I ve been a happy user of debian stable for 15 years now, if I could get a Linux laptop with a comparable battery life to apple's then it's done for me.
I think linux people tend to forget how important battery life is on a laptop
There are several reports of people getting 12+ hours out of a Lunar Lake based laptop running Linux. Still a ways away from the 20 Intel claims for them, but likely a more realistic scenario.
Intel claims Panther Lake will be even better, and we should be seeing results within days as there should be Panther Lake desktop released during CES this week.
Would be great... what I've heard is, Apple's incredible battery life comes from the vertical integration - they make everything, the laptop, the OS... so they are able to optimize it incredibly well. Even running Linux on a Apple Silicon Mac doesn't get you the same kind of battery life because of how much work the OS does putting different components to sleep etc. (though one could argue Apple's arbitrarily making it harder for Linux by making it so much reverse engineering work to get everything to go into sleep mode!)
I don't think it's that per se, it's just apple has a lot of resources to optimise/test a relatively small amount of configurations.
The big "issue" with Linux on non-server workloads imo is a lack of testing like this - which is completely understandable. Afiak Microsoft runs millions of automated tests on various hardware configurations _a day_.
Intel does something similar for the Linux kernel, which no doubt explains the relative stability of Linux server vs Desktop (servers are running far less "OS level" software in general in day to day use than the desktop).
The desktop experience itself needs more automated testing. There are so many bugs/regressions which I've noticed in eg gnome which should have been caught by e2e testing - I do try to report them when I see them.
Doing a bit more digging there seems to be some basic e2e testing for gnome ran nightly but currently most tests are failing https://openqa.gnome.org/tests/12128.
This isn't a criticism at all btw, it's quite boring and resource intensive work for a project like gnome to do. I hope soon some large corp decides to go all in on realLinux desktop (not ChromeOS) and can devote resources to this.
I am most familiar with Debian but only headless. What would be a good choice of desktop environment? I’m looking to switch over the only windows computer in my house to Linux, it is primarily used as a home theatre and gaming PC.
Desktop environments are a matter of taste, but since you asked, I like KDE Plasma. I think it would be pretty comfortable for someone coming from Windows.
It's not the default on Debian, but once you install it, you can choose it next time you log in.
For media, I'd pick a distro that has the software you need. Most should work. I like Debian or CachyOS (Arch). Thr desktop environment is likely what will impact your media experience the most. I use Hyprland but wouldn't recommend it for a media desktop.
Not just battery life, but also webcams and mics. Sure, you can use additional gadgets...but being able to open your MacBook and just talk to your coworkers is reason enough to keep an M1 Air around for the next years.
While I like echarts I have found it somewhat challenging to extend their functionality.
I wanted a Gantt chart and while I did achieve what I wanted it wasn't without having to delve into the their source and putting log statements everywhere.
I happen to be using ant design and I've had the same issues there.
Its a bit all over the place and the translations are not great, but i will stick with it.
Also using Ant Design with eCharts. Having to funnel the designers to not use gradients for all the charts has been fun. While eCharts supports _some_ gradients, it's been a PITA for certain chart types.
I also made the mistake of using Ant Design Pro Forms since I wanted to use the StepForm Wizard component. All of the tsdocs are in Chinese and it's barely documented for more than their example use cases :'}
Some parts of the api are a bit confusing especially with more recent version upgrades but I still have found it to be the most powerful open source library that’s not D3.
I'll give you natives, but men, whites, Asians, and non-socialists can be found in abundance, existing freely and flourishing on any college campus in America.
It requires the same amount of labour from my part but it delivers the same outcome every time.
That is what tools do, they act as an extension and allow you to do things not easily done otherwise.
If the hammer sometimes hammers, sometimes squeaks and sometimes screws then it requires extra labour from my part just to make it do what purpose specific tools do, and that is where frustrations arise.
This is the kind of non-serious argument he's talking about. There are plenty of tools that require supervision to get good results. That doesn't make them useless.
My 3D printer sometimes prints and sometimes makes spaghetti. Still useful.
They never said it was useless. You just invented that straw man in your head.
3D printing is largely used for prototyping where its lossy output is fine. But using it for production use cases requires fine tuning it can be 99.9% reliable. Unfortunately we can't do that for LLMs hence why it's still only suitable for prototyping.
But you can adjust the output of a LLM and still come out ahead in both time and mental effort than writing it by hand. Unlike a 3D printer, it doesn't have to be right the first time around to still be useful.
You don't use 3D printing to do large-scale production. If you agree that AI should only be used in prototype code and nothing else, then your argument makes sense.
Off the top of my head apartheid in South Africa, ethnic cleansing of Albanians and genocide in Serbia, WWII... maybe indirectly, end of oppressive horrible USSR where I was born
I think linux people tend to forget how important battery life is on a laptop
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