Darktable UI issues Macbook Air M1 & best specs for a Linux laptop

Software darktable
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Hi everyone, I have a m4 macmini > darktable works great!
a m1 Macbook Air > it behaves very weird, I can’t scroll or click anything in the interface when I go in fullscreen, I have to stay in regular mode. ChatGPT says it’s “normal” and will happen with any macbook even the more recent ones… that leaves me a bit puzzled, I’d like to double check here if that’s true?

Then I wanted to use darktable on a Ryzen 7 3xxx MSI prestige laptop, but although there’s 16gb of RAM, darktable uses tiling and is very slow because OpenCL can only access 512m of RAM… I’ve read on the forum that it’s a hard limitation, but it leaves me puzzled as what computer I should be looking for if I move to Linux. The laptop I currently have works perfect for everything BUT darktable, and I’m afraid that if I choose a mac i won’t be able to work fullscreen or a PC i will have inferior performance due to quirks with how OpenCL behaves.

LLMs tell me to just buy expensive laptops with discrete GPUs but I find it kind of crazy and not helpful… and I prefer to buy 2-3 year old laptops, so if someone had some recommendations on what kind of specs in the PC world would work best for a an allrounder laptop to run darktable reasonably smoothly, that would be very precious info for me!

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Does this list help you?

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You need to allocate more memory to the iGPU in the BIOS.

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The bios from msi doesn’t let me unfortunately… there’s no option i could find.

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thanks! it’s valuable to get an idea, but then it looks like mac is very efficient, so i wonder if the quirks I encounter with full screen are only me, or a general issue on mac laptops…

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Fullscreen worked on my macbook m1 air last time I checked. You can try launching dt with your config directory renamed so you have a fresh config. Or maybe there is a command line flag you can use to pass the special name “:memory:” as the library path, but I’m not sure. You want to override the config, but the image database doesn’t matter.

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@Qor @finestructure many thanks for your answers!

  1. I tried on another Macbook Air and things work fine, so it’s definitely my config, will look into it.
  2. I struggled but found that MSI has a “hidden BIOS” mode that you can enter by pressing Right Ctrl+right shift+ left ALT+F2`, and from there I could adjust the VRAM, thus enabling OpenCL and now my darktable is usable.

So many thanks to both for your help!

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