The worst font rendering Linux ever had is still better what macOS does today to non-apple-blessed displays. It's a blurry mess.
That said, I was in disbelief that this was a problem that both was common enough to be all over the Internet, and so involved to fix. Amazes me that OSX doesn't simply have an advanced setting for RGB/YPrPb, and instead requires that you boot into Recovery Mode (!!!) to fix it!
1. https://spin.atomicobject.com/2018/08/24/macbook-pro-externa...
Anyway, low-dpi screens on macOS are so blurry because it doesn't do font hinting.
There are a lot of non high dpi devices out there. The majority of screens are. Whether it's your personal one (and you can't or don't want to change it) or a professional one (and your company may not want or be able to justify changing dozens of screens), you need to use them.
It's possible to display properly and cleanly on them, everyone else does it. It's not as great as on a high dpi obviously, but it's perfectly sevicable for its need.
Apple with osx is the only major os that fails to do it, either through incompetence, malice or just pure disdain for their users facing that scenario.
It’s because of cost involved in maintaining the code that can push the hinting through the various layers of the graphics stack. Coupled with Apple’s culture of ditching old technology at the first opportunity.
As opposed to what other year? Color me naive, but I thought it was supposed to be the function rather than the form that we were supposed to make those kinds of comparisons about. What about a low pixel density is /not/ appropriate to the year 2020?
Your RAM might be working fine, but with crashes and lockups I think its always worth checking. Life is too short to put up with faulty hardware.
The thing is that the issue started long before that, my Blender app would crash in tens of times a day, and same with Solidworks on windows.
So yeah, i recommend running memtest and replacing ram if necessary.
The first one just needed a cleanup and some new thermal pastes. But afterwards, when I was test driving the laptop, I found the machine started to crash randomly - the OS was a fresh install. And later, I found whenever I put the laptop on the metal chassis on my PC (it was on the same table), it could trigger a kernel panic. Oh no, did I accidentally shorted something on the motherboard to the chassis? I reopened the machine and reseated the board but it didn't solve the problem. I also tried to reproduce the problem with a multimeter probe, but it didn't work. I got the final breakthrough while searching the web using the laptop while lying on a sofa - whenever my lap kicked the bottom cover, it would crash instantly!
The DIMMs came loose. Reseating it fixed the problem - the machine was previously dropped, which also explained the cracked plastic I saw on the battery.
Coincidentally, one day later, another family friend (with absolute no relation or knowledge about the former one) sent me a message, showing a MacBook with random screen corruptions. I said "you're out of luck, better to get a replacement from Apple." Later, I was also told that screen corruption was not the only problem - whenever a spot near the keyboard was punched, it would promptly crash! I couldn't stop laughing, "Okay, just send it to me, it's a 5 minute fix..." And yes, the machine was previously dropped by kids.
Nowadays, most MacBooks come with soldered RAMs. But if your machine has sockets, make sure to reseat the RAM and swap the slots first before declaring the death of your motherboard or your RAM.
The only thing I can say is that with the M1 Mac mini I have it’s the only computer I haven’t found any issues with at all yet and I’ve been using it since November 26th 100% of the time. Absolutely no issues at all.
Now windows is mostly reliable from the hardware side of things I’d you are lucky but the software is broken as fuck. Nothing works reliably or consistently. For over a month now Alt-tab on 20H2 has been randomly changing window ordering as an example breaking over 20 years of muscle memory. Their own mail client stops receiving mail twenty times a day. I’m not even going to start the book-sized rant on how unreliable their development stack is. And yesterday I spent an hour trying to delete a file which wouldn’t go away. It’s just motivational poison at the end of the day. Death by a thousand paper cuts.
That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been better or worse times with platforms I’ve used over the decades.
But it does mean that no platform is exempt from flaws or even dark times.
Individual mileages vary wildly depending on a combination of general quality of the product at any stretch of time, personal use patterns at that time, and blind, random luck.
And I’m still using 3 or 4 major platforms daily, depending how you count. None are worth total praise. And none totally suck either. As with many relationships “it’s complicated” :-)
Last year I worked at a location with a Mac on my left, Win10 on my right. Same software / jobs. Mac hangs 3 times a day. Both machines were very well tended to.
Alas, it turns out my OS drive was busted. Not Windows' fault. Before that, more than a year ago I had some crashes with Windows, by then it was my GPU dying out. It's all anecdata, and it still doesn't feel right to praise Windows for its stability (guess everyome from earlier days would feel the same), but hey, in last few years my Windows OSes outlasted the hardware they worked on.
In the meantime I can't count how many times I had to reboot my Macs (two of them) for one reason or another. Crashes after wakeups, permanent visual bugs that only get solved after reboots, weird slowndowns, Mac's disdain for external monitors and adaptors, etc etc. Back then Mac was the it-just-works machine, nowadays I would attribute that to nothing but Windows.
I am just saying Apple, for me, has the most reliable and consistent experience. And I have tried most options:
- windows, linux, and macos for my personal and work machines
- android, ios, and even windows phone (remember that?)
So far, may experience has been the opposite of yours - my work laptop is a 2015 macbook pro 15 and still performs really well (no crashes), but I have BSODed a couple of times on my windows 10 laptop I bought last year. Doesn't say much, I know.
That being said, Windows 10 cannot be in the business of "ship and keep calm", due to the number of businesses and governments relying on Windows.
Mac fans have defended Apple saying that "QA is expansive and they can't afford it", as if Apple is some low budget indie app developer in an incubator and not this trillion dollar goliath with insane margins.
Being a QA is the most thankless way of making the world better imaginable.
As a fellow dev, you might be getting ahead of yourself. I think there are plenty more professions that go thankless and that are actually making the world a better place.
I hope this doesn't offend you but the thankless garbage men or street cleaners on my neighborhood have a bigger impact on my life than the people who do QA on the apps I use on a daily basis.
If github, slack and outlook stop working I basically have that time off and go outside for a coffee. If my garbagemen stop picking up my smelly garbage, then I'm gonna have a pretty bad day.
Again, no offense, just stating the facts.
In every Linux thread on HN, macOS fans seem to disregard the fact that Linux has to support so many more hardware configs entirely. In fact they'd compare the experience of them installing Ubuntu on a $300 Best Buy laptop they got for $150 on Black Friday and wonder why the experience isn't up to par compared to their 2019 decked out $3000 MBP.
They do try... for instance I’ve heard the reason they always charge more for RAM is labor costs from running additional tests to fail chips other companies ship.
Which is false. Apple uses the same off the shelf DRAM chips from established manufacturers found in any PC/Phone/Laptop.
Unlike Flash storage, there is really not really bad performing DRAM per-se, just defective, And apple is no guarantee of free from defects with RAM fault in MACs being as common as in the rest of the PC industry.
The extra price is just the Apple tax.
That doesn't mean parts with some defects don't sneak into the final products but the rate is low enough that testing each chip you receive is not monetary feasible for consumer products so you just test the final assembled product to a degree, but even then, brand new Apple products are no strangers to having their mainboards replaced for a defective chip in the warranty period. Just ask Luis Rossmann or people working at the genius bar. That's why everyone recommends you get Apple care.
So the theory that Apple thoroughly tests each chip that goes in their products is false. It would be too expensive and eat into their fat margins.
What you do test, is samples from each batch you receive, to make sure your supplier did not pull a bait and switch and replaced your contracted parts with lower quality ones under the same part number and hope you would not notice but this is more common on low margin parts and Chinese suppliers are notorious for this since for them it's just regular business practice and see nothing wrong with it.
Source: my career as a hardware engineer.
We do BYOD on phones, so don’t have data there.
A friend of mine was once stationed in a jungle in South America. Most laptops couldn’t handle the humidity there. His IBM Thinkpad was the only one that held up.
In theorie Win10 looks nice. I tryed to upgrade one of my notebooks at home from Win7 to Win10. Privacy is one thing, but CandyCrush and things like that, was a totaly show stopper for me. I mean, I even have the Pro licences, but so much bloat .. So since the, I'm Linux only at home. I will never upgrade to Win 10.
I never felt so miserable using a notebook before and dreaded each day I had to use it.
I literally use drivers from Lenovo because the ones HP provides are like 5 years old and they don't plan on updating them.
Updating the BIOS is like playing Russian roulette, they seem to introduce more bugs than they fix.
But the hardware itself is nice, I've been using HP workstations for more than a decade. Quality has gone down somewhat (less metal, more plastic, less durable compared to early Elitebooks imo), but they're still nice machines.
1: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-sg/troubleshoot/windows-client...
2: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/2c...
In my company i am the only one, but it is not due to a faulty Dock since it works with Windows and Linux.
I had like 30 crashes until i could reliably avoid them.
Inertia is a powerful force in the IT departments of Corp America.
1. Linux
2. MacOS
10. Windows
I had more crashes on Linux than any other, all related to the Gpu driver (intel iGpu), and it really depends on the kernel version but newer not necessarily means better. In a VM with i3, it never crashed.
But regarding hardware support except for the Gpu, I had better experience with Linux than Windows on the same machine. On Windows my mouse is stuttering when connected on my TB3 hub, Wifi connectivity is much more unstable and strangely my battery consumption is higher (5-6 h on Windows, 6-7h on Linux)... But the issue on Linux is the lack of proprietary software to manage these device (talking about my Canon printer and scanner).
As for Mac (MBPro 2015 early) I had quite some issues with Bose QC35 II bluetooth connection. I have to reboot sometimes. And one issue with Mac I noticed is compared to Windows, is less support for corporate software. For instance, for my AWS remote certification exam, I could not connect with my Mac.
Linux on a server is basically bullet proof. There's just no surface area for issues, it's talking to storage and a network card. Desktop Linux with the wrong display drivers can crash daily.
Windows can be rock solid. I do game dev and am forced to have it as my daily driver. I have a 3900X, 2070 Super, do machine learning, VR development, game playing, peg it at 100% CPU overnight and I haven't had a blue screen since I bought it.
Buy the wrong laptop with shitty drivers, though, and BSOD is a way of life. Although Microsoft cracked down hard on this over the last decade, the WHQL initiative. They were well aware Windows stability was suffering at the hands of third parties, and put processes in place to validate their work.
And OS X, since it barely has to work with third party drivers, is more or less rock solid. You buy a MacBook Pro, plug an Apple mouse in and use it like that for years, maybe you never see a fault.
When it does interact with third party devices in my experience it's not better than Windows. Bluetooth handling in particular is quite poor.
This wasn't intended to be some kind of argument. Defending MS on the internet is of zero interest to me. I was intending to say, if you're forced to use Windows professionally and it's not stable, you absolutely do not have to put up with that. I don't.
Not saying it's definitely the cause, but strongly suggest you check if you haven't yet. It doesn't take long.
We sometimes fry CPUs, memory controllers or RAM at office. Even a well cooled component has a lifetime and eventually gives up.
One thing to keep in mind is that Windows/Mac/Linux do render fonts differently - they may not look identical to macOS out of the box, but there's a lot of configuration options (if you want to play with them) to get them to look the way you want.
Meanwhile, my Windows machine just keeps chugging along, drama free. All of my hardware and peripherals work just fine with it, but I often have to play the plug-unplug game with audio peripherals until video playback works on my Mac.
Five years ago I never would have guessed I'd be writing an HN comment praising my Windows machine and lamenting all of the issues with my Mac, but here we are. It's downright depressing to think of all the time I've lost in the past year waiting for my MacBook to reboot or replugging USB cables until everything works after I wake it from sleep.