Why I bought my wife a Macintosh

Since I handle all my family computers' issues with computers and whatnot (what a curse this has become).... I have bought my wife a Dell Vostro laptop a few years ago...

now she is the kind of person who might use her computer twice a month or even once but she just wants to have a computer for when the time that she needs to do some work on it......

the problem is, with Windows 10 especially, when that time comes that she wants to use her computer, she turns it on, and everything is so slow or just won't open until an update happens, programs, MS Office, Windows update, antivirus, the list goes on, so she gives it to me to do all of this. Off-course, it never goes smoothly, the Windows updates takes ages when it's updating from one major build to the next, some drivers if not updated might cause issues, then updating this, and that, I just got sick of it......

I finally ended up buying her a Macbook Air with an i5 and a 256GB SSD, update it once and the rest is piece of cake. even if updates for apps or whatnot happen, they are so much smoother and don't ever cause issues. Oh and driver updates? what's that? they don't have any of those shenanigans on Mac

rant over

PS: This coming from an Anti-Apple person

if MacBook Pros weren't so limited with USB ports and whatnot (I don't want to attach dongles) and had some half decent specs, I would've switched to Apple and be done with Micro$h4ft as well

 

Exactly, the only apple products I bought (macbook airs and iphones) were for my wife and my mother.

 

yeah gives *us* peace so we can deal with our own problem (Winblows)

 

That worked for me until everyone I was foisting Macintosh's on found out how much faster they could get things done on my PC's

Now they run Windows to get real work done...and Macintoshes to keep up their "image" of being "cool".

 

Oh I think she'll be fine, the only thing she uses is MS Office and surfing the web. Plus, she is an Apple lady, she has all kinds of apples, 2 or 3 iPads, an iToy 7 Phone, Apple CarPlay in her car, this just completes the set. Again, I wouldn't wanna ever own an Apple product because I don't like the eco system but man the more updates this Windows 10 is getting, the uglier and buggier its becoming. And no Windows 7 isn't an option on *my laptop* due to some weird issues I faced after installing all the drivers and whatnot, random crashes here and there out of nowhere

 

This coming from Phoenix is, how do I say this, shocking? Of all the people, you wrote most of the tutorials on how to make WIn 10 run properly, just the way it should be and if anybody knows how to avoid all the pitfalls (including unwanted updates, it is in one of your tutorials). But I feel your pain, it took 6 hours for my computer to prepare fall update and 1 hour to reboot, I have not seen anything like that ever. I won't even mention how my computer keep stop responding for 10 to 20 sec doing something probably related to updates prior to fall update, which forced me to do the fall update. At least my computer is dual boot into Win 7 and I have back up Win 7 machine, otherwise I would be in deep poo work wise. My wife's computer took "only" 4.5 hours to update. Since Apple products are forbidden in my house, I think I'm going to start testing Linux more seriously next year. I'm thinking dual boot with Linux for all internet related things and Win 10 with no internet access at all for programs that have no Linux version.
BTW thanks for posting this, I feel better now, before I thought I was the only one.

 

coincidently, my best friend just called me. I didn't say anything, he just goes...

"Hey bro, my ASUS laptop started doing a big update, after it was done and it rebooted, now my WiFi card doesn't work and I have no internet, what shall I do? "

 

I laughed so hard reading this thread. It is so painfully true. I hate thinking about the uphill battle and dark days ahead for utilizing my new laptop (I am still waiting on getting replaced) to its fullest extent with all this crippled software. And M$ pulling out the rug on newer hardware for Windows 7 and BIOS is fu**ed.

I almost kind of feel like I wasted my money getting a new machine with powerful hardware that I am no longer in control of.

 

Yeah, the whole Windows Update thing is getting out of hand. I do have a "spare" laptop I use periodically. If I want to boot it up to just use it, well, it's been a month, so it goes through tens of minutes of who knows what to update and reconfigure. I just want to use the damn laptop. Windows 10 was supposed to smooth that process, but it's only made it worse.

 

word. Now my friend has no other spare computer to fetch for drivers, he is stuck with a laptop with no internet after the update so I have to meet with him soon and find the right WLAN driver to get his wireless to work. I mean seriously, such a small thing like a wireless card driver breaking with an update, whatever happened to that system check that the update does before it installs the update?

You see, this is what ticks me off with these Windows builds. in Windows 7, a Windows 7 driver was a Windows 7 Driver. Period. It'd work always no matter what system updates you have. This BS started with Windows 8 but it was better. it was only the Windows 8 drivers that didn't work with Windows 8.1, not every freakin' build the drivers wouldn't work. Now, you need a new set of drivers for every major update. Some drivers will work but a lot of them may not like graphics card drivers, audio, card reader, wireless. This is really silly. Imagine having to deal with such issues for your entire family.......

 

This is the reason I like my chromebook. When I need to do something it boots up to usable desktop in less than 10 seconds. If there is an update waiting, all you do is restart with around a 30-60 second inconvenience. Obviously chrome OS is limited compared to a full OS, but it does get out of your way.

 

I never looked into Chrome books. I will do some research about them. Yes I am that sick of Windows

I wish I can install Chrome OS on my MSI laptop but then drivers.....

 

You say your testing out linux? Just pray you don't get a laptop that has a broadcom wlan chip. Talk about driver agony.

 

oh I'm not even interested in going further after this >>>>>> http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-on-an-msi-laptop.811583/page-2#post-10646694

Even after they've reached version 18.3 , can't even freakin' boot without reinventing the wheel. no thanks

PS: My laptop has a Killer AC1535 not broadcom

 

you have 2 options to simulate Chrome OS.

1. try out Cloudready, booting from a flash drive. Cloudready has about 99% the functionality of ChromeOS. I recommend not installing it unless you have a spare drive. When you see it make something like 26 partitions, you'll be like wtf is this crap.

2. Run google chrome browser and resist the urge to do anything outside of chrome.

 

I'm beginning to think that I should've also bought a MacBook Air or something else able to protect me from myself . Over the past couple of days I've reinstalled Windows 10 Pro 4 times... Phoenix was there for the first couple of hours during the first failed attempt and then proceed to less demeaning endeavours.

There is a thin line between a computer enthusiast and a bored sysad working his third shift at home. My wife is running my 2012 Clevo P150EM with openSUSE Leap. Sounds fancy but she has no root access and I've completely disabled automatic updates. Every couple of months I login to her machine and update everything. She's very happy using Chrome, Google Photos and Google Docs. The Clevo could well be a Chromebook (or maybe an iPad with a keyboard) for all she cares.

Guess what? She is currently the lucky owner of the only working computer in the house.

Meanwhile I'm spending my Friday evening trying to figure out why I can only get Windows 10 to install in legacy mode, messing around with MBR to GUID conversion and totally pulling my hair out.

@Phoenix, don't mean to stalk or anything bro. I know that you are busy man with lots of friends with broken computers on your table or something (Do you feel the drama?). But could you pretty please give me a hand? I think I've figured out the most complicated stuff now. My fresh Windows 10 Pro installion is now able to boot in UEFI mode after I've converted MBR to GPT. The system just need Phoenix tweaks now. I lost the entire "Phoenix Stuff" folder when we removed the Data Partition. Turns out I've screwed up and didn't backup the data. If you really can't jump in I'll not hold a grudge (Brick and run! Brick and run!!! ) but if you could please promote me to the top of your very special friends list that don't get blocked in Skype during the Holidays season I will be deeply grateful.

 

a modern powerful Android device like the Samsung Note 5 or Note 8 and a USB3.0 / microUSB dual tipped flash drive are your best friend in these dire circumstances I have a couple Samsung Duo's I really love. 32GB to 128GB range iirc. Pretty cheap on Amazon too.

 

Those reversable designs are really helpful for transferring files between desktop and tablet / phone devices.

I use these Patriot Stellar 16GB, 32GB, 64GB USB 3.0 drives:

And, Patriot has a new Stellar C series out now that's USB 3.1 and are even tinier:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...ion=+Patriot+Stellar+C+USB3.1&N=-1&isNodeId=1

 

I wouldn't want smaller than the Samsung Duo myself. It's easy enough to lose already and smaller designs make them harder to plug and unplug imo. It was a PITA finding a keychain lanyard string thin enough and strong enough (to my standards) to fit through the little hole in the body and cap though.

These little drives are indispensable on vacations. If your phone memory ever fills up you can dump it on the spot and keep shooting without the need to tote a computer with you.

 

I have this, the fastest USB Drive I've owned:
Lexar JumpDrive P20 128GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive - LJDP20-128CRBNA

 

Lexar has closed down, so no new products are coming... no USB 3.1 Flash drives...

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...cription=Lexar++usb+3.1+flash&N=-1&isNodeId=1

Micron Discontinues Lexar Business, Plans to Focus on Higher-Margin Products
by Anton Shilov on June 28, 2017 9:00 PM EST
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1158...iness-plans-to-focus-on-highermargin-products

 

So that's why it is so hard to find one in the UK. Too bad, Microsoft really excels at "cheap" hardware. Lexar was interesting

 

My wife and I both have dell computers. We tried the Mac thing and both agreed the OS is garbage. I keep up to date with updates on her machine and she loves it. Small. 2 in 1. Fast. It’s the perfect device for her. Mac is soooooo overrated.

 

There do seem to be an inordinate amount of updates for Windows 10 as of late. They have occasionally caused me a productivity problem; for example I needed to get some files off my PC before I left my place the other day and I ended up having to wait around until updates were finished. And I've also been trying to leave somewhere and ending up having to wait for the PC to finish installing updates.

One of the solutions/workarounds is to have your PC on all the time, or as often as possible. This way it applies updates and automatically restarts whenever needed. I manage my family's computers and that is one of the things I've been doing - never having the PC shut off. One less thing for my family members to do, as well - remember to turn on/off the PC. The way I view it, anything they don't have to do that isn't directly related to what they want to do on the computer is a good thing.

Charles

 

i'd say why not just install OSX to the Vostro but, i know itunes store sometimes doesn't work right but, why not simple to use OS like Elementary OS. I have almost no fuss with eOS other than few tweaks when initially installing, occasionally it asks for my password to update, otherwise it just works.

 

I totally agree. Linux Distros can be somewhat challenging to setup on bleeding edge hardware (Phoenix gave up after trying to boot up Mint and getting a Kernel Panic thanks to Noveau drivers). The thing is, when you go with a LTS release, after installing you are pretty much done for good. I had very few problems updating openSUSE leap on my wife's computer. This includes almost 2 years of Kernel + proprietary drivers updates and even a distro upgrade to 42.3. Everything works as expected. In the rare occasion that an update makes the system unstable (e.g., problem with latest Nvidia driver), I can simply revert to the last Brtfs snapshot and skip the update for a while (restoring Windows snapshots rarely works for me, but restoring openSUSE Brtfs Snapshots works 100% of the time).

If you have commodity hardware and a user-friendly distro like Elementary OS even the initial setup can be pretty much hassle free... So yes, contrary to popular belief a Popular LTS Linux distro can be a solid choice for your missus box. It is certainly less painful than a Hackintosh and even Windows 10.

 

I had little success in getting Linux distro Xubuntu 16 to work on somewhat older generation skylake PC. I did custom kernel upgrades using hwe method and installed nvidia proprietary drivers. Yeah it took some 2-3 months to get it running in perfect condition.
Earlier on 4.4 kernel battery life on iGPU was crap it drained to 0% in 4 hrs in complete standby mode even using TLP and Powertop.
I upgrade to 4.8->4.10->4.11-> 4.13, now battery life rivals Windows 10 on iGPU only. Almost lasts 8-10hrs if the wattage is under 10W. Even with wifi power savings disabled I get this consistently. Unfortunately battery life is horrendous on dGPU in linux, it lasts only 1-2hrs. Worst case scenario is 45mins.

 

I switched to Macs back when Vista came out. I wasn’t playing games as often but windows and bootcamp handled the couple I played fine. They then got on the thin and light non upgradeable period phase and migrated back to windows. Well that and battlefield 3 was coming out.
I kinda miss the not having to worry about drivers and compatibility issues with hardware/software and like the “it just works” way of computing.
I will however never own another Mac at this point with the extreme limited connectivity and they have pretty much gave the big fist up the rump to professional creators for video and photography editing.

 

Like these new gimped / stripped out macs came at the wrong time. If there was a proper MacBook Pro with a lot of expansion ports for NVMe SSDs and proper USB ports I'd like to try it but just when I need to leave this joke of a world that Microsoft has made, there isn't even a good alternative. To me, now Macbooks are like internet cafe/star bucks books that you just take to watch youTube here and there otherwise they'd overheat and no USB ports is a big no no

 

Sorry for the long delay, out for Xmas.

I feel your pain...

NVIDIA proprietary drivers are terrible for everyday use (I still get a lot of tearing on dGPU mode). Nvidia Optimus is also subpar on Linux. nvidia-prime is a half-backed 2nd class solution. Unfortunately open source solutions aren't ready for prime time either. It took me quite some time to get Bumblebee working with my hardware. Battery life is pretty good and performance is ok for my light gaming needs, still NVIDIA drivers on Windows are on a whole different league.

To be honest, Linux has its own definition of "reasonable old". I still have quite a few server installations running old Kernel versions. Heck, even WSL is still running Kernel 4.4 patched by Microsoft .

If we revisit release dates: Skylake was released around August 2015. Linux Kernel 4.4 was released in January 2016. Ubuntu 16.04 was released in April 2016 (yes, that was almost one year after Skylake's official release...)

If your box had a GeForce 10 series GPU (May 2016) and a modern NIC your hardware probably wouldn't run smoothly with Kernel 4.4. Skip all the way to Kernel 4.11 (April 2017) and everything should be running well. So, unfortunately the definition of reasonable old in that case was around 1.5 - 2 years.

To be fair Early 2016 MacBook Pros were shipping with Haswell era CPUs. The first MacBook Pro model with Skylake was released in October 2016 and it wasn't exactly a bug free experience either.

By March 2017 I had heard so many horror stories about 4th Gen MBPs that I've convinced myself to buy a "state of the art" Clevo Machine.

In hindsight I should definitely have bought a Skylake era machine and installed Linux instead of fooling myself into buying bleeding edge hardware. I definitely don't game as much as I had planned anyway, and most of what I play would run fine on Early 2016 hardware.

Not to be unfair with @Phoenix that spent a fair amount of time tweaking my Windows 10 installation, nor with HIDevolution that have been trying to help me (with BIOS upgrades / tracking Prema's progress, etc). But at the end of the day I'm on my own with VIDEO_SCHEDULER_INTERNAL_ERRORS and all kinds of funny Windows 10 bugs that no amount of tweaking seems to fix. I also don't have unlimited time to keep reinstalling OSes, trying random fixes, buying software and chasing after people.

As I said before, my former P150EM (Ivy Bridge / GTX 675m), now my wife's computer, is the only reliable machine in the bouse. It is linux, it is fast, it is stable, and it works. It is also 5 years old and - as long as I replace the battery and clean it every once in a while - may as well last for another couple of years.

My plan is to obtain a RMA for this box, make sure that the GPU is working properly, erase Windows 10 and never go back.

My next box will certainly have boring old hardware, a boring old OS and it is going to be great. My only requirement is that Sleep / Hibernation works as expected and I don't need to restart it more than once per week.

 

Bumblebee is obsolete on newer optimus models 900M and above. So nvidia-prime is better.
If you follow the tips what I suggested your newer laptop should 100% run KBL and even CannonLake w/o issues. Don't miss out Linux-firmware that provide preliminary support for newer Triband Intel WIFI, Killer Cards, CPU support for post CoffeeLake.
I haven't tried gaming on Linux but during Blender renders, the GPU briefly stalls or stutters due to high temps because the fans decide not to spin up until it gets 90C on Linux which is complete opposite to what BIOS is configured.
If you want any help, I will try my best to help you out except RAID mode for Disks on Linux. There's new Teamviewer for linux.

 

Hey, thanks for the report / tips. I've also heard that Bumblebee does not play well with Pascal series GPUs. I'm not really surprised, the last commit in Bumblebee's repo is now 4 years old.

Hopefully nvidia-prime works better with newer generation cards than with my 675m... nvidia-prime makes my KDE system unstable and introduces a lot of tearing when composition is enabled. I'm also not a huge fan of having to restart the X session to switch between intel and Nvidia (Windows anyone?). nvidia-prime in dGPU mode also reduced battery time from around 3 hours to about 45 minutes in my wife's box. Granted my P150HMBAT-8 battery has weared down and needs to be replaced but Bumblebee is doing a better job in terms of power management.

I'll certainly get back to you once my machine has been returned; I haven't even opened the RMA yet (will have to backup everything during the weekend).

My plan is to install a rolling distro like Tumbleweed. It should ship with a very recent kernel by default. Then I'll find the most recent kernel version that works well with Nvidia driver (might as well be the latest) and have a secondary entry on GRUB for the "stable Kernel + proprietary drivers + working sleep / hibernate" snapshot as a fallback. Since this laptop has a dMux and BIOS settings to swap between Intel and Nvidia I don't care if a system update temporaly breaks support for the dGPU as long as I can boot from the "stable" snapshot for the occasional dGPU session.

I'll probably only update sporadically (although less secure, I'm really enjoying the peace of mind that comes with a sane update schedule) and rarely shutdown / restart the box.

I don't use RAID so this shouldn't be a problem. In fact I've already managed to install openSUSE 42.3 on an external HD and everything worked with the newer machine (so KB + Killer NIC + Samsung external SSD seems to be supported). The only problem was the dGPU, I had to swap to Intel during the setup, however that's expected for old Noveau drivers + Kernel (I haven't tried to install proprietary Nvidia drivers since this was a test install and I'm not positive that my 1070 is working properly). The only unknown variable is the internal Samsung NVMe, but by what I've read it should work fine. In fact, system76 is selling a Clevo Laptop almost identical to mine ( https://system76.com/laptops/oryx), so my expectation is that most issues with the P650HS hardware have already been figured out by now.

 

Try Xubuntu 16.04.3 LTS

 

Never used LXDE before, might as well try it (although I personally prefer openSUSE to Ubuntu ). Out of curiosity, why LXDE with new hardware? Do you prefer LXDE over KDE / Gnome / Cinnamon or is Lubuntu somehow more stable than the other *ubuntu distros?

 

Xubuntu uses Xfce which is very light than stock Ubuntu or kubuntu. Lubuntu uses LXDE which is 20-30% lighter than XFCE.
I use same OS for my low end or budget devices so I incline to use lighter OS which reduces thermal issues and runs fairly w/o any issues. I prioritize stability over looks.

 

Meanwhile my mom uses a 10 year old thinkpad with no problems on windows 7.......and it's probably just as fast as a macbook.

 

Yeah laptops which have Windows 7 as the base OS will soon become in demand and go up in value!

I can't install Windows 7 on my MSI laptop. I tried, installed all the drivers, then when I started installing apps, I'd get random errors left and right or they won't launch and this is without any telemetry updates installed I just used the Simplix Pack

 

Sorry, for some reason I'm with Lubuntu stuck in my mind. Probably because I was watching a review video not that long ago.
Having the same desktop experience over all devices is a fair reason to use Xfce.
I got really used to KDE; Leap is currently using around 600MB of memory and breezing in 5 years old hardware (Ivy Bridge, 8 GB memory, 5400 rpm HD). Not Raspberry Pi material, but the fact that KDE is on the heavy side of Linux Desktops using 600MB of memory is kinda embarrassing for Windows.

 

For me Xubuntu on older Ivybridge CPU uses 400MB w/o firefox, with firefox it uses upto 1-2GB (20-30 tabs).
If I go into berserk mode on skylake based laptop, I trim my W10 RAM usage from 3-6GB to 1GB which is best during benchmarking.
Linux is really very very optimised on Skylake based PCs.

 

Just an update on this thread, ever since I bought my wife that Mac, guess what? I never heard from here again (in terms of computer problems that is )

 

That's the reason you paid a premium price. No driver updates and updating OS X issues. All are rolled up into a kernel update that updates the driver,apps etc and remove older ones in background w/o any issues.
Mac on HDD is super slow than Windows 10. I tried a Mac Mini in college.

 

Most of the issue can be fixed by installing latest linux firmware. The newest firmware 1.164.3 supports intel 9xxx series and has KRACK fixes too.

 

Firmware updates are beautiful. Have to be careful with Linux Kernel versions though. Follow-up to our previous conversation: I was a little bit concerned after you reported having problems with previous generation CPU in a Ubuntu variant. Ubuntu generally has pretty good hardware support out of the box, so I was expecting to struggle quite a bit, deal with Kernel updates, etc. Still it looks like the latest Kernel is not always the greatest choice. Most "Enterprise" distros like RHEL and SUSE comes with reasonable old LTS Kernel versions by default, but they take their time to backport new drivers.

I've installed openSUSE Leap on my bare metal P650HS as a last resort before RMA. Kernel 4.4 with SLE backports (drm-kmp-default) is able to run my Killer AC, Samsung NVMe, Kaby Lake and 1070 with no problems. Suspend and Hibernate are also working fine. Getting Bumblebee to work for hybrid graphics was a breeze. Cons: Couldn't get nvidia-prime to run, battery time is surprisingly worse than my old P150em and I've noticed some bugs related to ACPI battery monitoring; annoying but not a deal breaker.

Before installing Leap I've tried Tumbleweed with the latest and greatest Kernel (in their Package Manager that is: 4.14.9) 4.14.9, unfortunately I couldn't even get it to start X . So it looks like Leap, Tumbleweed and Xubuntu are completely different beasts in terms of hardware support. That's the beauty (and the ugliness) of Linux .

@Phoenix, Mint shares a lot of genes with Ubuntu / Debian. Assuming that you still want to try Linux. Since your hardware is similar to mine you might as well try a boring RPM distro like openSUSE or Fedora. I bet that you can get past the installer with SUSE (not that getting past the installation screen of Windows 10 was an easy / hack free experience last time that we've tried). Trust me, it is an upgrade to Windows 10, and a better OS for the enthusiastic crowd.

Running Windows 10 over the past year was a world of pain. Hopefully my dGPU will remain stable now.