Comment by mnm1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mnm1 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm sorry. I have a late 2013 mbpro too with Linux on it. Frankly, it's terrible. It doesn't sleep. Connecting thunderbolt monitors can only be done before booting. The os has needed to be reinstalled at least once when it ran out of battery. Nowadays, no external monitors work at all, not even display port. Brightness cannot be controlled. Lately redshift has stopped working. It's been a nightmare.

Linux on laptops is like osx on any machine. It only runs on Linux hardware well from what I hear. I'm quite skeptical of that even given my previous experiences running it.

I'm currently considering an xps 15 as I had ordered a Lenovo p1 and after almost two months they still haven't shipped it. Cancelled that garbage. The laptop space in 2020 is frankly shit, way worse than it was in 2014. It's devolved. Microsoft doesn't even make an os anymore, just malware that goes by the name "Windows" so there is literally no alternative for people who refuse to use such malware. Apple, Lenovo, Dell, or some crappy (hw wise) clevo Linux laptop like the system 76s. Maybe it's time to go back to a desktop as technology keeps devolving.

may I ask which distros you have tried? From investigating the arch wiki, there is a bit info on the graphics: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBookPro11,x#Graphics

I have too considered system76 as well as lenovo t480, so far the mac can still do the work I need.

(K)ubuntu, mint, manjaro, and a few others I don't remember. I went through a whole slew of them and didn't find one that was stable, not even mint. One of the issues is that problems are intermittent and start without any obvious cause. One day the external monitor works, the next day it doesn't. Etc. This is a huge issue when the problem hits six months after purchase and the only solution is to reinstall. I do remember kubuntu used to be stable back around 2007 or so but that was a different era. In 2010, it made it to about six months before the x wouldn't boot anymore after I changed the title bar color or something like that. On my current iteration on the mbpro, I've gotten about 4 months of use out of it after it failed within the first week. Often just changing something minor like the display manager's wallpaper will kill the entire desktop environment. In no case was there an actual kernel crash. It's always the gui. And it doesn't seem to matter what desktop environment runs. None that I've tried have been stable.

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