i haven’t personally had trouble with that since early 2023, but it depends on your dependencies

i feel like if you’re not sat stationary at a workstation (who is these days) what you want is a laptop that’s good at being a laptop. 99% of the software developers i work with (not a small number) use Macbook Pros. they are well built, have good components, have best in class battery life (we’ll see how things shake out with Qualcomm), and are BSD based and therefore Unix compatible. my servers and gaming/CUDA PC? Linux all day. my laptop? Macbook. i’m not ideological enough to have range anxiety every time i step away from my desk. plus any decent sized org is going to have to administrate these machines, from scientists to administrators, and catering to .4% of your users is not a good ROI if your software vendors struggled for 8 years to get their Windows 98 based specialty sensor software to run on Mac.

that .4% is likely not 0 because they are nerds.

seriously tho if Qualcomm chips can make a Linux book that lasts all day i would happily make the switch

i guess the rare thing is the public commitment, but Apple has generally had a good track record for updates compared to its Android counterparts, who have previously failed to meet their goals or set laughable goals like 2 years.

you’d be surprised how fast a model can be if you narrow the scope, quantize, and target specific hardware, like the AI hardware features they’re announcing.

not a 1-1, but a quantized Mistral 7B runs at ~35 tokens/sec on my M2. that’s not even as optimized as it could be. it can write simple scripts and do some decent writing prompts.

they could get really narrow in scope (super simple RAG, limited responses, etc), quantize down to even something like 4 bit, and run it on custom accelerated hardware. it doesn’t have to reproduce Shakespeare, but i can imagine a PoC that runs circles around Siri in semantic understanding and generated responses. being able to reach out on Slack to the engineers that built the NPU stack ain’t bad neither.

gotta pull out the ole “win the fight; lose the cutscene”

i think it’s a matter of perspective. if i’m deploying some containers or servers on a system that has well defined dependencies then i think Debian wins in a stability argument.

for me, i’m installing a bunch of experimental or bleeding edge stuff that is hard to manage in even a non LTS Debian system. i don’t need my CUDA drivers to be battle tested, and i don’t want to add a bunch of sketchy links to APT because i want to install a nightly version of neovim with my package manager. Arch makes that stuff simple, reliable, and stable, at least in comparison.