Disclaimer, I don't have an M1 Mac, but I do have a buggy ubuntu desktop and used Macs my whole technical life.
It seems that you're heavily in the minority with this. Even the weird bugs you mention are very unexpected. I've used a Mac for 15 years and never heard of an issue related to thumb drives. You may just have a lemon. See if you can just replace it (warranty, etc, not just spending more money).
It's hardly unheard of for a Mac to pick up weird issues. My wife's Macbook has a thing where the mouse cursor will just disappear when she wakes the thing up from sleep. Poking around on the internet finds other people with the same problem and no good solution (zapping PRAM doesn't help, neither did a full OS reinstall). It's just a live with it affair. The only fix is to close the lid and open it again, which isn't too bad but the issue crops up multiple times in a day and is quite annoying.
I manage a bunch of Ubuntu desktops at work and the most common issue seems to be that if you leave a machine alone for too long (a week or two), then when you log back in the DBUS or something seems to get hung up and the whole interface is mostly unusable until you log out and log back in. It can be so bad you can't even focus a window anymore or change the input focus. Next most common issue is DKMS randomly fucking up and installing a kernel without the nVidia or VirtualBox modules leaving the machine useless.
Just my N=1 anecdata, but I'm in the same boat. I got a Macbook Air from work, and I have a hard time using it compared to my Linux setup (which is saying something, since I'm using a Torvaldsforsaken Nvidia card). Here's a list of the issues I can recall off the top of my head:
- High-refresh displays cause strange green/purple artifacting
- Plugging in multiple displays just outright doesn't work
- Still a surprisingly long boot time compared to my x201 (almost a teenager now!)
- No user replaceable storage is a complete disservice when your OEM upgrades cost as much as Apple charges
- Idle temps can get a little uncomfortable when you're running several apps at once
...and the biggest one...
- A lot of software just isn't ready for ARM yet
Maybe I'm spoiled, coming from Arch Linux, but the software side of things on ARM still feels like they did in 2012 when my parents bought me a Raspberry Pi for Christmas. Sure it works, but compatibility and stability are still major sticking points for relatively common apps. Admittedly, Apple did a decent job of not breaking things any further, but without 32-bit library support it's going to be a hard pass from me. Plus, knowing that Rosetta will eventually be unsupported gives me flashbacks to watching my games library disappear after updating to Catalina.
Compatibility issues are the most painful part of architectural shifts, although Apple's pretty good at them by now and a lot of desktop software "just works."
> Plus, knowing that Rosetta will eventually be unsupported gives me flashbacks to watching my games library disappear after updating to Catalina
RIP my 32-bit macOS Steam library. Though I think some 32-bit Windows games can run under Crossover.
I wish that Apple would commit to supporting Rosetta 2 indefinitely, but realistically they'll pull the plug on x86 emulation just as they did with their 68K and PowerPC emulators. Apple is about the Next Big Thing and not so much about long-term backward compatibility.
However Windows on ARM under Parallels may get better over time - a number of x86 Windows games already run. And who knows, maybe we'll be able to boot native ARM Windows at some point...
On the up side, M1 Macs get access to the only game library Apple cares about: iOS games (including Apple Arcade and some pretty decent iPad games.)
I use an M1 MacBook Pro (16Gb Ram) for personal projects and as my standard home/travel computer. It is amazing and fast.
I use a Lenovo Carbon X1 Laptop with similar specs (i5, 16Gb Ram, m.2 ssd) for work that runs RHEL 8 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). It's insanely fast and stable.
The overhead to run RHEL is so small it would blow your mind at the performance you get from almost nothing. Mac or Windows are crazy bloated by comparison. I know I am sparking an eternal debate by saying this, but I personally have never found Ubuntu to be as stable for a workstation (but ubuntu server is great) as RHEL is.
With that being said, I still think the M1 mac is the best computer I have ever owned. While linux is great for work, I personally enjoy the polished and more joyful experience of Mac for personal use. There are a million quality of life improvements that Mac offers that you won't get in Linux. The app ecosystem on mac is incredible.
When most people make comparisons for the M1 Mac, they are comparing windows PCs (generally Intel-based ones since Mac previously used Intel) and they compare intel-based Macs. I have never seen someone comparing it to linux performance.
The speed of the M1 mac is far better than Windows and far better than old Macs. There is no question. Before my M1 mac I used a MacBook Pro with an i7, 16Gb RAM, and the upgraded dedicated graphics card. The little M1 MacBook outshines it at least 2 to 1. Best of all, the fans never turned on, and my old MacBook Pro had constant fan whine which drove me crazy.
The other incredible feat of the M1 Mac is the battery life. I run my laptop nearly exclusively on battery power now. I treat it like an iPad. You plug it in when it gets low, but I can use it for about a week between charges (I use it for 2-3 hours each day). I don't turn the screen down or modify my performance. I keep the screen fairly bright and just cruise away. I love it.
While Linux might be able to outshine on performance, it doesn't outperform with battery. My Lenovo laptop is worth about 2x my MacBook Pro. It is a premium laptop and yet running RHEL I will be lucky to get 6 hours. Compare that to ~20 hours of my MacBook.
Downside of RHEL is the package repo is anemic and out of date. Sometimes horribly out of date. It's hardly uncommon to run into some issue with an application and then look it up online and find out that the fix was applied 8 versions after the one that's in the repo.
Worse is when you start grabbing code off of Git and the configure script bombs out because it wants a library two versions ahead of the one in the repo. But you don't want to upgrade it because obviously that's going to cause an issue with whatever installed that library originally. So now you're thinking about containers but that adds more complication...
This use case begs for arch. Not bloated and up to date upstream and AUR is very robust for the “one off” apps.
Rhel on desktop makes sense for development for rhel on servers. Can’t think really of any other use case. At least they could try out centos stream? For all its hate it’s really nice for certain use cases. Although people are religiously against it (rh needs to really work on that before it dies on the vine)
CentOS Stream doesn't significantly change the up-to-date-ness of the packages. It's a few months ahead of RHEL, but RHEL (minor releases) move at the same pace as always, which is to say slowly, so a few months ahead is insignificant.
Fedora is probably better if you want up-to-date packages on a platform that's relatively similar to production.
I run Arch on my homelab, and the AUR is a lifesaver. Not to mention, the basic Arch repos contain more Podman Cockpit modules than apt, to my surprise. Very nice OS for server stuff if you're brave enough to wrangle pacman.
> [Arch is a v]ery nice OS for server stuff if you're brave enough to wrangle pacman.
if you're running a homelab and regularly 'wrangling' a package manager which is broken/incomplete by design, why are you choosing distros based on package availability rather than on the quality of the tooling? surely you can package anything you need to use
I could, but the time I'd spend getting it working on a stable distro vastly outweighs the time I'd spend setting up my pacman.conf and backing it up to git. When I say 'wrangle', I'm more talking about the instability and frequency of updates. It's definitely only for homelab use, I wouldn't ever consider deploying this on a larger scale.
I guess preexisting availability is important when you don't know what you'll want to use, and you're also interested in trying a lot of things that you may not want to keep around for long
I have had luck running Debian Stable with apps from Snap when the older .deb from the repo doesn't cut it. I haven't found that setup at all complicated.
My colleague has an M1 Mac. I have a Ubuntu desktop. My colleague always asks me to transcode videos on my machine because on her MacBook it is too slow.
I finally managed to get nvenc working on handbrake and the stupendous frame rate jump actually had me sit in stunned silence, from 3-15FPS to 120FPS on drone 1080p60 footage was jaw dropping. I know the m1 claims to be fast but I'm transcoding on a GPU that's from like 2015!
Just know that HW encoders on nVidia cards are usually inferior in quality compared to software encoders, altho the speed gain is very nice. I originally bought 2070 with its HW HEVC encoder, and apart from few test runs never used it again, because no matter the quality settings, its just worse (and I was never in a hurry).
yep. if things don't work contact apple support they are actually pretty decent. i had a lemon mini, randomly would go into a bootloop after os updates - had a bad mainboard so apple replaced it and it's been fine since.
Well if you actually do ‘work’ with the device, like installing software thats not in the appstore you might run into some troubles...i love my 2013 macbook air for most daily tasks, but never was there a time where i couldnt do with having a windows and linux device on hand. But yeah, thats just life. Happy to see sobering comment here that the m1 is a ‘mobile’ processor, my 12 year old pc agrees. Another question that came to mind is; what professional is gonna edit ProRes video while commuting? Is this the ultimate precarious labour creative industry machine?!
LOTS of people "actually do ‘work’" with their macs. Without trouble.
> i love my 2013 macbook air for most daily tasks, but never was there a time where i couldnt do with having a windows and linux device on hand
Are those devices also 8 year old low-mobile-tier hardware optimized for battery use and low thermals? I've never needed a windows or linux computer on hand.
I mostly work with obsolete industrial devices. Having obsolete devices around is handy to deal with them, sadly this also means keep ‘supporting’ their obsolescence in a way. The other half of my job and hobby consists of making those obsolete devices running on less obsolete devices but again requires sniffing out obsolete devices, they controllers or the support hard and software again. I agree thats work done by most people, again sadly
Plenty of professionals take business trips and present and share their work. It's not unusual to want to carry your work computer home, to a hotel, or to a conference and have enough power to comfortably continue working on it.
It seems that you're heavily in the minority with this. Even the weird bugs you mention are very unexpected. I've used a Mac for 15 years and never heard of an issue related to thumb drives. You may just have a lemon. See if you can just replace it (warranty, etc, not just spending more money).