windows games through CrossOver or Apple GPTK yet. I will probably hold off on that until macOS Sonoma is out, since it looks like that is a requirement for the current version of GPTK. I did try running Switch games through Ryujinx. Compatibility is a bit lower than it was for me with yuzu on Windows, but it looks like macOS support has been improving rapidly over the past few months so hopefully that trend will continue. There are a number of games that work fine ... once the shader cache is built up a bit. Shader stutter is much more apparent than it was on Windows with either Ryujinx or yuzu. That probably can't be avoided unless they add a proper Metal renderer, which I would not expect any time soon, but maybe it will improve as MoltenVK and SPIRV-Cross mature. One nifty thing is that as the Switch also has an ARM CPU, Ryujinx can run some games in "hypervisor" mode, so the game's ARM instructions run natively on the Apple CPU without a CPU emulator/interpreter/JIT thing in between.

Yes, you have to boot into safe mode once for the system to “realize” that the disk controller has changed and thus not BSOD at boot with “inaccessible boot device”.

If it is set to RAID mode, are you able to switch to AHCI/NVMe mode and see if you can boot install media? This is in BIOS setup in the storage section. If it works, to switch your existing Windows install, you will need to take some steps. https://www.nbrchive.net/forum.notebookreview.com/threads/precision-7560-7760-owners-thread.836381/page-64.html#post-11112315

There is no display whitelist. You can install any display that will fit and is electronically compatible. (M6800 has limited eDP bandwidth, 20 lanes instead of 40 or something, so high res displays like 4K are out.) PanelLook is a good place to see what options are, but sourcing one would be through aftermarket parts sites or eBay. I believe that you can install “any” PCIe device in the WWAN slot, including an NVMe drive if you can fit it in with an adapter, but the BIOS won’t look there for a bootable drive. So, using that drive as the system drive would require the boot loader to be on a different drive.

Yes. The same options are available in the “Dell Power Manager” app, and in the BIOS setup on some models. (My names for each mode might be a little bit abbreviated.)

"Optimized" is factory default.

Try an external monitor first. Your display might be dead. …Odd that you got a BSOD to set that off though. AMD or NVIDIA GPU? If NVIDIA, and you had Optimus disabled, enable Optimus and see if it works. You can do that by removing the bottom panel and unplugging the coin cell battery to reset the BIOS settings.

There is a Windows “reset” feature that you can access from Settings that basically does this. There is an option to keep your files. You won’t be able to keep installed programs and achieve the “fresh reset” that you are looking for. You might have to install some drivers but just one run of Windows Update should take care of that. (If the WiFi driver is required first, you can get that from the Dell support site.)

I’m sort of confused about the target audience and purpose for Apple Game Porting Toolkit. It might leave “some performance to be desired” but think about what it is doing. Converting x86 to ARM, and converting DX11/12 to Metal, obviously there is going to be significant overhead. And it works. They fact that it makes games playable at all is pretty amazing. They slapped this together in a seemingly short time and it is something that the CrossOver/Wine/MoltenVK/etc guys have been working on for a few years with limited success. So, clearly they have put in some substantial effort. But for what? Not for ordinary users to play Windows versions of games. It is officially so that game devs can “test” how their games “might” work on macOS. But that only sort of makes sense, because obviously they will work “worse” under AGPT than they would native. And devs can’t even use it to ship games (running in the “emulator”), according to the license terms, they would still have to proceed with a full port. I guess it they also have tools to convert shaders to Metal which could speed that up. So, yeah. Will Apple eventually open this up more in some way? Especially after seeing what the community reaction is like? I think they’d really prefer people to be using optimized game ports, so I don’t know. Anyway, not complaining too much. It opens up a whole new set of games to macOS users even if that was not Apple’s intent.

@Sandy Bridge I tried Amphetamine and it did work, but it had another issue which was causing the screen saver to trigger when it shouldn’t (like while watching a long video). The preferred solution these days seems to be an app called “NoSleep” which I am trying next. There is also a built-in terminal command called “caffeinate” whose job is to prevent various idle/sleep conditions from triggering which might do the trick. The new “scissor switch” keyboard is a step up from “butterfly” for sure. I wish it had more “depth” but otherwise don’t have a complaint with it yet. ….Other than that I basically have to learn a whole new set of keyboard shortcuts. And that I’d still like a numeric keypad. The headphone buzz issue did not occur when running on battery. It also disappeared when I hooked up the grounded power cable. So, easily solved for an extra $20 😕 I’m now traveling so I don’t have time to mess with it much but I will eventually be back with more observations.

There was some trick to do factory reset and get undervolt back after upgrading to a newer version of the BIOS that blocked it. Maybe you just figured out a “more specific” way to accomplish the same thing …

Storage details are out. https://frame.work/blog/framework-laptop-16-deep-dive---memory-and-storage Framework Laptop 16 has two NVMe slots, one 2280 and one 2230. You can add two more 2280 slots with a rear expansion module (…in place of a dGPU). Two SODIMM slots for RAM, and they are starting to offer Framework-branded memory modules made by ADATA. In the article, they detail the specific NVMe drive and memory modules on offer.

Fed up with Windows. Tried Linux for a while, and while successful in using it, I found myself frustrated a bit by the lack of professional software (MS Office, Adobe, etc.) and just the amount of tinkering that I had to do to get things working the way that I wanted. Now, I've decided to give macOS a go, so I went and bought a MacBook Pro. Background: I'm familiar with macOS so I don't feel like I am going in blind. For many years I was a sysadmin and managed a bunch of Macs, even though I never used one as a "daily driver" myself. That's been a while ago now, though, and I have not spent any serious time with an "Apple Silicon" Mac before now. Following up on the Linux thread, I figured that I would start this one and just sort of write about things that I've run into, positives and negatives. Maybe it will help out anyone else who is considering a similar transition. First impressions — positive. Setup is super easy, as you'd expect. But, it did offer to transfer data off of a Windows PC and I did not try using that function to see how well it works. The mini-LED display is easily the best laptop display that I have ever seen. Super bright, good colors, deep blacks. (Though I will mention that I've never used an OLED laptop display.) I poked around "Settings" and mostly was able to set it up to behave how I want, with some exceptions mentioned below. I did find the Settings app to be a bit odd, with stuff not being in the place that I would expect or hidden behind secondary menus that you have to press a button to access. The battery life, holy cow. I'm not used to a system with an "all day" battery. I spent the better part of an hour sitting on the couch, detached from an outlet, and figured out how to install VMware Fusion, build a Windows-on-ARM ISO, and install it. I was not being especially careful with regards to battery life and had the display brightness turned up pretty high, but when I was done, the battery was still reporting 94% capacity. (So, I do have a local Windows VM set up now.) It seems like it could last through a workday on battery power. At this very moment I am on my work PC but SSH'ed into the Mac, which has been sitting unplugged with the lid shut for over an hour (not sleeping), and it is reporting 100% capacity with 20 hours of life remaining. We'll see if this holds up over time or if the battery starts draining "more quickly" as it gets lower. I haven't heard even a whisper from the system fan yet (except while running Cinebench), and yet the system is cool to the touch. (My Precision 7770 would definitely be warm, even if it had just been sitting idle with the fans running at low speed, and I never felt comfortable running it with the lid shut because the display panel would get hot.) I got a Cinebench score of just under 15,000 (multi-core ten minutes), which is in line with what I got on the Precision 7770 before tweaking. The fan was only barely audible during this test so I wonder if there is some "kick it into high performance" setting that I haven't found yet. Unlike with the Precision, the score went up slightly as the ten minutes went on rather than down, so it doesn't seem to be hitting a short-term throttle limit. I've been using brew install --cask (app name) from the terminal to install a lot of things. This should give a "Linux package manager" type experience for keeping stuff up to date. Homebrew has tons of packages, for full commercial apps in addition to UNIX-y command line tools. I do have an iPhone so I am enjoying the integrated experience with messages, photos, maps, and even weather settings and content being just "the same" on both devices. First impressions — negative. Plugging in wired headphones, I noticed a sort of "hum" or "low buzz" noise in the background. It did not matter if the headphones were connected by 3.5mm or USB-C, so at first I thought that the headphones were at fault, but further testing indicated that it was definitely the MacBook. The buzz would stop if I touched my hand to the chassis, or if I disconnected the power cable and ran on battery power. Grounding issue! As it turns out, this is a common MacBook issue. They shipped the system with a two-prong power adapter that does not include a ground connection. You can swap out the end bit with a cable that includes the ground connection, which "should" take care of this issue (...if they offer one for whatever outlet type you have in your region — I saw someone post that the UK version of this cable does include the grounding pin on the outlet side, but it is not actually connected to anything on the power brick side). I am picking one up today, so we will see. Apple is stubborn about the way that they want the system to work in some ways. For example, the system automatically goes to "sleep" shortly after it hits whatever idle threshold you have set for the display to power off. There is an option to disable this behavior when on AC power, but no option to disable automatic sleep on battery power (without also disabling automatic power off of the display, which I do want). I had to install a third-party tool to have system stay awake "forever" on battery power. (.......If the battery can last all day, why not? I might leave the laptop unplugged somewhere in my house and want to access a file from my work laptop, or from my phone.) ...At least "sleep" actually works well, something I never had success with under Linux. They also stubbornly adjust the display brightness down when I connect or disconnect from AC power. It will not remember what I had set for either state. This despite disabling all of the "automatic brightness" / "dim brightness on battery" toggles that I could find in Settings. I should be able to work around this with a background shell script. (...Really used to doing this sort of thing from Linux...) Similarly, I had to fight with the "scroll direction". There are two toggles in the Settings UI to reverse scrolling for the touchpad and for the mouse, but it is the same toggle (flipping one also flips the other). So if you want scrolling to work one way on the touchpad and the other way on the mouse, you can't do that. This was also solved with a third-party app which inverts the mouse scroll wheel. There is potential for some funny backlight issues with the mini-LED display's different dimming zones. I noticed it most clearly when observing the mouse cursor over a completely black background. You can see a "glow" around the cursor as its zone is lit up but not the surrounding zones. Microsoft problem — I installed Microsoft Office using the installer from their web site and all of the Office apps crashed immediately on launch. Couldn't figure out how to get past that. I uninstalled it and installed the versions of the apps pulled from the App Store instead. Those seem to work fine. Haven't tried any games yet. I'm not planning to mess with the "Apple Game Porting Toolkit" until Sonoma releases in the fall. I'm hoping that some third-party tooling around it matures (looks like they are working on support in Heroic Games Launcher for example). There's enough stuff that I can run native or in an emulator to keep me happy until then.

There's a trickle-down thing going on as well. Most distributions don't ship the latest Linux kernel available right away. So when new hardware comes along, you have to wait for proper support to be added to a new version of the kernel (which might not happen until after the hardware's launch) and then you have to wait for your favorite distribution to ship an update which includes that kernel. The time that you have to wait depends on the distribution's release cycle. "Rolling release" distributions (i.e. Arch) will get it more quickly. I ran into a similar thing with my Precision 7770, which I picked up at launch in July 2022. Ubuntu is my distro of choice. Ubuntu didn't have a kernel that supports the Intel 12th gen iGPU until October 2022 and they didn't have a kernel that supports a 120 Hz display on said iGPU until April 2023. (Despite both being supported immediately at launch on Windows.) Bleeding edge issues, but something to consider if you're buying/building a brand new PC and plan to run Linux on it.

If you're interested and have a spare flash drive (8GB or larger) then it is easy enough to try. Download an Ubuntu ISO, follow the directions to make a bootable flash drive, and then boot off of that and poke around and see what you think. It will give you a full desktop environment with a web browser and you don't actually have to install anything. I think that the default GNOME desktop is good for beginners, but there are others that you can try. It is not as customizable as some others, but it is well-supported and very stable, and there are extensions that you can install to change some behaviors if you like. @Mr. Fox mentioned KDE Plasma and Cinnamon. I have tried both. I found Plasma to be my favorite, it is very flexible and a good power user experience, but also a big "rough around the edges" and buggy. Cinnamon is another solid option and good for new Linux users to check out, but I couldn't use it because I found high-DPI support to be lacking. Depending on what you do with your PC, it might be easy to transition to Linux or it might not. You've got to be open to things being a bit different. Linux does support older hardware better (IMO) so it could "breathe new life" into your machine, booting and operating much faster than Windows 11 does. You can easily install Steam on Ubuntu, and after toggling a few options in Steam settings, install any Windows game that you want (see YouTube videos for instructions). I just came off of using Linux as my main OS for two months and the main drawback to me was professional software (MS Office, Adobe, etc.) which you cannot use if there is no Linux version. There are free alternatives which will be fine if you only need to do light work in this area but probably frustrating if you are actually used to using them for productivity. "Why not charge for Linux?" No person or company is in a position to be the gatekeeper and charge for it. It is just a collection of free software. Even if Linux Torvalds decided that he was going to cut off free access require payment for the Linux kernel from now on, he would face pushback and likely legal challenges from other users who contributed code to the kernel under the open license. The software is licensed in such a way that no one can take it, create an "improved" (paid?) version, and then fail to contribute their changes back to the community if asked (without being ready to face copyright claims in court). If someone were to try to charge for it, then someone else would just make it available for free, and no one would use the paid option. I mean, Red Hat does charge for their distribution and they have a business model going off of that, but in that case you are more paying them more for the support than for the software. As for "fixes" and specific hardware support, indeed, as a largely community project then people get to pick and choose what to work on and their priorities might not be in line with yours.

Yeah, while Apple certainly does have issues, they are mostly a different class of issues. They value their top-to-bottom hardware/software integration so I do not think that they would allow their OS to be streamed to "any device". They have been a champion for the consumer in some cases (going up against the FBI over creating an "easy unlock" version of their OS, and winning; mandating user opt-in to tracking, causing a notable disruption to Facebook's revenue stream; deploying a mechanism to fully encrypt cloud data so that only users can access it) so I am giving them a chance. I do not expect that they won't change over time (possibly for the worse); they are a business after all and will follow the money. Right now, they know that they are financially benefiting from being the "end user privacy advocate" choice. Conflicted feelings. I don't like him either. But I was glad when he took over because I liked Steve Ballmer even less (at the time). I was initially pleased to see some initiatives start that never would have happened under Ballmer — WSL, and open sourcing .NET Framework, for example. But as time goes on it is increasingly clear that he's a key driving force in the direction that Windows has taken that I do not like. There will always be businesses and governments and use cases in general which won't tolerate this junk. This is why, for example, we have Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, which has a lot of the junk stripped out as well as the aggressive upgrade pushing; it is just really hard for "ordinary users" to get their hands on it. The same sort of crap is coming to more basic consumer devices, like TVs, which now have cloud services integrated, tracking what you watch, showing ads in the UI in some cases, and so forth. I'm still using a "dumb TV" which I got in 2012 (right before streaming services started being built-in to every TV) with a separate streaming box attached (.......Apple TV, actually). If I ever buy a new TV, I will go out of my way to buy a "commercial display" (which is what they use in hotels, airports, restaurants, etc.) which would have the same panel used in an ordinary consumer TV, but lacking the aggressive "smart TV" software features that all consumer TVs include now. ...All this to say, for now there are options available for users who want to avoid the direction that tech is going, you just have to bend over backwards and go through business channels to access it, and most consumers don't bother. [Edit] It might be the same for the iPhone/Siri issues that you were complaining about in another thread. Maybe the "cleanest" (but not "easiest") way to get around that is to put your phone under MDM management and turn the stuff that you don't like off from that side.

I saw this and I don’t see them taking away the option to boot local Windows, but rather adding another option to boot cloud Windows. Though, maybe some devices will ship with that as the only option someday. And obviously they are doing work to integrate cloud offerings into normal desktop Windows more and more, and monetizing whatever they can get away with. None of this is a direction that I really care for, which is why I am out. Funny how we have come full circle. You used to have dumb clients that connected to powerful mainframes because you couldn’t put much compute power into user terminals, for both physical space and cost reasons. That changed over time as things shrunk and got cheaper, and ordinary end user devices became more capable. Now we have powerful end user devices and companies are pushing to turn them back into dumb terminals. (I’d say cloud gaming is also trying to follow this trend somewhat.)

Derailing a little bit into an Apple/Mac/iOS discussion... Granted, six years of iOS updates doesn't mean you get all of the new features from those updates on old phone. For example, my 2017 iPhone X doesn't support some of the ML image features introduced in iOS 15 or 16 (don't remember), like being able to "extract" an object or person from an image or being able to recognize and select/copy text from an image. Those use the "neural engine" cores in the phone CPU which are only in the newer phones. Still, a lot of the features do make it over. If you are used to Android then you are used to not getting a new Android version immediately at release (unless maybe it is a Google phone); I understand that there is a "holding period" while the phone manufacturer produces an image for their phones (if they offer the update at all) and also it could need to be validated by the carrier? iOS updates are available on all eligible devices immediately at release. If you don't want to upgrade right away, they will still offer security updates for the previous version of iOS on devices that are eligible for the new one for a period of about three months. (This is new, just in the past two releases.) I haven't found Siri to be that bothersome. I rarely use it or even notice that it is around. I do have the "Hey, Siri" feature disabled, so when I do invoke it, I do it by holding down the power button. All I ever really ask it for is unit conversions, setting timers, and random numbers ("give me a random number between 1 and X" helps when my kids are having problems deciding on something ha). You can ask it to recognize a song that is playing in your environment which is sometimes handy. I did also disable "Siri suggestions" for the Maps app because if I don't, it tries to "suggest" the place where I want to go when I connect it to CarPlay in my car and it is usually wrong. That iCloud full client-side encryption feature is really cool and it is also pretty new, they just kicked it out in the past few months. It was sort of a sudden/surprise launch too, announced one day and then available to use the following week. I know they have gotten pushback from certain agencies (FBI/etc.) about encrypting everything so I think that they didn't want to give much time for complaints. Regarding the MacBook design and lack of upgrade potential, I see this too and it is a sore spot for me. I am mostly miffed by the lack of removable storage. That is something that definitely would get better over time and is perfect for a future upgrade. I would max out the RAM and CPU when I pick up the system so I don't think there would be upgrade potential even if those parts were modular. (Other than storage and RAM, not like the situation is that different from what most other laptops are doing these days 😕) Still, its a compromise that I am hoping will be offset by increased satisfaction of just using the thing. We'll see. I don't care so much about it being a slimmer build. The Apple silicon CPUs are way more tailored for laptop use than what Intel has been putting out lately, and there is not a discrete GPU so the dual-fan solution that they have should be enough to keep it cool. Interested to see how performance feels as well. I know that bigger Windows games will take a performance hit, going through Rosetta 2 (x86->ARM) and DirectX-to-Metal translation layers. I was watching some demonstrations on YouTube, and even a surprising number of games suddenly "work" now with Apple's Game Porting Toolkit, performance I was seeing on M1 Max was 35ish FPS for more complex titles at 1080p. I mostly play lighter titles, M2 Max should do a little better, and you can always lower settings to boost FPS. Maybe I'll kick off a new thread over in the macOS area once this thing arrives and I have used it for a while. I know there aren't many Apple users on this site. But I've at least seen @kojack thinking about the idea of switching to macOS as well on and off over the past few months.

I've been working to de-Google myself as well. macOS would also let me use Apple Maps in place of Google Maps, one of the few services from them that I still use with regularity. Otherwise I basically just use Google Voice as a "spam" phone number, and occasionally Google Search when DuckDuckGo isn't getting me what I want. I have an iPhone X, which is a 2017 model which is just going "out of support" this year (it will not get iOS 17 in the fall). I wish they would formally specify how much support each of their devices will get. Basically, you have to wait until WWDC and see what they do when they announce each OS. You can "guess" that they will drop one generation of devices every year, but sometimes they don't drop any devices at all (iOS 9, iOS 12, iOS 15) and occasionally they drop two generations at the same time (iOS 16 dropped both 2013 and 2014 phones). Right now, six years from launch is a pretty good guess for how long an iPhone will be supported with major OS updates. And they will still deliver security updates to older phones that don't get the latest OS for a while, so it is not like it is a hard cutoff when that time comes. (Still, they don't have a formal policy so you can't tell when security support is officially done.) One thing that did put me off from getting a Mac is the same thing. Don't know when it will stop getting major OS updates, they don't announce it more than a few months in advance. There are ways to run "unsupported" newer versions of macOS on older Intel systems, sometimes with caveats and sometimes without any issues at all, but it is not yet clear if that will be possible on Apple Silicon systems. If I stick with macOS, my plan would be to basically ride this MacBook Pro out until they stop offering OS updates for it (6-7 years?) and buy a new one at that point. And yeah, Apple is the only "big tech" company that I even remotely trust from a data privacy perspective. They have issues from time to time but overall they are a league above the major competition in that area (IMO). —————— I visited the local Apple Store this evening to play with a 16" MacBook for a little bit, partly to make sure that I am not crazy and that it would be tolerable to use. I wish the keyboard had more "depth" but it is not as bad as those butterfly ones that they used to have. I can say though that the screen is pretty amazing. I hadn't seen one of these new ones before. It is mini-LED and not OLED, but I couldn't discern any glowing or backlight bleed when maximizing a window, which causes the top bit of the screen around the notch to "disappear". It's just black up there.

Eh. Sort of opposite situation here. I spent the last two months trying Linux and in the end decided to just go and buy a MacBook. We'll see how it turns out...

Well, this was a fun two-month experiment, but it is coming to an end. One reason I am ending it is ongoing frustrations with my Dell laptop hardware and the direction they are taking their products in general. (My posts in the Precision 7X70 threads go into this.) Another is the lack of access to professional/commercial software, which I decided that I do actually want to use. (Visual Studio proper, Adobe products, Outlook/OneNote/OneDrive, etc.). I've been bouncing to a VM to use these but that's not really the workflow that I want. The final kicker is basically KDE's flakiness. I think that they just don't have the people/resources to deliver a fully polished experience. I keep having to add workarounds to get the behavior that I want when I feel that it should be just there. I already disqualified GNOME (see above) and none of the other DE's look like they have the functions that I want from a power user OS... at least any more readily available without tweaking than KDE does. Examples of niggling issues with KDE: At 200% DPI scaling (using X11), a maximized window of a QT application leaves an empty row of pixels along the bottom of the screen. This is not the case with GTK apps, so you could see a GTK app poking out from behind a QT app. There has been a bug report on this since 2019 with no action to fix it. It tries to take control of my keyboard backlight, overriding the BIOS behavior and forcing it off when the system is idle, but sometimes it does not remember to turn it back on. (I put in a script to fix that.) No option to automatically disable the touchpad when a USB mouse is connected (...I could script that as well). Moving the mouse at the lock screen will prompt for a fingerprint read, which will time out after 60 seconds if I am not ready for it (i.e. just moving the laptop from one room to another), so I have to intentionally botch the login and wait for a few seconds before it will be ready to try the fingerprint read again. As if to push me over the edge, last night while I was just working in OneNote on the VM, the system went and visually locked up. (Mouse could move but nothing actually worked. Except, the system was still up and running because stuff that I typed in OneNote would still be synced in to the cloud notebook, which I could also see on my phone.) This is not an exhaustive list. Stuff like this keeps popping up. It's like lots of little paper cuts. What to do? Well, I'm not going back to Windows. I put in a lot of thought and investigation before deciding on this next step. I'm going to give macOS a go. I'm ordering a maxed out MacBook Pro 16" and it should be here Wednesday Tuesday. (If I'm going to have a system that is a pain to repair, let's at least have it be one that is very well engineered.) I'll probably sell the Precision 7770 and that will make up for much of the expense of buying the MacBook. I'm quite familiar with macOS, I used to work with it professionally, so I feel like I know what I am getting in to. Unlike Linux, nearly all of the apps that I want are available on macOS. I thought about holding out for Framework, I am very interested in the direction that they are going. But, it'll probably be a few years yet before they deliver what I want (larger system with a 4K-or-better display that can hold multiple SSDs in addition to a dGPU) and even then there is the fact that I'd have to run either Windows or Linux on it, neither of which I seem to want. Up above, I gave three reasons why I felt like macOS is a non-starter, which I will address: MacBook keyboard layout. Well, since switching to Linux I have been trying out a different keyboard layout, leaving "num lock" turned off and using the home/end/pgup/pgdown buttons over there, and the top row of keys for numbers when I would normally use the keypad. (This is as opposed to remapping right alt/ctrl and F11/F12 keys to handle those functions, to make up for Dell's keyboard layout deficiencies.) It took a week or so but I adapted to it fine. So, I'm willing to try out using the Mac keyboard layout with no/few remappings. I think it'll be OK. No removable storage. Well, this is definitely disappointing. They offer 8TB which is not enough for me to have everything in one spot, which I would really like to have, but I think that I can make it work by also taking the large SSDs currently in my Precision and using them as NAS storage instead and that will hold my more "archival" stuff. Poor gaming library. ...I'm encouraged by recent activity in this area, both from CrossOver and also Apple's own new game porting toolkit, made available just earlier this month, which allows you to basically attempt to run any Windows game on macOS. People are reporting success running big games like Elden Ring. It might not be at the same spot as Linux+Steam+Proton is just yet, but its heading in the right direction with actual momentum which is good enough for me. I have no shortage of games to play that will work. Apple putting that toolkit out makes me think that they have no plans to pull Rosetta 2 away in the near future. Also, I do a fair amount of console emulation and each of the big emulators of recent Nintendo consoles (yuzu/Ryujinx/Cemu) have made big strides over the past year-ish in getting a proper macOS version off of the ground. Older stuff will work fine in RetroArch which I am already familiar with from using it on both Linux and Windows. I'm also planning to heavily leverage the Homebrew repos and casks to have a Linux-esque package management experience. Some work that I did in Linux to manage process priority/affinity/etc. will translate pretty easily to macOS. I'm already somewhat in the Apple ecosystem (iPhone/Apple Watch) so the ability to tie those products together more seamlessly is also nice. I'll install the ARM version of Windows in VMware Fusion for the odd case where I need to use a Windows app not available on macOS. I'm excited to see how this goes. But that will be a story for a different thread (...if I even go into it here). [Edit] Order is in...

Sigh. Very disappointed in the lack of "precision" with regards to this new display enclosure + panel that I received. It is a refurbished part — clearly labeled as such on the packaging. That made me nervous out of the gate. First off, it was completely covered with very sticky plastic stuff that I had to pull off. I was worried that I was going to damage the display just by doing that. I fire it up and the first thing I noticed were visible bits of adhesive glue stuff sticking up from inside of the bottom bezel edge. Now, I was wondering about the attention to detail given by whoever put this refurb together. I removed the bezel and pulled those off without much trouble. The next thing that I noticed was that the bottom few rows of pixels are covered up by the plastic bezel. The screen is mounted too low in the enclosure. It was also slightly worse on the right side. I could scoot the mouse cursor along the bottom of the screen — on Linux, at least with my cursor, maybe six pixels stick up out of the bottom when I do this — on the left edge, I could only see two pixels of the cursor, and it would "disappear" as I moved it over towards the right. Pulling up the corner of the bezel, I could see what I expected in the corner of the screen, and it would be covered up as soon as I snapped the bezel back on. I pulled the bezel off entirely to see if anything could be done about that. Unlike previously, this one does not have visible adhesive pull-tabs so I couldn't try to remount it even if I wanted to (...which I don't...), without some prying or heating that might damage the display. I tried to see if I could nudge the display panel up slightly but it would not budge. There was also a substantial backlight bleed / pressure issue in one spot along the top but that was resolved after removing the bezel and snapping it back on, like last time. I also spotted backlight spilling out of the bottom of the enclosure and shining on the bottom left hinge. That was resolved by pulling up that bit of the bezel and putting some black electrical tape in place to stop the bleed. Despite the issues, after doing the work described above I ended up completely satisfied with the panel, other than the issue with the bottom rows of pixels being covered by the plastic bezel ... which I would treat as a deal-breaker. Before calling Dell to complain, I decided to check and see if I could manipulate the bezel into snapping on in a different way. I started by bending the bezel's plastic tabs a little so that it could mount in a slightly lower position, and I had some success fixing the bottom corners in this way. ...As I was working towards fixing the bottom-center, messing with the bezel too much eventually did me in. The display stopped working. I must have jostled the display-side of the eDP cable in the wrong way when pulling off the bottom edge — there is a lot of adhesive there and it tends to get stuck to the silver tape stuff that is on the bottom of the panel and the eDP cable runs right behind that. I put the old display back in and it works, but it still looks like there is a tiny bug stuck in the screen. So, Dell is sending a replacement display panel again. A shame, because this panel doesn't appear to have any pixel issues or actual defects on the display itself, and once I pulled the bezel off and snapped it on again once it had pretty uniform backlight with no bleed or pressure spots on the edges that I could see. It was a good one. I feel a little bad about messing with it to the point of breaking it and then having Dell replace it a second time at their expense ... but not too much, really, since I wasn't going to keep a panel with the bottom portion covered by the bezel anyway, and because I don't at all mind taking Dell to task for issues caused by what I believe to be a bad design choice in this system. If I could swap out the panel only as in past Precision systems then I would probably have ordered a replacement panel myself rather than going through warranty support to replace it over a "minor" display issue. I was already considering buying my own mini-LED panel to try out before I found out that the panel alone is a non-replaceable part because of the adhesive. They won't let me do a "parts only dispatch" a second time for the same issue, so I'll be having a tech install it this time. I will be sure to have him stay until I do a full examination of the display and have him document any issues that I spot, with a copy of Dell's pixel policy on hand. At least, I didn't have much trouble installing the PTM7950 stuff. I watched a couple of videos ahead of time and I did stick it in the fridge for a while. I ordered a 8×4cm pad. I cut off a 2×4cm strip and that was enough to cover both the CPU and GPU, so I have enough here for four total attempts. I didn't have time to do temperature testing but at least I could tell that the system was not trying harder than normal to cool itself off. Since I had to repaste again to put the old display panel back on, I'm just using the ordinary paste that Dell provided for now. (...Looking back, I should have done a quick job with the Dell paste and only applied the PTM7950 after I was sure that I liked the display.) [Edit] Looks like the panel will be available to ship today, so hopefully a tech can come out on Monday.