Uncles don’t let relatives buy less than 16gb ram. That has been my standard since ~2010 and our 2013 mbp is still running fine because I insisted on it.
I prefer FW for freedom reasons, that’s worth a few hundred as well as the ram. Would also wait for the new intel chipset that is more efficient however.
Finally I think the FW 12 is weirdly positioned, as the 13 is already thin and light. For a tablet, I recommend the Star Labs Starlite instead. Both in same package? Clunky.
Guess I’d recommend a used FW 13 and Starlite instead. That’s what I have now and no real reason to upgrade, and freedom to tinker is off the charts, perfect for a student.
> Uncles don’t let relatives buy less than 16gb ram. That has been my standard since ~2010 and our 2013 mbp is still running fine because I insisted on it.
Just last weekend I bought 8gb ram thinkpad t14 for an elderly relative. 240 EUR.
It replaces his thinkpad x220 where the fan and ssd slowly dies.
I doubt it becomes an issue, and if it does then I can upgrade it later.
Someone has to buy that (presumably second-hand) laptop to prevent it from becoming e-waste. 8GB can be plenty for a student, most don't need much beyond a browser and PowerPoint. Many of my university colleagues were using new $5,000+ MacBook Pros exclusively for Google Docs, that seems more wasteful to me.
Do you use Firefox? I have a theory that there's some kind of Firefox-aarch64-linux-specific memory leak but I haven't been able to track it down. I have a 16GB x86-64 Thinkpad and I rarely get OOM issues, whereas my 32GB M1 MBP running Asahi is always on the brink of OOM.
Zram and Zsawp are mutually exclusive on Linux. On macOS, both concepts coexist – except macOS is able to compress individual memory pages (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300432) on the fly. Zram is a compressed RAM block device with a hard capacity limit.
There is really no comparison here at this point. macOS is vastly superior in that regard.
zswap works well in my experience. Don't need both. Combined with systemd-oomd I haven't had a swapping or memory issue in many years. 16gb here with VMs and lots going on. This doc clears some things up:
That's my whole point: on Linux a process gets killed to prevent a system lock up if you're about to run out of memory or swap. That never happens on macOS, as long as you have some SSD left, period.
OMG why do you keep on insisting on this? The point is you can run as many apps in the background and at no point will they get OOM-ed. This isn't about a rougue app, this is actually a very obscure reason to run out of memory! I get OOMed weekly on Asahi with 16GB only because my Brave/Chromium session grows too big. THIS NEVER HAPPENS ON MACOS.
> Current zswap+oomd behavior is the best choice imho
This isn't up for debate, Linux memory management is less advanced. How about you actually read up on the advantages of how macOS handles the memory and stop the speculation OK?
Either the programs are operating normally, or they aren't. You don't get to pick and choose to suit your argument.
Above someone else is complaining about a browser on asahi. There's obviously a leaking problem but you are uninterested in solving it, just keep repeating "macos more advanced," which is not a useful argument.
The oomd memory pressure threshold is tunable, you know. So are browsers/plugins, etc. As I mentioned I've been using Linux and 16gb RAM since ~2010 and haven't had ooms in the last decade+ since firefox was overhauled.
I prefer FW for freedom reasons, that’s worth a few hundred as well as the ram. Would also wait for the new intel chipset that is more efficient however.
Finally I think the FW 12 is weirdly positioned, as the 13 is already thin and light. For a tablet, I recommend the Star Labs Starlite instead. Both in same package? Clunky.
Guess I’d recommend a used FW 13 and Starlite instead. That’s what I have now and no real reason to upgrade, and freedom to tinker is off the charts, perfect for a student.