The Return of the Mac

Maybe you remember my last post about my journey from a MacBook to a ThinkPad running Fedora …well, it’s over 😀

I really wanted this to work. I have put a crazy amount of effort into configuring my new beloved system exactly the way I wanted it.
I was proud to have this thing that I own completely. New OS distro to try out? No problem: swap out the SSD and run it. Don’t like it? Just install the old SSD again.
Also all the features that KDE comes with are simply crazy. If you imagine that this is being done by hundreds of people who just do that for the fun of it, or because they see some purpose in doing that. Crazy.
All the things that “just work”. I never expected that given my Linux experience from a decade ago.

What Worked

Most of the Things I Do on a Daily Basis Actually Work. at least, Kind Of:

• Browsing the web ✔
• Building Flutter apps ✔
  • Even for iOS (kind of - performance is really bad) ✔
• bash, Warp, Bitwarden, Affine, Seafile, Thunderbird, Vivaldi, VS Code, Antigravity, Android Studio - all work ✔
• Having Gemini in a Chrome App ✔
• Sending files with LocalSend ✔
• native Wireguard integration in KDE ✔
• having stats like network activity, CPU activity, … in the status bar ✔

Some Things Did Not Work but Were Solvable

• Having a Resilio Sync status bar symbol (vibe coded one) ✔
• Native GeForce Now app -> Chrome App (more on that later) ✔
• A good Git GUI (used Fork on a Mac, which is - hands down - the best Git GUI) -> switched to GitKraken. Not really fast and a bit weird, but does its job ✔
• Screenshot tool was really not that good. I use CleanShotX on my Mac, and there is nothing that even remotely comes close. I was about to vibe code my own (✔)

What Did Not Work

• MoneyMoney. I tried several Linux alternatives. But that’s just a pile of garbage, to be honest. There was that one application that kinda worked but it looked like a Java application from 2000 (maybe because it was 🤷‍♂️😂)
• Wiso Steuer. The tax software I use. There is no way that I would use a web based tax declaration service. I would rather install Windows into a virtual machine, and do my tax declaration in there.

The Turn

As you can see, most of the things I need just work. They aren’t so nice as on a Mac, but they work.
I was able to get used to that - always using that voice in my head that screams “freedom” as a support.
Half way into my journey I tried some Linux gaming. Did not really work out well. I had an eGPU (NVIDIA) attached to the ThinkPad and when it worked it worked quite well (Valve does an amazing job in providing that Windows integration layer). But if it did not detect the eGPU then you have to fiddle around and restart the ThinkPad until it does.

At one point, I installed a dedicated gaming Windows partition because of all the hassle.
But having to reboot to just play a 30 minutes session of Oxygen not included (I know, that’s a lie. One can not only play 30 minutes of Oxygen not included) was very annoying.

Speaking of Oxygen not included: One would think that a game like this should run without any issues on a 13th gen Intel processor, right?
It kind of does but you can feel the limit of that iGPU on a 4k monitor. I think the iGPU on an AMD processor would have had a much easier life with this workload. AMD in general seems to really have stepped up their Linux game. So a pivot to an AMD based machine would do the trick then?

Not really. Seems like unlike Intel AMD processor cause a couple of issues in Linux regarding suspend states. My ThinkPad also had some issues on that end - especially the Thunderbolt part could lead to the system completely freezing. But that happened once a month or so.
And with this we are already starting to approach my main gripes with Linux.

The End of an Experiment

As much fun it is to tinker with the OS to try to squeeze out all those nasty little annoyances as much it is a burden in the long run.

It’s not as bad as in the (long distant) past. Normal package updates don’t break the whole system any more. But I had a couple of occasions where some parts of my Fedora installation refused to work for a week because of some updates (like SMB connection to my server via Dolphin). You might say (correctly so) that this was my decision by choosing a distro with a fast paced update strategy. I might answer that this is true but on the other hand you would stick with all that bugs from a year ago until the distro decides to bump versions (like having blurry text in scaled UIs).
The issue is that there is always a couple of things that don’t work as expected. You need to find workarounds for them or hope for an update fixing it.

Over time it just gets annoying. This alone would not have stopped my experiment but the sum of all of it did.

The final straw that broke the camel’s back was GeForce Now. Sounds dumb but let me explain:
As I have written there is no native Linux client for GeForce Now. (There is one for the Steam Deck but that only works on AMD devices - they say 😂).
GeForce Now in the browser on Linux does not have support for hardware accelerated video decoding. This makes the resolution being limited to 1080p.
Knowing that my plan supports 1440p but I can only see 1080p on my 4k monitor is not an acceptable state for me 🙈.

So I searched the Internet and found a way to trick GeForce Now to think it is running on Windows (at least the server gets tricked) enabling 1440p in the browser. The Intel processor had enough power to decode those 1440p video streams in software.

One day I wanted to screen record my experiments in Arc Raiders (Don’t look for me there, I don’t play that any more, I’m too old). I saw the frame rate and then the quality of GeForce Now drop to 720p (and I think even something in the 500 range). The picture was horribly blurry and the game was not playable.
I did some experimenting and it turned out that the screen recording has put the whole system on it’s limit making the software video decoding not catching up. GeForce Now detected that and switched to a lower resolution to compensate.

This experience reminded me of that crazy power that the Apple Silicon based Macs have. They wouldn’t even notice a screen recording in the background (just kidding, of course they would but you get the point).
Also things like GeForce Now are natively supported on the Mac as there is enough demand for it.

All of this led to me switching back to my MacBook that I gladly did not sell but just stuffed into a drawer 😮‍💨.
As you might recall (the whole reason for that journey) my MacBook is quite limited in terms of storage (and RAM) for my workload. So I watched the market and got a used M2 MacBook Pro with 32 gigabytes of RAM and 1 terabyte of SSD in an excellent condition (recent Apple Care case and display replacement included). So I bought that one for the price of one used ThinkPad T14 Gen 4 and one used eGPU 😊.

Verdict

I really liked my Linux journey. I hope that Intel and AMD get their stuff together to provide us with hardware comparable to Apple Silicon. Or Snapdragon takes of. Whatever comes first, I would take both 😆.
Linux has come a long way and given the recent push from Microsoft (Hello Windows 10 support end) and Valve (Their recent SteamMachine announcement) there is a good chance for it to get more traction.
But today in the space that I operate in it’s not quite there yet. Pretty close but not there.