Trying to switch from Windows to Linux, ongoing issues thread

[Aaron44126]

12 minutes ago, Etern4l said:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/112968/automatically-disable-wifi-wireless-when-wired

 

Yeah I saw this exact page, and its "helpful" but I'm not sure if it might cause other issues.

 

For instance, the TLP configuration seems to turn the WiFi on or off when the Ethernet cable is connected or disconnected.  Great.  What happens if I have Ethernet connected, power the system off, unplug the cable, and then power it back on?  Or vice versa?  Will I end up with both connected, or neither connected?  Will have to do some testing to make sure funny state cases are covered with appropriate behavior.

[Etern4l]

Not familiar with the TLP package, but if power management is the goal, then I guess (but I'm not sure) interface priorities alone probably won't do the trick. That said, perhaps there is some advanced config trick to automatically turn lower priority interfaces off if higher priority ones are available, even without using another package. 

 

Edit: yes, perhaps. It seems like bonding set up in active-backup mode should do this. If the active/higher priority interface is available, the backup one is apparently turned off. I cannot test this now, but will at the next opportunity.

[Aaron44126]

New Sabrent drive (warranty replacement) installed, added to RAID0 array, and it is working.

 

...I noticed pretty quickly that this one makes a sort of electrical buzz noise if I do several GB's of writes in a very short time.  I've never heard an SSD make a noise that before, it is definitely noticeable.  The other two drives of the same model that I have are silent.

 

I don't do bulk writes all that much so I will just live with it for now.  (I will ask the warranty guys about that but I doubt that they will want to spring for another replacement, if it is "working"...)  I tested lots of bulk reads and it doesn't make any noise for that.

 

[Edit]

One day later, not able to reproduce the buzzing sound from the drive when doing bulk writes.  Maybe it just needed some burn-in time ...?

[Aaron44126]

 

1 hour ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

Heh, told you so. Dolphin is the best file manager I have ever seen, and Konsole is also a decent terminal emulator.

 

Replying over here so as to not throw the Precision thread that far off topic ...

 

I have found KDE to be a bit "rough around the edges" compared to GNOME, but over all, the level of customization that it offers makes it a real "power user" DE which is exactly what I was looking for.  I was only on GNOME for about a week and sort of ran into lack of choice about some things bothering me; the "who's computer is this, anyway?" issue is part of what drove me off of Windows to begin with.

 

I'm currently still on Plasma 5.24 (which is default for Kubuntu 22.04 LTS), but I plan to upgrade to 5.27 in the next few days.  Reading about the progress towards 6.0, I'm getting pretty excited about that even if it is a ways off yet.  In a way, it seems like this is a good time to hop on, with 5.27 being "stable" for a while I will have time to sort of get used to things and then decide how aggressively I want to follow the latest releases once the 6.0 train gets going.

 

I have some examples of the "rough around the edges" issues above.  Konsole has a good example.  I would go to settings, make a new "profile" so I could adjust the appearance to my liking, and save it.  If I relaunched Konsole, my newly added profile and settings would be gone.  Turns out you have to add the profile (with no changes), save it without changing anything else, immediately close and reopen Konsole, and then it will "stick"?  That worked for me and I haven't had to mess with it any more since then.

 

My opinion on Dolphin is ... meh.  It's fine, better than Windows File Explorer and probably better than Nautilus or Nemo or other Linux file managers that I have tried so far.  But it is no Directory Opus.  I feel like a "power user file manager" on Linux is still a hole I haven't figured out how to fill yet.  Some things I can do in DOpus that I haven't figured out how to do in Dolphin are:

• Have a subfolder of bookmarks so that I can open a certain set of folders in tabs all at once.  (I can probably fudge this with a script or folder full of symlinks or something.)
• Using the "Details view" mode, have a custom set of columns and sorting that it will remember ... for a particular folder only.  (For instance, I want to see photo metadata columns but I don't want those columns sticking around when I am in non-photo folders.  Also, certain folders I would like to have automatically sorted by the file "modified date" and not the filename.)
• If I have a folder full of videos, I want to be able to see how long they all are, but I can't get Dolphin to show me the "duration" of video files in a column.  (I can add the "duration" column from the "Audio" group, but it just shows blank for .mp4 files.  It can show the duration in the F11 "Information" panel, so it does know how to fetch it...)

Interested to hear if you know any tricks that I don't along these lines.

 

But overall, I've managed to work around most of the things that really bothered me and I don't see myself switching off of KDE any time soon.  I saw some discussion on how it has stuck around for so long and not fallen subject to the barrage of forks that GNOME has undergone over the years, and I think that there's something to that and they have a good trajectory going.

[Ionising_Radiation]

42 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

Reading about the progress towards 6.0, I'm getting pretty excited about that even if it is a ways off yet.

The biggest pull factor for me for Plasma 6.0 is native Wayland support with proper fractional scaling. Qt 6.0 already has it, but Plasma won't use it until it itself reaches 6.0... Soon™.

 

44 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

Using the "Details view" mode, have a custom set of columns and sorting that it will remember ... for a particular folder only.  (For instance, I want to see photo metadata columns but I don't want those columns sticking around when I am in non-photo folders.  Also, certain folders I would like to have automatically sorted by the file "modified date" and not the filename.)

Settings -> General -> Behaviour tab -> View -> Remember display style for each folder. Problem is that this option litters your filesystem with `.directory` files everywhere (hmm... we should enable inline code with backticks, and consider enabling Markdown syntax in general). 
 

54 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

If I have a folder full of videos, I want to be able to see how long they all are, but I can't get Dolphin to show me the "duration" of video files in a column.  (I can add the "duration" column from the "Audio" group, but it just shows blank for .mp4 files.  It can show the duration in the F11 "Information" panel, so it does know how to fetch it...)

Hmm... I don't think the option is there in the code. Good idea for a PR?
 

Or, clone, patch, and rebuild Dolphin from source. 

[Aaron44126]

30 minutes ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

The biggest pull factor for me for Plasma 6.0 is native Wayland support with proper fractional scaling.

 

Yeah, Wayland is super interesting.  I tried it briefly during my time with GNOME, and aborted mostly because it didn't work well with VMware Workstation, as under GNOME it would not allow VMware to "capture" shortcuts like Alt+Tab or the Windows key.  KWin has its own solution for that, though, you can just disable global keyboard shortcuts for a given application.  I'm very interested to give Wayland a go on Plasma when it is ready enough that KDE and distros are comfortable enabling it by default.  Hoping it is there by the time that Ubuntu 24.04 LTS drops next year.

 

30 minutes ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

Problem is that this option litters your filesystem with `.directory` files everywhere

 

That's kind of gross.  But, macOS does that with ".DS_Store" files so nothing I haven't seen before.  I wonder if it will read these ".directory" files even if that option is not checked, so maybe I can just have them sitting around where I want custom options set, rather than "everywhere" ....?

 

30 minutes ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

Hmm... I don't think the option is there in the code. Good idea for a PR?
Or, clone, patch, and rebuild Dolphin from source. 

 

I'll think about it.  I actually have a small list of such things for various projects that I am considering taking a stab at.  Not quite ready to get into that area while I am still sort of getting up and running on Linux.  But, the Debian package system makes it easy enough to fetch the source code for a package and pull in all of the dependencies that you need to build it so it shouldn't be too hard to start messing around with stuff like this.

[Ionising_Radiation]

33 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

I wonder if it will read these ".directory" files even if that option is not checked, so maybe I can just have them sitting around where I want custom options set, rather than "everywhere" ....?

I ought to clarify my wording: these files are only created in directories where you have set custom display options, and not like .DS_Store. However, 'custom display styles' include even changing the column widths, which is something I do quite often.

I still wish these settings were put in a centralised registry (I much prefer some things that Windows does; the registry being one of them, rather than a scattershot of .cfg, .ini, .conf, .rc files like in Linux). Can't be that hard...

[Aaron44126]

9 minutes ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

I still wish these settings were put in a centralised registry (I much prefer some things that Windows does; the registry being one of them, rather than a scattershot of .cfg, .ini, .conf, .rc files like in Linux). Can't be that hard...

 

I was actually just looking at discussion on this.  Dolphin will already squirrel away ".directory" files in a different place if you make a change on a folder that it can't write to.  An option to have it do that for "all folders" would make a lot of people happy.  There's a bug on the subject but it doesn't look like it is getting any real movement.

[Ionising_Radiation]

20 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

An option to have it do that for "all folders" would make a lot of people happy. 

I would guess one blocker would be how to migrate from existing `.directory` folders... Maybe every time it encounters one, and the directory has 666 permissions, then copy the settings to the registry, and then delete that folder. But this might mean straggler files that are never dealt with because the user never opened their parent directories after the first couple of times.

Baloo could deal with this, too; it's an indexer service, anyway.

[Aaron44126]

Well.  Decided to go current with KDE Plasma, rather than sitting on version 5.24 which is what Ubuntu has in their current LTS repo, so I went ahead and upgraded to (K)Ubuntu 22.10 and pulled Plasma 5.27 from the Kubuntu backports PPA.  (Well, it is Plasma 5.27.4, but they should have 5.27.5 shipped out any time now, it's already in the staging repo...)  The upgrade was smooth and everything seems stable so far.  I'll look to fully upgrade to (K)Ubuntu 23.04 in July around when 22.10 is going out of support.  (I'm already using the 23.04 kernel packages...)

 

I can already see some appreciable differences, for example, it starts "listening" for a fingerprint scan as soon as I touch anything on the lock screen.  On 5.24, I had to hit the "enter" key to try to enter a blank password before it would initiate fingerprint scan.

 

[Aaron44126]

...Ran into audio stuttering for the first time when gaming after upgrading to Ubuntu 22.10.  Maybe "audio dropouts" would be a better way to describe it.  Come to find out, they have switched the default audio server from PulseAudio to PipeWire.  I had previously added some scripting to make sure that the PulseAudio server runs on P cores only, so I guess I'll do the same for PipeWire, but if that doesn't fix it then I guess I can just switch back to PulseAudio and see if that fixes it.

 

(Sort of a shame because the GPU / power throttling has not been an issue at all over the past two days, likely because of the BIOS settings changes I made on Friday?  Fix one thing and now have something new to figure out.)

 

[Edit]

Looks like maybe it's not just me.

[Etern4l]

Perhaps @Mr. Fox has some thoughts on that. I have done zero gaming on Linux lately, but ran some GPU-intensive benchmarks like Heaven, Valley, Superposition etc with no issues.

[Mr. Fox]

I have not experienced any audio issues for a couple of years at least. I don't know anything about PipeWire. Never heard of it before. The last time I had audio issues was on X299. Everything worked fine but the onboard Realtek audio only functioned in 2-channel stereo. The additional channels we're not even detected on my 5.1 audio setup. It was obviously a driver issue, and it never got fixed. I moved on and now X299 is a thing of the past.

 

One of the many things that makes Linux better than Windows, at least historically, is the minimal change and an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" approach to things. It kind of pisses me off that they've made a change for the sake of change, switching from Pulse to PipeWire. There's no reason to change so they shouldn't unless there is one. Change should only occur as a matter of necessity, not stupidity, boredom or curiosity.

[Aaron44126]

1 hour ago, Mr. Fox said:

I have not experienced any audio issues for a couple of years at least. I don't know anything about PipeWire. Never heard of it before. The last time I had audio issues was on X299. Everything worked fine but the onboard Realtek audio only functioned in 2-channel stereo. The additional channels we're not even detected on my 5.1 audio setup. It was obviously a driver issue, and it never got fixed. I moved on and now X299 is a thing of the past.

 

One of the many things that makes Linux better than Windows, at least historically, is the minimal change and an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" approach to things. It kind of pisses me off that they've made a change for the sake of change, switching from Pulse to PipeWire. There's no reason to change so they shouldn't unless there is one. Change should only occur as a matter of necessity, not stupidity, boredom or curiosity.

 

Yeah, I generally agree, so I need to spend some time figuring out what the motivation and supposed benefits of the switch are here before I decide if I'm just going to just switch back to PulseAudio, which seems like it would be the easiest thing to do, or if I am going to try to make PipeWire work.

 

I have heard about PipeWire in the context of something that exists to help with the transition to Wayland (...which I am all for, I get the benefit of Wayland, even though I am not using it yet...).  I know for example that it can help screen sharing apps (i.e. virtual meeting apps, Zoom/WebEx/etc.) that are written for X11 to work under Wayland.  I do not know why there is an audio component to it though.  I didn't even know that there was until I ran into this issue.

 

The Reddit post I linked above has a potential solution (adjust the "default.clock.min-quantum" value in PipeWire).  Similarly, I don't want to go and make that change without first understanding what that value even does.

 

So.  Investigation to follow, when I have time.  I'll post what I find out back here.

[Aaron44126]

6 hours ago, Mr. Fox said:

There's no reason to change so they shouldn't unless there is one.

 

So, PipeWire was originally started as a project to handle video streams, but they added audio support later on.  It's not just Ubuntu that is switching to use PipeWire as the default audio server, in fact Ubuntu is sort of late to the party.  Ubuntu switched with version 22.10 (October 2022), but Pop!OS switched at version 22.04 (April 2022) and Fedora switched at version 34 (April 2021).

 

It looks like they're trying to unify use cases for PulseAudio and JACK and generally fix some other architectural issues around audio with this transition.  In fact, PipeWire supports to protocols/APIs used by ALSA, PulseAudio, JACK, and GStreamer, so it can be used by applications that support any of those without applications specifically needing to add support for PipeWire.  Also, PipeWire supposedly addresses some issues with audio over Bluetooth that have plagued PulseAudio, and is also lighter in terms of CPU use.

 

(When I originally tried Linux as a full-time OS back in 2008, I think that the process to move from ALSA to PulseAudio was just getting underway, so funny to see that PulseAudio is now being phased out right when I switch over again...)

 

So, if that is clearly the way that things are going, I am going to start with trying to use PipeWire instead of PulseAudio and find a way to fix the audio drop-out issue.

 

This guy seems to have run into the same issue and the solution appears to have been to change the value for "default.clock.min-quantum" to 1024.  The default value is 16, so that's a big jump.  I found other threads reporting stuttering issues and messing with the "quantum" setting seems to be a common recommendation.  In fact, I found a note here on the Debian wiki specifically saying that because PipeWire has lower latency that PulseAudio by default, it can be "choppy" on systems with a high CPU load, and they also recommend increasing the quantum value.

 

My system doesn't seem to have any sort of PipeWire config file in /etc/pipewire or ~/.config/pipewire, so I can only assume that it is using the default values for everything.  I take it back, I found the config files in /usr/share/pipewire.  It did have the "min-quantum" value explicitly set to 16.

 

This command will return the current value for min-quantum:

pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.min-quantum
 

You can change the value on the fly with:

pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.min-quantum (value)

 

This page describes how to set up a split-file configuration so that you can adjust your own values and not worry about them conflicting with the config files that the packages wrote out, when the packages are updated later on.

 

You can also run pw-top and it will give you a tool that shows details of connected PipeWire clients, including what the "min-quantum" value is currently.  With Firefox as the only client it is reporting a quantum of 512, but if I fire up yuzu (game emulator) it appears to want to lower the quantum to 256.

 

The config is pretty robust, you can set up rules for specific applications.  ArchWiki has an example for Discord.

 

What is the quantum, anyway?

It's basically the buffer window, and thus audio latency?  Best I understand it, it's the scheduling period for drivers and impacts how long applications have to fill in the audio buffer before a dropout will occur.  To measure the window, you have to divide the quantum by the playback rate.  On my system, PipeWire is reporting that the playback rate is 48,000 Hz, so yuzu's observed quantum of 256 means 256/48000 = 5.3ms of latency (and also a 5.3ms buffer window).  The "min-quantum" of 16 means an absurd 0.3ms.  ...Since I generally play at 60 FPS, frame times are 16.7 ms, so audio latency of up to around 30 ms or so is totally fine (I'm not going to be able to tell if a sound comes one frame late) and I don't mind raising the min-quantum to 1024 (21.3ms).

 

For reference...  What's latency like with PulseAudio?

I'm not running it right now so I cannot easily check myself, but I found this blog post where the guy reported latency of 100ms with default values (includes commands to measure it and configuration to lower it).  This bug report also mentions 100ms as the default latency.  100ms seems really high to me??  But, if that is right, it totally makes sense that if my setup used to allow for 100ms of latency and now it was pushed down to 5ms then maybe there will be issues with audio buffer underruns that were not there before.

 

The plan for me is, I will see if just forcing PipeWire processes to run on P cores helped, and if not, I will try min-quantum = 512 and see if that helps, and if not, double it until it is good.

 

This big post is sort of me just unpacking this as I figured it out myself, but maybe it will help someone else down the line!

[Aaron44126]

All good.  Min quantum 512 still resulted in some dropouts but 1024 seems completely fine.  (Can't tell that anything is off from an audio latency test.)  No GPU power limit hiccups either, for the third day in a row.  Maybe this is finally going to start working properly...

[Aaron44126]

On 5/12/2023 at 8:22 AM, Aaron44126 said:

Have a subfolder of bookmarks so that I can open a certain set of folders in tabs all at once.  (I can probably fudge this with a script or folder full of symlinks or something.)

 

(@Ionising_Radiation)

I just realized that Dolphin has a more robust "bookmarks" system that is entirely separate from "places" left bar thing that you can pin things to.  It's just sort of hidden away by default.  To access it you have to manually configure toolbars and add the "Bookmarks" button.  From there you can easily add folders to the bookmarks list (Ctrl+B), and using the "Edit bookmarks" function you can sort them how you like, group them into folders, and even add custom icons.  And if you have a folder full of bookmarks, it will let you open them as a set of tabs all at once.

[Aaron44126]

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...

[Etern4l]

Looks like a well worked-out rationale. I recently dumped Android for iOS, part of a slow-burning effort to degoogle. It's not perfect, but quite smooth overall, and there seems to be more care for privacy and personal data (not to mention something like 10 years of updates if needed). Might give macOS a go myself at some point in the future, albeit I expect Linux to remain hard to beat for heavy lifting.

[Aaron44126]

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.

[Etern4l]

OK, so it has been 6 years of iOS updates plus a further period of security updates - that completely outclasses Android. My previous Android flagship got maybe one OS update, I am not sure, and maybe a year or two of patches lol. Now Samsung are promising something like 5 years of security updates, and G. generously offers 4 on their own phone.... 

As you say, they don't have a formal policy on this, but similarly there is no guarantee they won't close the handy stores, or become worse than G. on AI and privacy in the next few years. We have to hope for the best, although those bad outcomes seem unlikely at the moment. One thing that surprised me about iOS is that some (just a few) apps work slightly better on Android (for instance Signal offers local message backups on Android, but not iOS) - this is unexpected, I guess that means that the Android app market is larger. 

 

It's hard to fault the screen (mini LED is probably the better screen choice for laptops anyway, given the burn-in risk you get with OLED) or aesthetics of Macbooks, but he list of things that have been putting me off them includes the light design aimed at casual users, and the completely closed build - no way to officially upgrade anything. Unless they change this, I will probably stick to Wintel or maybe try a Linux laptop, given my very limited native Windows app requirements. Yes, the ARM-based silicon probably ameliorates some of the performance concerns.

 

One thing that really surprised was the full client-side encryption they offer on iCloud, plus they do point out if ML algos run locally and no data is sent home.

Android sends 20x more data to Google than iOS sends to Apple, study says 

 

One exception is Siri and search which are aggressively on by default on everything (including the "learn from app and its concent"), and is a bit of a pain to disable and keep it that way. Oh well, there isn't any option at the moment, other than go full ghetto with degoogled custom Android ROMs.

[Aaron44126]

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.

[Etern4l]

45 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

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.

 

Yeah, I was assuming it's disabled, until I received a suggestion to call someone at a particular time lol. To be fair, I can see that as a great feature if I make it to my late 80s. Either way, if this was on device then no problem, but presumably it's not. Completely disabling this behaviour is painful, because any time I install a new app, I  have to go to setting and deselect "Learn from this app", "Include in search" etc. Same thing with this "Memories" feature where it generates slideshows. It's done in the cloud since it doesn't work with network off, even though I have iCloud disabled for now. Not great TBH.

[br2]

So my newest machine hung this morning and had to be force rebooted. The oldest is already on a scheduled daily reboot. Every time Windows p1sses me off enough to think Linux, i come to the same conclusion; it's a nice idea but volunteer developers aren't enough to make a viable platform for me. Crossing my fingers the April updates fix whatever the F**k Msft broke in the February updates.

[Aaron44126]

I guess I'll drop an update...

 

I've been really enjoying being off of Windows, even if the Linux switch didn't work out.  I do have a Windows VM that runs 24/7 under Parallels which I pretty much just use for two apps, but I find Windows a lot more tolerable to use as a "container" for hosting apps in a VM rather than for driving the entire system.  (Also, I found that the Windows 11 Enterprise 22H2 ARM image that I used, that I did get directly from Microsoft, was pleasantly clean and a lot more like an LTSC image in that it didn't come with the crufty bundled apps or even Microsoft Store installed.)  I also still have to RDP to an x64-based Windows system in order to use my 10+-year-old network-attached scanner, which doesn't have a driver for either ARM macOS or ARM Windows.  I'll replace it eventually...

 

I'm going to be setting up a 24/7 Linux VM too; I have a few things that make more sense to run under Linux but I've been waiting for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS to be ready (or "almost" ready).  I'm just going to use GNOME.  Mostly I'll just be setting up some background jobs to run on it.

 

Gaming on macOS has been fine.  There are a handful of titles that I can't run but more than enough that I can run to keep me happy.  I do miss Switch emulation; I believe that situation will solve itself in due time, but for now Ryujinx has a Mac version that is "not there yet" (performance issues + crashes are not uncommon), and the whole legal situation with yuzu is sad.  (At the moment, just using a "real" Switch when I want to play a Nintendo game...)  Otherwise, the emulation scene on macOS is in really good shape, and CrossOver+GPTK works pretty well for running most Windows games that do not have Mac ports.  The big blocker is newer big Windows games that require AVX (which for the moment are mostly ports of previously exclusive PS5 games).  No way to run those without an Intel/AMD CPU for now.

 

I was on the fence for a while, but more recently I decided that I'm going to also push for a MacBook to replace my work system, which is due for a refresh later this year.  We're a Windows shop at work but there are a few people in the org that use a Mac, so it wouldn't be unprecedented.  I can get most of my work done in Visual Studio Code, and whatever is left that is Windows-specific I can either do from a local Windows VM or a remote Windows system via RDP.