Wouldn’t you just pull the power cord at that point? If the device has become completely unmanageable such that it needs a power reset i’d be surprised if there’s much more harm that way than holding down the power button until it turns off.
I can’t remember where I watched it - but I saw some video a while ago now where (I think) the engineer was explaining that shutdown & power on does less of a cleanout than restart on Windows. Something to do with shutdown going through steps more similar to a sleep/suspend than restart. Made little sense to me but would be interesting to see if post restart or post power-on the computer was “fresher”
I wonder if power buttons are a Windows thing? I recently switched to Linux on my desktop and have a MacBook as well. On the MacBook i’m not sure if i’ve ever used the power button - it just goes to sleep & I wake it up.
And on Linux the suspend is so good I don’t power off at all, but on Windows I always did so needed the power button all the time.
I still have one of these, I bought it & set it up as a server 14 years ago so its been powered on the majority of its life, and still functions ok. I’ve slowly moved most stuff off it and now it kinda just exists as a computer to buy & download albums from iTunes on if I can’t get them on bandcamp etc.
If I didn’t need OSX for the iTunes part i’d have rebuilt it a long time ago with some more lightweight linux distribution but its doing a job and now i’m reminded of how old it is I kinda want to see if I can get it to 20 years.
I used Smultron for yonks as well; very good app.
One thing I like about neovim (and its taking me ages to learn & improve) is being keyboard first and having less time with fingers away on mouse etc, its helped my concentration, as has full screening my terminal session and not having anything pop up in eye lines!
Yeah I don’t think the Air is really the premium Apple laptop by any stretch.
Not to be an evangelist; but on my M1 Air I found VS Code to be a pig (plus I had to run both universal and native M1 versions) so much that it was finally motivation to try neovim like I kept seeing all these people promoting. Wouldn’t say i’ve gotten as used to it as quickly as others, but I can argue that its at least extremely lightweight in comparison, plus i’m not working under the license VSCode has.
It is more than a little silly that I need 16GB of RAM to make my work windows laptop functional in order to administer a bunch of 4GB linux VMs ;)
PCs are moving towards 32GB now.
Windows PCs.
I’m not going to pretend that more RAM isn’t just automagically better, because it is. But 8GB RAM on a 2020 Lenovo Windows build feels and performs much worse than 8GB in a 2020 M1 Macbook Air.
8GB was so unusable in my work* (IT Pro for large corporate) laptop that they eventually agreed that we were “power users” and so could have an upgrade to 16GB RAM. But it still feels a bunch worse than my M1 due to all the additional sludge that gets lumped on top for corp reasons.
*Just to describe what I do, I have browsers open, MS Teams and then spend my day in SSH sessions to linux based servers, so realistically there was nothing “power” user about what I was doing, it was just that our corp Windows build & laptops are that awful. And now we’ve been 11’d, ugh.
i’m becoming a linux nerd and this power button thing would be fine for me bc ive discovered how good suspend is and never power off my desktop anymore anyway, just spend then bump the keyboard when i want it back.