Not that I have anything against MacBooks, but was installing some Linux distro (or a BSD) not an option?
If I had a Linux laptop, an extraordinary amount of my time would be spent trying to make it work. Wireless breaks, sound breaks, upgrades break everything. I would have to spend a serious amount of time and research finding a laptop that had good Linux support... regardless I would still probably have to spend hours trying to get the sound or the wireless or sleep or some feature or another to work properly.
OS X just gets out of the way. I have never had to put any work into making the graphics card work or making sound work or making the network work or fixing boot... you get the picture.
If I'm using Linux on a laptop to do any sort of work, a sizable portion of the work becomes keeping Linux working on the laptop and I don't want that.
Linux on unsupported laptops (which is most of them) sucks big time, but not linux desktop itself. It works great on standard desktop computers (towers)
you should make that distinction, because otherwise you'll just start a flame war.
One thing I've learned is distrohopping is a must if your hardware is an edge case... that said, since moving to Manjaro, I haven't had to use anything else.
The Linux desktop has come a long way, even in just the last year or two. I know everyone always says that, so take it with a grain of salt, but I have never been happier with the state of the Linux desktop.
Might it be that we tend to like what we're used to? When I jumped from WinXP to a Gnome2-desktop, I tried to make it a bit more like WinXP, even though these days I would probably want nothing of how WinXP desktop is laid about.
But yeah, if you buy anything that's not part of the "top of the line developer notebook" category, specifically the Intel not AMD ones, then almost nothing will work out of the box :)
Sure, not the very newest hardware, but it's not like laptops have gotten significantly more powerful for anything that actually matters, for the last couple of years.
The biggie is the GPU. T420 has no oomph to run an external 4K display (at more than 24 Hz, i.e. in usable mode). Broadwell and newer do have the capability to run 2 of them.
The CPUs got less power-hungry. You can do the same work with less juice, so your battery lasts longer.
The SSDs with the new interfaces got much faster. There is simply no comparison between M.2 nvme drive and SATA3 SSD.
Sadly, wifi took a step back, with almost universal unavailability of anything better than 2x2 MIMO 802.11ac. In the past, MIMO 3x3 used to be available (Broadcom, but the option was there).
So yes, modern laptop is significantly different experience than few years old one, despite the CPU having the same GHz.
My point is that they're not noticeably faster for the things most people use their computers for. They still run browsers, Spotify, email, word processors and all of that just fine and last "long enough" on a charge.
The improvements have been incredibly marginal for most people.
Also, they do not have a problem with Electron apps. for most people, they are just apps like anythig else, and do not perceive any performance problems with them.
And where did Electron apps come into the discussion?
Even the Apple 2015 M.2 drives, which are "only" AHCI, but with much deeper queue (i.e. nonstandard), can do 1.something GBps and the difference compared to standard SATA SSD is noticable by normal users.
Electron apps are something normal people use and some of them compain about the speed/lag/memory usage. Usually those with older computers, who think nothing changed in the last years ;).
If you do the first, you will do also the second. It makes a difference even when launching Excel or Firefox.
Between SATA SSD and PCIe? Sure, for extremely IO-heavy tasks there's a difference to be felt, but not really in everyday use.
Also, I run an Intel Nuc (laptop hardware, essentially) with Ubuntu as a main development machine. 0 problems. 0% in the way.
OSX is great, don't get me wrong. But, it's been years since I've ran into driver problems with desktop Linux.
In years past you may have spent hours getting wireless or sound working. These days, if you buy decent, mainstream hardware it just works. Ubuntu does a great job of getting out of the way.
I'm a Fedora guy, myself, but find myself recommending Xubuntu to more and more people for casual computing because 1) it really does just work, and 2) Xfce is lightweight and lets you use your CPU for doing real work vs. holding up a bloated windows manager.
At our office, the macOS laptops tend to have the most problems with sound & graphics; the Linux desktops, OTOH, Just Work™. I find that pretty funny, actually, because I would have expected it to be the other way around.
I've never had anything similar happen with a PC (we use Thinkpads), whether running Linux or Windows.
My Mac problem was solved using ethernet adapter.
I hear that argument frequently. On macOS (or even Windows) things just work(tm), while on Linux (or some BSD), there is always something that does not work correctly.
I guess I must be quite lucky. A long time ago, I positively enjoyed spending an entire weekend getting a sound card to work or something. To be honest, these days I consider myself too old for that stuff. I, too, like it when things just work. But really, Linux as a desktop system has come a long way, and for the past couple of years, things have pretty much just worked(tm) for me.
Picking hardware that is supported by Linux takes a little care, so does picking a distro[1], especially with laptops. But I prefer to do a little research before buying a laptop anyway, because I am usually on a budget.
[1] In my experience, the more recent the hardware, the more unlikely Debian is to work. OpenSuse has worked well for me, though.
Macs historically have always been a decent compromise for having decent GUI/Linux-like terminal/nice hardware.
It's kind of a different environment now, with PC manufacturers coming up with well designed laptops and Windows offering more Linux integration.
Linux could be the new Mac os X if all the Linux distributions chose to focus on one platform and way to do things, but nobody in the Linux world is going to do this.
Also, Mac has unified hardware, so they pretty much can optimize so that stuff Just Works.
The Dell XPS 13 is a good choice if you want something from a major manufacturer, but there are loads of smaller companies, too.
Of course there are things that are not working so nicely, and are not meant to. For instance, running RHEL (which is a server OS) on a laptop (which typically has new optimized hardware which is not meant to be server) and then expecting graphics and WiFi work on a kernel that is much older than your hardware and thus has no drivers.
Perhaps you might expect some trouble also when running Windows Server 2012 on a new laptop? I don't know, I haven't tried, but wouldn't be surprised.
And so therefore, no one else has either!
One of the big reasons Linux Desktop still sucks is the outright refusal of the community to acknowledge any of its problems.
How do you define "mainstream laptop"? Or is it a laptop that can run desktop Linux without problems?
There’s a lot of things I like about macOS [eg: better power management], but the main reason I switched was because it was a Unix I could put Photoshop and InDesign onto.
That argument trumps pretty much everything else. If my boss came into my office today and told me to switch all of our desktop computers to Linux, as much as I would enjoy that, I would have to tell him that it cannot be done, because we use a lot of software that just is not available for Linux. (And a fair amount of it is not even available for macOS.)
I don't know what examples you had in mind when you mentioned applications having incompatible keyboards. The only one I know that does that is Vim (which by default uses the internal clipboard when you use its cut, copy and paste commands) but Vim is definitely not your average Linux application...