Apple Silicon On Linux Now More Capable For Gaming With Latest Mesa + Steam On FEX

[Ladis]

Remember M1s problems about wearing SSD too much on their launch time. I would not rely on them especially after that long. Where would you get genuine apple battery outside apple? It will be costly, reballing SSD and RAM? for that price you would have got new laptop for that time. Linux is less demanding but are sitting in front of terminal? Nowadays web is the most demanding thing people use on their computers and in the future it will become worse and linux won't save you from it.

No SSD died on the wearing out. The problem was reported and fixed in time. The battery e.g. for Air is $100, you don't need to search elsewhere. And if you think Linux is nowadays just a terminal (web browser), then why we need it?

[vextium]

Fine, I will be the guy that says it: these people need to shift gears and stop trying to bring Linux to the Mac.

They come off as the same type of people that squat in other people's property and refuse to leave, it's a trespass mentality, like they are doing it out of spite,

What they should be doing is working on getting Linux to run perfectly on Qualcomm's Snapdragon, because honestly, if one wants Linux on ARM for the desktop, Qualcomm is where it's at.

Unlike Apple, Qualcomm is also actively working on bringing an ARM optimized GLIBC and since Qualcomm is actively supporting the effort, maybe the Asahi team could secure official sponsorship for an Asahi on Snapdragon distro.

That to me is the better play than this nonsense.

I don't think you have the right to tell other people what to do with their time.

[SpyroRyder]

By that time those devices will be unusable, too slow for everyday use, battery would need replace, ssds will be on their way to death. 8 GB models are pretty much obsolete even today. You can not upgrade ram or ssd on those devices.

Apple says it cares about environment there are millions of their devices floating around only because of their icloud lock. Other then that they are pretty much usable but apple makes sure second hand market is minimal so that people are forced to buy their new devices. Even repairability is at minimum and too costly when it comes to apple. Even if you buy 2 shiny new iphones and swap their internals they won't work.

If it had been 4GB of ram youd have a point, but 8gb its honestly fine for most use and if you dont think so you need to go touch grass. Most linux systems, even the more resource intensive ones, run well under that limit with web browsing being the main normal ram hog. Even then 8 gb should be fine for most browsing. Gaming gets more intensive but just because theyre not good for that doesnt make them obsolete for most tasks, i dont need the laptop i bought for portability and battery life to be able to play Elden Ring

[sarmad]

The MAIN thing that makes those chips that good is mac os. When you remove it from an equation and install linux you end up with crippled laptop that is barely usable and will never come close to mac os on that hardware. Many things will never work on them and apple may suddenly even block you from booting linux on their devices.

That's not accurate. The chip is good because of the hardware itself. On the other hand, the entire laptop is good because of the entire stack, from the APU to the OS to the build quality to other hardware components and software elements, the goodness cannot be attributed to any single component in the stack.

That said, Apple's closeness and monopolistic strategies invalidates all of that goodness for me. I would happily stick to Linux running on a crappy hardware with short battery life any day without hesitation.

[Paradigm Shifter]

If it had been 4GB of ram youd have a point, but 8gb its honestly fine for most use and if you dont think so you need to go touch grass. Most linux systems, even the more resource intensive ones, run well under that limit with web browsing being the main normal ram hog. Even then 8 gb should be fine for most browsing. Gaming gets more intensive but just because theyre not good for that doesnt make them obsolete for most tasks, i dont need the laptop i bought for portability and battery life to be able to play Elden Ring

8GB is nowhere near enough, unless MacOS does some really brutal memory management on the lower memory devices.

My boss loves Macs, so everyone has one for e-mail, Word, etc. On a clean boot, my M1 Macbook uses about 5.6GB of RAM. Open e-mail and that immediately jumps to 7.1GB. I rarely have more than a dozen or so tabs open, while other members of my lab can have 100+, which I personally don't understand, it's too distracting for me, but... to each their own. Use the laptop the way it's designed (Apple really do get suspend/sleep right here) and don't regularly reboot it and memory usage will slowly climb. And climb. And climb. And closing programs will not recover it - I'm currently sitting at 17.5GB of RAM used with every application I can close, closed (before closing them it was 20.2GB so it did recover some). The culprits appear to be two integral components of MacOS, as well, so you can't even complain that it's a third party program with a memory leak. Colleagues with M2 laptops report similar issues. A new M3 laptop for a new lab member shows the same behaviour. I've seen this across multiple versions of MacOS, although it got really noticeable when MacOS 13.2 landed.

edit: Also, Apple's build quality is wildly variable. Or have the problems of the terrible keyboards that broke because of dust, extreme heat output damaging screens, desoldering GPUs, poorly designed traces cooking memory chips all been memory holed for convenience? Check out some of Louis Rossmann's older Mac repair videos.

[sophisticles]

I'll bite.
The M-series chips are miles better than Qualcomm's desktop chips. It's not even close. Macbooks as a whole are better than any of the Qualcomm laptops out put, again, by a mile. Some people like/want the hardware, but also want Linux. Hence, the Asahi project. Tada. I know, critical thinking isn't your strong suit but that wasn't a whole lot of steps to get to the obvious answer.

https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/laptops/qualcomm-brings-the-receipts-snapdragon-x-elite-gets-benchmarked-proves-it-beats-apples-m2-processor

You were saying?

[Ladis]

https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/laptops/qualcomm-brings-the-receipts-snapdragon-x-elite-gets-benchmarked-proves-it-beats-apples-m2-processor

You were saying?

The comment under you article explains it. They are comparing the Qualcomm processor with the base M1/M2/M3. But Apple makes also Pro and Max.

[Ladis]

8GB is nowhere near enough, unless MacOS does some really brutal memory management on the lower memory devices.

My boss loves Macs, so everyone has one for e-mail, Word, etc. On a clean boot, my M1 Macbook uses about 5.6GB of RAM. Open e-mail and that immediately jumps to 7.1GB. I rarely have more than a dozen or so tabs open, while other members of my lab can have 100+, which I personally don't understand, it's too distracting for me, but... to each their own. Use the laptop the way it's designed (Apple really do get suspend/sleep right here) and don't regularly reboot it and memory usage will slowly climb. And climb. And climb. And closing programs will not recover it - I'm currently sitting at 17.5GB of RAM used with every application I can close, closed (before closing them it was 20.2GB so it did recover some). The culprits appear to be two integral components of MacOS, as well, so you can't even complain that it's a third party program with a memory leak. Colleagues with M2 laptops report similar issues. A new M3 laptop for a new lab member shows the same behaviour. I've seen this across multiple versions of MacOS, although it got really noticeable when MacOS 13.2 landed.

edit: Also, Apple's build quality is wildly variable. Or have the problems of the terrible keyboards that broke because of dust, extreme heat output damaging screens, desoldering GPUs, poorly designed traces cooking memory chips all been memory holed for convenience? Check out some of Louis Rossmann's older Mac repair videos.

Maybe the problem is, clicking the X in the window title doesn't quit the app on macOS . Also try looking into the tasks viewer (Activity Monitor app, I think). And the last, macOS uses hardware compression of the RAM and as a Unix system, it swaps differently than Windows (only when needed, for the price of a lag when switching apps, but that's compenzated by fast NVME storage).

edit: Mac with Apple Silicon (last 4 years) have no problem with the keyboard (Apple returned before the butterfly design) and GPU (there's no dedicated chip anymore).

[Daktyl198]

https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/laptops/qualcomm-brings-the-receipts-snapdragon-x-elite-gets-benchmarked-proves-it-beats-apples-m2-processor

You were saying?

1. Never trust manufacturer benchmarks. Check 3rd party benchmarking sources.
2. Faster on CPU benchmarks than the base-level chip from 2 generations ago? Oh geez, so amazing

M3 and M4 are faster CPUs, and even the higher end M2 chips crush Qualcomm chips in GPU benchmarks. Let alone the newer generations.

[SpyroRyder]

8GB is nowhere near enough, unless MacOS does some really brutal memory management on the lower memory devices.

My boss loves Macs, so everyone has one for e-mail, Word, etc. On a clean boot, my M1 Macbook uses about 5.6GB of RAM. Open e-mail and that immediately jumps to 7.1GB. I rarely have more than a dozen or so tabs open, while other members of my lab can have 100+, which I personally don't understand, it's too distracting for me, but... to each their own. Use the laptop the way it's designed (Apple really do get suspend/sleep right here) and don't regularly reboot it and memory usage will slowly climb. And climb. And climb. And closing programs will not recover it - I'm currently sitting at 17.5GB of RAM used with every application I can close, closed (before closing them it was 20.2GB so it did recover some). The culprits appear to be two integral components of MacOS, as well, so you can't even complain that it's a third party program with a memory leak. Colleagues with M2 laptops report similar issues. A new M3 laptop for a new lab member shows the same behaviour. I've seen this across multiple versions of MacOS, although it got really noticeable when MacOS 13.2 landed.

OS's say they use more ram as the amount increases but beyond even that just because the os is programmed poorly doesnt mean the device is obsolete if you can switch the OS out. If Apple havent made their OS to be happy with lower amounts of ram then that speaks to problems with them, Linux is much better on that. Even Gnome, which usually uses the most resources, blasts that outta the water in ram utilisation