Switching from FF to Chrome (this was like a decade ago, to be fair to FF) eliminated about 50% of my beachballs and other unresponsiveness system-wide, not just when using FF. Switching from Chrome to Safari got rid of almost all the rest, and also made my battery life match Apple's claims.
[EDIT] And when I do still run into trouble, it's almost always Electron chat apps. Slack, Teams, and Discord. All terrible at being respectful of system resources. Closing the program and restarting it usually temporarily fixes the problem, but that shouldn't be necessary.
It's frustrating that efficiency and being a good desktop citizen is such an afterthought for most browsers. Support for all the fancy web features imaginable is isn't worth much to me if means keeping my system pegged and destroying its battery life.
Afaik browsers are highly efficient and a lot of work goes into optimization. On the other hand, they're expected to run arbitrary code (JavaScript, Web Assembly) which can do all matter of terrible things. A couple years ago, it used to be Gmail/Google Voice websites would take nearly 1GB of RAM alone per tab and crash if you left them running a few days.
A website could just run <download big json blob and append to array> in a tight loop and the browser has to try to make decisions on not hosing website performance if the user wants to actually use the crappy website while simultaneously not hosing battery/machine performance.
Blink and Gecko don’t fare as well as WebKit does when it comes to efficiency which would suggest they’re making tradeoffs favoring things other than battery life.
things have improved a lot over time. I have one project involving json arrays that grew way out of hand. Sort of panicing about the need for a fast 80% rewrite while not having 10% time I tested a good number of devices. Crappy androids and low end iphones deal with the many thousands of objects incredibly fast. I still think its wrong I just have nothing to show for it.
ff a decade ago would just randomly die on me within 2 days.
A very unreasonable reason for me not switching to Safari is because the bookmarks dropdowns (when activating the bookmark bar) have two very annoying features. Firstly they only open when clicked, so if you click one and move your mouse to another, the other doesn't open, just the original stays there and you have to click off it to close it. Secondly there's some kind of delay to that click such that if you accidentally click the wrong folder of bookmarks, click off it to the correct folder and click again to open the correct folder, if you click too fast it'll do nothing - no opening the new folder, nothing. And it'll continue to do nothing if you continue to click 'inside' the timeout window. So you have this artifical delay built into bookmark navigation that just put me off.
That and also ultra-wide tabs which change in size as you close them with a middle click, which is really annoying and you sometimes close the wrong tab. Close them with the cross and they stay the same size and neatly collapse, you can even then middle click to close the remainder and they stay the same size. Silly difference in behaviour IMO.
It's the little things that put me off. Shame, as Passkey support is great.
A decade with Ubuntu and I get why it’s free. I have disastrous performance issues with it, for reasons that people usually respond, “oh well that’s not Ubuntu’s fault…” but that isn’t a great excuse as users do not care (unless you aren’t intending to attract general users).
Most of the issue is that I have to fight with nvidia video drivers every month or two. Something happens and they stop operating and it grinds my entire system to a crawl when everything is software rendered. YouTube basically kills my computer.
When I go with Mac or Windows, the main feature is that they have designers to make more than a Potemkin UI, and they care about the end to end UX. No, “oh go complain to some other vendor.”
Ubuntu is very very impressive for free. I certainly acknowledge how great that is, and how important that is to the ecosystem.
The wild thing is that using the Additional Drivers UI is what bricked my computer last week. It probably downloaded some binaries but it also spent 30 mins running gcc compiling something. And then forced a kernel headers update but didn’t update anything else. Rebooted and I have no wifi or bluetooth.
The fix was a reversion and then CLI install of the nvidia 515 drivers.
Imo Intel graphics work best (not sure about the new dedicated GPUs) if that's powerful enough for you. I've had some issues with amdgpu although no special setup is required. Unfortunately a lot of hardware manufacturers are Windows first (and only) and some poor volunteer has hacked up a Linux driver via reverse engineering
If you want a good Linux experience, you should look for hardware with first class Linux support. Likewise, good luck with macOS on non-Apple hardware--it's possible but ymmv
The trick is to disable automatic updates once you have a working system. Yes, there is some risk. But at least your system will stay as stable as it was when you first installed it. Oh, and disable swap and have plenty of RAM.
32GB + swap off really does help for sure. I do have updates disabled but I admit I am sloppy with not picking through what I update. It doesn’t help that there’s new updates basically daily.
Thats a good description for many linux GUIs. They look like they can get the job done, but to really get the job done, you have to use what the developers of said UI likely themself use - the terminal.
A friend used the term when I said, “I used Additional Drivers to update to the latest recommended driver and it bricked my computer.” He said never to use that UI and to do it via a terminal. The terminal approach worked effortlessly and in half the time, once I Un-bricked my laptop.
It feels like a lot of the UIs in Ubuntu are there just so they can claim it’s an OS that can take over for Windows or Mac.
My own personal experience (recent x86 based MBPs and similar) is that macOS degrades quickly when CPU and IO get stressed, but Windows 10 and 11 become unresponsive with much smaller loads. Of the big three, Linux is the one that can take more processes while still being responsive.
Even a lowly old i3 can encode videos with ffmpeg while you browse the web provided you start ffmpeg with a `nice -n 19`. On a Mac, it seems to be ignored.
Linux UI actually becomes very unresponsive under load (on most distros) because the default kernel scheduler is tuned for throughput at the cost of responsiveness, instead of vice versa.
Desktop distros switching to a more user-friendly scheduler, and loading a ‘small speaker’ EQ via Pulse on detecting internal speakers (= laptop) are two massive, low-hanging fruit improvements for Linux that just don’t seem to be done.
2019 13" MBP, 16GB. Pretty much anything I do will spin up the fan now. Compiling an app uses so much battery that I get less than an hour of battery life. I've resorted to remote development only, a la Chromebook.
My previous laptop was a similar Lenovo X1 Carbon with Debian and wow do I miss it, but I don't have too much of a choice since I do mobile app development :(
Yeah, the 2019 MBPs were absolute abominations. I spent 5k AUD on a fully kitted out MBP and performance wise it’s one of the worst computers I’ve ever owned.
I swore that would be the last Apple computer I ever bought, but then they released the M1s… and they are very good.
Would recommend getting an M1 if at all possible. There’s still time to ask Santa for one.
I recommend getting a Framework. It's probably not as good as an M1, but it'll last you more than two years, and if it doesn't, you can just change the CPU for a better one without having to throw all the other, perfectly good hardware away.
my macs absolutely start to degrade after about 18 months, and I try to keep them limping along for a few more months. I think it’s usually the battery crapping out that causes everything else to sort of overheat and suck
I had my 2012 MacBook Pro for 8 years, before giving it to my dad where it continues to be used (though under far less load than when I had it).
I did get the battery replaced once, it was free. The screen got replaced twice, also for free (the second time they just did it when replacing the battery because the person at the Apple Store noticed a slight wear on the edge anti-reflective coating)
> I recommend getting a Framework. It's probably not as good as an M1, but it'll last you more than two years…
Macs have famously-long usable lives — my sister uses a 7-year-old iMac, for example. The latest macOS Ventura supports Macs made in 2017. I'd be very surprised to hear about people using 2021 Framework laptops as their daily driver in 2026.
I've had 3 MBPs, every single one has had at least one issue, well before 7 years, usually around 1.5 to 2. The first two had battery recalls, the middle one had cable-gate, the middle one's display was also very temperature sensitive (it would have glitched lines artifact on the screen if the ambient temperature wasn't near 70F), the later MBP suffers from keyboard-gate and from constant thermal throttling. (Likely because the vents are choked with dust, but MBP's user hostile design prevents me from opening it up and pushing air through it, which is likely all it requires. They hate the user so much they used screws worse than Torx. I think they're Pentalobe, but don't quote me.)
My current Magic Trackpad is also highly temperature sensitive. The "click" will lock up at high temp. (I.e., the trackpad will fight you, if you attempt to click, if the ambient temperature is warm.)
> I'd be very surprised to hear about people using 2021 Framework laptops as their daily driver in 2026.
I'm using a Lenovo Thinkpad at about that age. (It is a 2017 model, so, 5 years.) The biggest thing wrong with it at present is it requires AC power. (The battery connection is bad. It lived through two bike crashes, though, and I suspect that's a side effect of it. I should see if that's repairable, one of these days, but I've put up with that for the time, as with COVID, it doesn't really travel much anymore.) The TrackPoint™ is also wonky, but I think that's because sunlight has chemically hardened the nib like an old eraser. I have more nibs… somewhere. I should look for them or order more…
It would be absurd to claim that Macs don't fail or need servicing during their usable lives, but you seem to have been particularly unlucky in my experience.
> They hate the user so much they used screws worse than Torx. I think they're Pentalobe, but don't quote me.
But you're in a thread about how the GP's Mac didn't last two years. I'm fairly sure I will be using my Framework laptop as my daily driver in 2026, maybe with one motherboard replacement. I just switched from my 2017 XPS, and I do development work. I gave it to my dad, who loves it and will probably hold on to it for another few years.
It's a bit odd to be saying this about pre-M1 Macs, as they were "just" Intel machines, same as everything else.
An M1 Mac should last double that, easily - so long as you don't underspec it. My family has multiple November 2020 M1 MacBook Airs that are still working good as the day we got them.
Frameworks are nice in theory but they still have a long way to go when it comes to heat, fan noise, and battery life based on what I've seen owners of them say.
This is the biggest reason that I won’t get a Framework today. Give me a Ryzen with 8+ cores, 32GB DDR5, hopefully two m.2 slots, a full-size HDMI and USB-A port(s), 99wh battery because of TSA security theater, dedicated graphics, and some real heat sinks that can handle 200w+ so it doesn’t have to run the fans constantly or cook the touchpad. A 4:3 OLED with at least 4K resolution and 120hz refresh would be perfect on top. Ooh, and a rigid chassis that doesn’t flex like a noodle, and no RGB / gAmER tacky plastic junk all over. It’s sad that a package like this is very rare.
