Can I run Solidworks on Linux yet? Excel? Labview? Vivado? Adobe products? Altium Designer? (Matlab is mostly yes) Not everybody is just writing Javascript and PHP.
Can I get a laptop to sleep after closing the lid yet?
Not that long ago the answer to these questions was mostly no (or sort of yes... but very painfully)
> Can I get a laptop to sleep after closing the lid yet?
> on windows all of this just works
Disagree on the sleep one - my work laptop doesn’t go to sleep properly. The only laptop I’ve ever used that behaves as expected with sleep is a macbook.
Not sure why you're insinuating that I dislike apple products. My personal mb air doesn't have this issue and most of my household is on apple.
I'm also seeing results for "macbook pro doesn't go to sleep when lid closed", so other people see this problem too. You can't really claim that other platforms have them beat here if there isn't data to support the claim.
> Not sure why you're insinuating that I dislike apple products.
Your comment was written in a manner that echos the same anti-Apple bias that's frequently found on HN. If that's not you, then it's just a misread on my part.
> You can't really claim that other platforms have them beat here if there isn't data to support the claim.
I can, because by and large those are still anecdotal experiences posted online. The deeper integration of OS/hardware due to Apple controlling the entire chain has made sleep mostly a non-issue; it's typically a misbehaving application that might prevent it. There are valid reasons an app might need to do that, so it's not like macOS is going to prevent it - but if sleep's not working right on macOS, it's typically a user error.
This is different from Linux (and Windows, to a lesser degree) where you have a crazy amount of moving parts with drivers/hardware/resources/etc.
Macs do sleep well, when they manage to sleep. Sometimes macOS takes issue with certain programs, the last stack I used at work had a ~50/50 chance of inhibiting sleep when it was spun up.
All in all, I've given up on sleep entirely and default to suspend/hibernate now.
A buggy program preventing sleep is a bug in that program, not a mark on the overall support and reliability of sleep functionality in macOS.
There are valid reasons why a program might need to block sleep, so it's not like macOS is going to hard-prevent it if a program does this. Most programs should not be doing that though.
Still no big CAD names that I'm aware of (annoyingly), Libre Calc works fine for me as an Excel alternative, I have used Matlab on it but not recently, not sure on the others.
Laptop sleep and suspend can still be finicky unfortunately.
I will say my experience using CAD or other CAE software on windows has gotten progressively worse over the years to the point that FEA is more stable on linux than on windows.
We do really need a Solidworks, Creo or NX on linux though. My hope has been that eventually something like Wine, Proton, or other efforts to bring windows games to linux will result in us getting the ability to run them. They are one of the last things holding me back from fully moving away from windows.
These are all pretty niche products at this point. For the true professionals that need these tools they're stuck but most people can find reasonable alternatives for their hobby or side hustle.
I hear you, and also value Excel and a few other products, but I hit my perosnal limit with Windows enshittificatoion early last year and changed my daily driver at home to Linux.
I added a couple VMs running windows, linux, and whatever else I need in proxmox w/ xrdp/rdp and remina, and it's really the best of both worlds. I travel a good deal and being able to remotely connect and pick up where I left off while also not dealing with windows nagware has been great.
Can I get a laptop to sleep after closing the lid yet?
Not that long ago the answer to these questions was mostly no (or sort of yes... but very painfully)
On Windows all of this just works.