Comment on Asus Co-CEO: MacBook Neo Is a 'Shock' to the PC Industry

• RIotingPacifist@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  What?

  I use OSX for work and Linux on my personal laptop, that hasn’t been my experience at all

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  • setsubyou@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    There are some advantages macOS can have but it depends on usage patterns and user knowledge:

    • You don’t have to configure swap on macOS, while on Linux you can get into a situation where e.g. at install time you set up some default 2 GB swap but then it’s not enough and you don’t know that’s a thing that can be changed.
    • You don’t have to configure compression for RAM or swap on macOS; on Linux you often have to know you can set up zram/zswap if you want it. Compression can make a huge difference for users that switch between memory heavy applications as long as they don’t literally switch every 5 seconds.
    • On macOS, applications generally use the same frameworks e.g. for UI (because there is not much choice), and they can be loaded once and shared between all of them. Linux can share libraries too but users can run into situations where their applications use multiple different versions of Qt, GTK, etc. at the same time, and then you have stuff like snap on top that comes with its own copies of even basic system libraries. Containers also do this. As a Linux user you can avoid library bloat to some extent but “normal” users are not aware of it in the first place.

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    • RIotingPacifist@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Dynamic swap and zswap aren’t really the same as efficient ram usage it’s just good ways to mitigate when you run out. But when your using actual swap it’s in my experience more noticable on OSX than Linux, which at least for me remains responsive until you’re using a lot of swap.

      Linux can share libraries too but users can run into situations where their applications use multiple different versions of Qt, GTK, etc. at the same time

      Maybe Arch & Flatpak users hit this, but avoiding multiple versions of the same library is what distros exist for and avoiding loading different frameworks is what Desktop Environments are for. Although the ability to restore apps after closing them is pretty sweet and built in to OSX in a way that lets me safely kill apps to reduce the memory I’m using.

      I think the main reason my Linux setup consumes less memory is probably because I used Kate for most file editing instead of vscode, which is probably an unfair advantage to Linux.

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      • setsubyou@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Dynamic swap and zswap aren’t really the same as efficient ram usage it’s just good ways to mitigate when you run out.

        I disagree. If the OS automatically identifies unneeded pages and compresses them or swaps them out, it’s certainly using the physical memory more efficiently than if it wasn’t doing these things.

        avoiding multiple versions of the same library is what distros exist for

        But they can’t if the applications they want to ship don’t all use the same version. E.g. Ubuntu ships GTK 2, 3, and 4. Arch even still ships GTK 1 in addition to these three.

        avoiding loading different frameworks is what Desktop Environments are for

        What happens is you run KDE but then you still want to run Firefox so you still need GTK.

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  • BladeFederation@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    To clarify, some versions of Linux are lighter weight with resources, and macOS does tend to take up more RAM at rest to make things pull up snappier. But their compression algorithm is better, and if you are using near the limit, it will be more efficient with the use of the RAM you have available before lagging. With Windows and Linux, it feels more like if you’re out of RAM you’re out if RAM. It’s less likely to happen at all on Linux though.

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    • RIotingPacifist@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      What compression algorithm? The osx kernel is largely open source so they aren’t doing some secret compression, do they hardware offload it or something?

      OSX enables zswap by default, but on a laptop that regular uses it, I’m not convinced it’s a trade-off that’s worth it, although swapping is different on OSX (IMO worse on modern desktops as it swaps whole apps) so I could be wrong.

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  • SlurpingPus@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    MacOS doesn’t shove the system UI components into swap when Firefox uses too much memory.

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• bitwolf@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It is not more efficient. Macs use more ram in general and they both employ memory compression and caching.

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