In Zagreb, I realized my 2021 MacBook Pro M1 is starting to show its age. The battery life is shorter and the system seems slower than it was at the beginning, perhaps also due to the latest OS version. Yesterday, I used the "new" Acer with openSUSE Tumbleweed, running KDE Plasma. It's small, I paid about 500 euros for it, and it has a good monitor, but the battery life is poor, and that's the main reason I still primarily use the Mac. And yet, it gave me a greater sense of speed than the Mac. When one of the BSDs works well enough on this laptop (mainly suspend/resume), it will probably become my daily driver on the go. I need to try OpenBSD 7.8 as soon as it will be out.
it might have some surprises in store for me.
Discussion
Loading...
Post
@stefano have you considered Asahi? it should run on M1 and KDE is the default on Fedora Asahi Remix. Or are you keen on BSD?
@stefano funnily enough, any person I talk to, who has been using Mac and tried Linux (KDE or GNOME specifically) say that they feel much faster and snappier than MacOS
@leniwcowaty I think it actually is. My mini PC is fast and reliable (using openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE), much more than MacOS.
@stefano I think (and this is supported by many people I talked to), that the MacOS and iOS animations are what makes them feel slow. I mean sure, the animations are expressive, fluent, great looking... But they are insanely slow. Even comparing the newest iPhone 17 to my Pixel 8, the gesture of swiping up to go to main screen is super fast, near-instant on Pixel, and on iPhone it's a slow fade with icons flying in from all directions. This makes the device feel sluggish
@stefano How will you run BSD on an M1 Mac? Will you do it in a vm?
@stefano I see the same here with my MacBook. I would really like to run FreeBSD on my Thinkpad and use it as a daily driver, but it’s sometimes really hard, as it requires a lot of effort to set up and full blown desktops like Gnome and KDE don’t seem to work 100% as they are designed for Linux. And I see that these environments are more and more relying on systemd. That’s why I’m staying with Sway, which is not bad btw. but also requires a lot of background configuration to get a working environment.
Do you think OpenBSD could be a better alternative on a laptop regarding power management? I only used it for firewalls, where it does a pretty good job.
@NebulaTide OpenBSD devs generally use OpenBSD so it's surprisingly efficient. On a MacBook Pro M2, it gives roughly the same battery life as MacOS (source: @h3artbl33d )
You could try it and see if it's ok for your use case.
@stefano @h3artbl33d Sounds very good. I’ll give it a try. My main goal is to become independent of the big players like Apple, Microsoft and the large webhosters. And to avoid systemd and Pulseaudio wherever possible.
The major downside of OpenBSD on Apple Silicon is that there is no graphical acceleration (even 360p video playback is troublesome). It does make one hefty SSH machine with a sick battery life - but for daily desktop use it might be a mismatch with your scenario.
I recently learned that Framework is now funding alt-right and facist open source software.
So that leaves us with? System76?
@h3artbl33d and refurbished Lenovo 🤔
bonfire.cafe
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
Automatic federation enabled