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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

(sigpipe.macromates.com)
2031 points jrk | 7 comments | 22 May 20 15:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.768s | source | bottom
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halotrope ◴[22 May 20 16:29 UTC] No.23273850[source]▶
I am using Ubuntu 20.04 on a Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen2 and you would be surprised how "normal" it feels as a development machine. Sure there some little annoyances, the touchpad behaves a little worse than on windows, sound is a little worse. But the most important things, Keyboard and Screen are excellent. The system in general does not feel like the horror stories that people keep telling about linux on desktop(notebook). Now that WSL2 is getting Cuda even windows looks workable. Their new terminal app is amazing. After a decade of Mac notebooks it was quite liberating and I would not switch back even if the flaws in macOS would be fixed. It is for sure the nicest of the big 3 operating systems but for development work Ubuntu is hard to beat for me. YMMV but it won't hurt to look around you what else is there.
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1. Sangeppato ◴[22 May 20 17:13 UTC] No.23274456[source]▶
The dual GPU is a pain in the butt since Nvidia still doesn't support Optimus on Linux (and probably never will).
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2. rudiv ◴[22 May 20 17:36 UTC] No.23274750[source]▶
Have you tried 19.10 or 20.04? Before that I had a lot of issues with my Dell XPS 9560 because of optimus, but it got a lot better in those versions. YMMV but it actually worked out of the box with nary a hint of manual configuration when I installed 20.04 recently.

Edit: should note, when I say work I mean you can switch between GPUs/launch an app on the dedicated GPU with ease.

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3. Sangeppato ◴[22 May 20 17:44 UTC] No.23274851[source]▶
I've tried 19.10 and Arch Linux and the only option still was to statically choose only one GPU and reboot. How does the offloading work now? I haven't heard anything about it
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4. halotrope ◴[22 May 20 17:46 UTC] No.23274873[source]▶
That is not true anymore. With 20.04 it supports hybrid graphics just fine. The only issue I had was sharing cuda and OpenGL context since GL ran on the Intel card. This should not be a concern for most people I assume.
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5. Sangeppato ◴[22 May 20 17:59 UTC] No.23275019[source]▶
Can you run everything on the iGPU and only activate the Nvidia GPU to do the render offloading on single apps? If you can, I should try 20.04 on a laptop
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6. hvis ◴[22 May 20 18:03 UTC] No.23275061{3}[source]▶
19.10 added the "NVIDIA On-Demand" profile in Nvidia Settings. It needs the driver version 435 or newer.

It works okay, but you have to launch processes with a specific set of env variables to use the Nvidia card.

7. halotrope ◴[22 May 20 18:16 UTC] No.23275189{3}[source]▶
Yes exactly. This way you have all the GPU memory available for accelerated apps. Not sure if it works for all use cases but worked for me.