My concern lies squarely with the 8GB of RAM. MacOS has great swapping implementation, but swap is not magic.

Inevitably, the OS and applications will get heavier, requiring more swap and therefore more disk reads and writes.

8GB on phones isn’t bad as iOS and Android are designed to freeze and kill background apps quickly. As an app developer, it’s something you design around. But on a desktop, that’s not an option, apps should only be frozen and killed at the last moment to avoid locking up the OS.

I’d be more comfortable buying an older/used M1 Mac with 16GB of RAM. And given that Neo and M1 are roughly comparable, they should hopefully be supported for the same length of time.

It’s a utility app that is that is available on Linux, Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android. It’s a decently popular app and is more likely to be used by regular people than in a business setting.

It’s in the top 50 most popular apps on Flathub.

Ubuntu being shit for personal users is all but new (Who wants 2 year old software?

A lot of people. From a snap I maintain:

So not only are some people fine with 2 year old software, they’re choosing to use 4 year old software more often than 6 month old software (granted in this second case, you can argue it’s because Ubuntu promotes the LTS as the main version).

That’s misleading, there was a significant outlier. Gnome was on average slower, but not that much slower.

MacOS is UNIX, but is not the best implementation of UNIX.

The UNIX tools it ships are extremely old. For example, it comes with GNU Screen, which I was using but was having same strange issues with. It turned out it uses a version from 2006… so I had to brew install a modern version.

And I’m personally not the biggest fan of MacOS. It’s certainly better than Windows thanks to Apple mostly treating the user with basic respect (no ads), but the desktop/window manager is just super quirky. No other desktop, whether it be Windows or any desktop on Linux behaves quite like it. They tend to only adopt the nicer features while keeping a UX that feels closer to Windows. For example, MacOS quirky/unique in doing

• Requiring a click to activate a window (with no option to change this behavior)
• Fullscreening a window moves it to its own space
• Closing an app’s window does not close the app itself for the majority of apps
  • Perhaps not the biggest deal if the goal is app startup speed for heavily used apps, but unnecessary for rarely used apps and clutters the dock)
  • Also can be quite annoying since it will drag you to the last space you used the app on
• Minimized windows show on dock as previews
  • Not that of an idea, but strange since you now have two ways to bring the app back: clicking on the app icon itself or the minimized preview

Flatpak cannot access the host GPU drivers, so there are runtimes for NVIDIA drivers.

What they are referring to is that the driver version on the host must match the driver version installed as a flatpak runtime. Otherwise, you may get graphical issues and crashes.

Packagekit mainly.

It also helps if you just focus on a single package format. The Snap Store’s performance is great, though I have seen some baffling QA issues with it (like categories showing up like “Devel…”). There’s also that store that Universal Blue is pushing, forget what it’s called.

My real surprise is that this supports Linux and more specifically Wayland.