If it gets full Linux support, i.e. I can blow away Windows and use Ubuntu, then I'm in. This'll be my last macbook ..
The ThinkPad X250 I'm using right now with Linux would disagree. The Sony Vaio I had in 2010 and put Linux on would disagree. The Dell Inspiron I had last year would fit the description of "broken" but not "badly broken".
Are there poor pairings of hardware and software outside the Apple garden? Sure. Does that mean everything outside Apple's garden is poor?
For my part, I've had perfect, smoothly-running Linux workstations for decades now, and for me its a no-brainer to select hardware for the purpose of running Linux. Like I said, if this has decent Linux support, I'll switch from Apple in a moments' notice. Linux can do just as well, if not better, than OSX for many, many things ..
They should have dropped the Nvidia chip all the way, it is a shitty compromise. Nobody is going to play games on this machine and the Intel IGP handles all other workloads just fine. Also, the 12.5 version coming with 4GB is a bit disappointing.
I ran linux as my primary os for 10 years. This was never true for me. Something was always broken, or wonky. 10 years of platitudes about how "it will get better", but it didn't. There is always new hardware to support to various degrees.
I got a mac, because I wanted to be able to listen to music and print at the same time. Also, I was tired of all my photos coming out pink.
The printer is a classic linux desktop experience. CUPS wouldn't recognize the printer, not even as generic postscript or something, or maybe it did, but wouldn't take advantage of its high resolution because binary blobs being evil or some other high horse. Either way, binary blobs figure into this. So I had to actually buy a driver and color profiles from some company in Germany that had paid a license to make a closed source driver. While I could now print at high resolution, all the photos had a pink cast, that no amount of correction could take away. Boot into Windows, thing prints fine. Ironically, the company touted its color profiles as being better Windows.
In 10 years, I never had a machine that had all of it's hardware working correctly. But hey, maybe 2016 is finally the Year of Linux Desktop!
Sysdamining is not my favorite thing.
It’s gaining polish with every point release. Desktop search is finally quick. The UI stack (QML) is nimble and powerful. Breeze is the best looking flat design, both beautiful and clean. Even the default desktop wallpapers are gorgeous.
The only thing remaining is the Akonadi legacy, which is being replaced. The rest is details. KDE is the best desktop Linux has to offer now, and it’s the best platform to build upon in the future.
I tried to like KDE, but every time I tried it, one of the first apps I tried would immediately crash. Plus it's default looked like a bad copy of Windows XP, which was a bad copy of the Mac, so it looked really bad. (That was a long time ago.) Unfortunately, GNOME looked nice, but had no features, so I just gave up and went to a bare window manager and realized I have no need for anything a DE offers. Then the problem became that sawfish became unsupported, and nothing else had the same customizability.
I’m not going to claim KDE didn’t deserve that reputation in the past. The architectural changes are to blame, but they weren’t frivolous. You can’t build on shaky foundation.
I also think it’s not fair to criticize it based on some snapshot from the past. You’ve seen the beta. It’s really good now!
I've used Linux for over ten years, on dozens of machines. I'm not a newbie. And yes, it's horribly difficult and broken compared to OS X, unless you get lucky.