Comment by tkiolp4
1 day ago
But what about laptops? I don’t use desktop machines anymore (last time was in 2012). Apple laptops are top notch. I use ubuntu as vm (headless) for software development tho
1 day ago
But what about laptops? I don’t use desktop machines anymore (last time was in 2012). Apple laptops are top notch. I use ubuntu as vm (headless) for software development tho
Best you can do is build a high end desktop at home and access it remotely with any laptop you desire. The laptop performance then becomes mostly irrelevant (even the OS is less relevant) and by using modern game streaming protocols you can actually get great image quality, low latency and 60+ fps. Though, optimizing it for low bandwidth is still a chore.
Have that desktop be reachable with SSH for all your CLI and sys admin needs, use sunshine/moonlight for the remote streaming and tailscale for securing and making sunshine globally available.
Bandwidth is not really a problem if you live in decent city. The problem is latency and data usage. 1 Hour streaming consumes GBs of data, that's a big problem if you use cellular network.
Latency is another problem, recently LTT video show that even as low as 5-10ms added latency can negatively impact your gaming performance, even if you don't notice. You begin to notice at around 20ms.
How is bandwidth not a problem if data usage on a cellular network is? You can dramatically lower your data usage by constraining bandwidth to say, ~2mbps, but doing so while keeping a decent image requires many sacrifices, like lowering resolution or using a software encoder that can squeeze out as much quality as possible out of 2mbps at a penalty for your latencies (won't matter much since you are already incurring latencies from your internet connection). You may also switch to a wi-fi hotspot once that's an option, and then even lift the bandwidth restrictions.
Regarding latency, this solution is meant as a way to use your notebook for any task, not just gaming. You can still play and enjoy most fps games with a mouse even at 20ms of extra latency, and you can tolerate much more when playing games with a gamepad. If you need to perform your best on a competitive match of cs2 you obviously should be on a wired connection, in front of a nice desktop pc (the very same you were using to stream to your notebook perhaps) and with a nice high refresh rate monitor. Notebooks are usually garbage for that anyways.
I don't have an x86 laptop at the moment so sticking with Macbook for now. My assumption is Mac laptops still are far superior given M-series chips and OS that are tuned for battery efficiency. Would love to find out this is no longer the case.
My HP ZBooks have been a dream. My current Studio G10 with an i9-13900 and 4070M has largely Just Worked™ with recent versions of both Fedora and Ubuntu.
HP releases firmware updates on LVFS for both the ZBook and its companion Thunderbolt 4 dock(!). They also got it Ubuntu certified, like most of their business laptops.
Works well if the laptop has hardware designed to support Linux. Framework stuff is great, for instance.
I have the HP Zbook Ultra G1a. AMD 395+, 129GB RAM, 4TB 2280 SSD. Works great with Ubuntu 24.04 and the OEM kernel. Plays Steam games, runs OpenCL AI models. Only nit is it is very picky on what USB PD chargers it will actually charge on at all. UGreen has a 140W that works.
Updated Mesa to the latest and the kernel too.
I’ve found Apple’s 140w charger to be sufficient for this machine under full load. Running Bazzite and Windows natively
"laptop has hardware designed to support Linux"
I've had Linux running on a variety of laptops since the noughties. I've had no more issues than with Windows. ndiswrapper was a bit shit but did work back in the day.
What issues have you had?
I haven't, because I buy hardware that's designed to work with Linux. But if you buy hardware that doesn't have Linux drivers, it just won't work. That might mean Wifi not working, it might mean a fingerprint reader not working, etc.
I did some investigation into this the other day. The short answer seems to be that if you like MacBooks, you aren't willing to accept a downgrade along any axis, and you really want to use Linux, your best bet today is an M2 machine. But you'll still be sacrificing a few hours of battery life, Touch ID support (likely unfixable), and a handful of hardware support edge cases. Apple made M3s and M4s harder to support, so Linux is still playing catch-up on getting those usable.
Beyond that, Lunar Lake chips are evidently really really good. The Dell XPS line in particular shows a lot of promise for becoming a strict upgrade or sidegrade to the M2 line within a few years, assuming the haptic touchpad works as well as claimed. In the meantime, I'm sure the XPS is still great if you can live with some compromises, and it even has official Linux support.
Can't one use MacOS only as an hypervisor and do everything else in a linux VM.
Yes, this is what I do. The main pain point is that the touchpad is emulated as a scroll wheel so you don’t get pixel-perfect scrolling.
3 replies →
> Linux is still playing catch-up on getting those usable
This is an understatement. It is completely impossible to even attempt to install Linux at all on an M3 or M4, and AFAIK there have been no public reports of any progress or anyone working on it. (Maybe there are people working on it, I don’t know).
In his talk a few days ago, one of the main Asahi developers (Sven) shared that there is someone working on M3 support. There are screenshots of an M3 machine running Linux and playing DOOM at around 31:34 here: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-app...
Sounds like the GPU architecture changed significantly with M3. With M4 and M5, the technique for efficiently reverse-engineering drivers using a hypervisor no longer works.
1 reply →
>Apple laptops are top notch.
Not working with Linux is a function of Apple, not Linux. There is a crew who have wasted the last half decade trying to make Asahi Linux, a distro to run on ARM macbooks. The result is after all that time, getting an almost reasonably working OS on old hardware, Apple released the M4 and crippled the whole effort. There's been a lot of drama around the core team who have tried to cast blame, but it's clear they are frustrated by the fact that the OEM would rather Asahi didn't exist.
I can't personally consider a laptop which can't run linux "top notch." But I gave up on macbooks around 10 years ago. You can call me biased.
I just put Asahi on an M2 Air and it works so incredibly well that I was thinking this might finally be the year linux takes the desktop .. I wasn't aware of the drama w/Apple but I imagine M2 hardware will become valuable and sought after over M3+ just for the ability to run Asahi
I love Linux, it was all I ran for years. But, unfortunately, I needed the better hardware more and haven't been able to find a viable way back.