I Miss My MacBook Pro, Buggy Iris Graphics Gives Headaches

[anda_skoa]

However, your experience is not unique, power consumption and buggy graphics drivers is still very much a challenge on linux. It just underlines that linux is not ready for the desktop yet.

I would say it is more an indicator that a lot can be done through fine tuning.
Whether that is done by the OEM or by the sysadmin/user, it has to be done.

Cheers,
_

[anda_skoa]

Sell the thing and get yourself a Mac.

I read that a lot, but I also read quite often that it is really hard to get Linux running well on Apple hardware.
Actually, it seems to be a lot harder on Apple laptops than on laptops of other vendors.

So I am quite puzzled that "buy a Mac" is recommended to people who are already struggling with Linux on another vendor's product.

Cheers,
_

[zanny]

So I am quite puzzled that "buy a Mac" is recommended to people who are already struggling with Linux on another vendor's product.

Michael wasn't using Linux on his Mac before, he ran OSX and used VMs.

The argument is more "I don't like the Linux laptops out there (Galago, Sputnik, etc). So I bought a Windows laptop, it didn't run Linux well, so I'm just going to stop using Linux entirely and use Apple products because that makes a lot of sense".

[anda_skoa]

Michael wasn't using Linux on his Mac before, he ran OSX and used VMs.

The argument is more "I don't like the Linux laptops out there (Galago, Sputnik, etc). So I bought a Windows laptop, it didn't run Linux well, so I'm just going to stop using Linux entirely and use Apple products because that makes a lot of sense".

Well, that does make even less sense.

When someone installs Linux on a system that was shipped with a different operating system then I would say this is a strong indicator that the user's target operating system is Linux (otherwise why bother).
Suggesting a change in operating system does make even less sense then suggesting a change in hardware vendor.

Cheers,
_

[zanny]

Suggesting a change in operating system does make even less sense then suggesting a change in hardware vendor.

The broader point is that he got a laptop designed to run OSX, ran OSX on it, and found out that actually works.

Then he buy a Windows laptop, with Windows on it, then puts Linux on it, and finds it doesn't work all the time.

All the way through the correct answer is to buy hardware supported by your OS. Duh. It is actually a terrible ideology that the Linux community pushes that says "no please don't worry about your hardware, it will work one day!" No it won't, the hardware is the responsibility of the device manufacturer, and all the thousands of man hours of reverse engineering the community has put in to making these piles of refuse work only gives companies reason to never support Linux and to continue making brilliant people waste their time doing the work for them.

I buy AMD GPUs. Why? AMD supports Linux with proper free drivers. At least, as close to free as we're going to get, sadly. But I always like to hope we can reverse engineer the firmware blobs if necessary, which is a lot less absurdity than reverse engineering black box graphics cards from Nvidia without any programming documentation.

I buy Intel and AMD CPUs. Why? Intel provides a lot of kernel driver developers (xhci, GCC x86 extensions, etc) and the only truly free GPU drivers. And AMD provides the only up to date coreboot support.

I buy Atheros NICs. Why? At least up to the ath10k parts, they are the only really good completely free wireless NICs. They get my money for that support.

I really can't buy any motherboard. Why? None of them support Linux at all. MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, Asrock, etc are all fucks that don't put a dime of effort into making any of their proprietary bullshit addons (sound cards, efi extensions, programmable stuff) work at all. This is the next great battlefield for Linux, because we seriously have no motherboard vendors that provide engineering support. Some might have at some point one some models provided technical support, which is better than nothing. Honestly, if anyone knows which board manufacturers provide the most Linux tech support let me know, so I can only buy their products in the future.

Mice, keyboards, headsets, microphones, webcams - a lot of these are just generic USB driver devices, which is fine, but I am also pretty in the dark on which companies provide legitimate driver and technical support for Linux for their premium parts. I know for sure Logitech and Razer don't. I'm just buying Logitech stuff because they have a great RMA policy. If anyone knows a company in this class with appropriate Linux support, I'd only buy from them too.

I'm also buying a lot of Mushkin products, because they have a native Linux utility to flash their hard drive firmware. So I buy their RAM, and their SSDs. I made the mistake of buying a few Samsung ones because I was enticed by the performance, and because I didn't yet know they didn't support Linux at all. You know, the company pushing a Linux distro (Tizen) and Android phones.

I got this 16 in 1 card reader that I have right now because it explicitly listed Linux support on the product page. Big win there for them, the company is called Sabrent.

Point is, DON'T BUY HARDWARE FROM VENDORS THAT DON'T SUPPORT LINUX. Even if there are reverse engineered drivers, you are still supporting the apathy of these vendors to just ignore the platform entirely, and giving them money to do so. We can do better now.

[deppman]

Why run Linux as your Desktop may be the smartest thing you can do

If you make a living using Linux, then running a Linux desktop is a very, very smart idea. Don't run Linux for any particular ideological reason. Run it because makes sense for you. It certainly make sense for me, and has been a definite boost to my career. My perception is that Michael would benefit in a similar fashion.

I work with lots of developers who deploy on Linux - nobody deploys to Mac because OSX is a piss-poor server OS, and as a result nobody makes any server hardware for it. Yet many of these same devs demand a trophy MacBook Pro so they can show that they have attained a certain status. "Look, my employer blew 3 grand on a beautiful Mac for me because I am so frick'n good."

I don't buy into the status symbol shit. Running Linux is best for me and my employers. Here are just some of the reasons:

1. Desktop Linux provides a near-production development environment. Not OSX's mutilated-for-mutilated-sake file system and commands.

2. Great upgrades. Distro upgrades take an hour or two - complete. How long did it take to update the MBP to update to Mavericks? People around here tend to take a 2-day sabbatical for this effort. Seamless upgrades of dev tools, and the ability to pin important packages. A very sophisticated repo system, with ability to use the configuration and private repo directly in production.

3. Seamless set up. I can set up a dev environment in 15 minutes that takes days on a OSX with Homebrew, Ports, and a dozen other piss-poor Mac development band-aids. And I am not exaggerating here folks - I have managed people who chose Linux, and those that chose MBP. The MBP folks, besides generally being generally less capable, spent far more time fucking around with their dev environment than the Linux users. Few development tools "just worked" like it did in Linux.

4. The ability to configure your system for optimal efficiency, instead of how Steve thought you should. Like menus where you want them. Real multiple desktop support. Real multi-monitor full-screen support (although I guess after 15 years OSX finally got a fix here). How about the ability to *turn off* composting when sharing screens? Nothing like wasting 3-4x the bandwidth and time while Hangouts or Skype tries to keep up with all the overwrought OSX eyecandy.

5. Great experience with systems. Most OSX-Linux devs totally suck at systems, because they work on a foreign environment. I have found those that use Linux are always substantially better on system integration and automation. At a previous gig, the Linux dev-ops guy left and was replaced by a MBP dev-ops guy. Guess which one was awesome at creating .deb and .rpm local repository mirrors?

There is no software that on an OSX that I want to use that doesn't run as well or better on Linux. Heck, even gaming is arguably better on Linux, with generally better OGL performance with binary drivers.

[zanny]

Heck, even gaming is arguably better on Linux, with generally better OGL performance with binary drivers.

I played a few hours of Metro Last Light this morning on radeonSI. I don't think it is just the proprietary drivers, I was playing at 1080p / whatever 50% of the "video" bar is on a $140 7870. If I set it higher I'd get tessellation and all surface reflection that could cripple my framerate, though.

[dungeon]

I really can't buy any motherboard. Why? None of them support Linux at all. MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, Asrock, etc are all fucks that don't put a dime of effort into making any of their proprietary bullshit addons (sound cards, efi extensions, programmable stuff) work at all. This is the next great battlefield for Linux, because we seriously have no motherboard vendors that provide engineering support. Some might have at some point one some models provided technical support, which is better than nothing. Honestly, if anyone knows which board manufacturers provide the most Linux tech support let me know, so I can only buy their products in the future.

I think they all supports server motherboards on Linux officially, and desktop motherboards not officially .

[Alliancemd]

re

I found that many of the graphical glitches, heat-ups come from Unity(most of the times with laptops that come with AMD)...
Try another DE, as strange as it might sound...
My laptop(with an Nvidia) was heating up very bad on Ubuntu(Unity), I switched to Kubuntu and I never had any problems(hardware wise).

[deanjo]

2. Great upgrades. Distro upgrades take an hour or two - complete. How long did it take to update the MBP to update to Mavericks? People around here tend to take a 2-day sabbatical for this effort. Seamless upgrades of dev tools, and the ability to pin important packages. A very sophisticated repo system, with ability to use the configuration and private repo directly in production.

Sorry gotta call pure 100% BS on that one. I've never had a upgrade on OS X take longer then 30 minutes dating all the way back to 10.4 and some of those were on pokey single core x86s and G4/G5's. Trust me, I've handled well over 1500 OS X upgrades.

I work with lots of developers who deploy on Linux - nobody deploys to Mac because OSX is a piss-poor server OS, and as a result nobody makes any server hardware for it.

There is plenty of server hardware out there for it from SAN's, 10Gbe ethernet, rackmounts, raid cards, etc.