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Comment by devwastaken | Hacker News Reader

Free work for the richest company in the world so that their overpriced locked in unrepairable computers can run an open source OS and divert revenue from competitors that natively support linux.

I don't believe I've seen work that advocates against itself harder than this. Competitors that actually care about linux support should be the ones worked towards, and the ones that should receive your money.

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That kinda was how GNU got started in the first place, though - bringing an open user-land to propiatary platforms?

If nothing else, the ability to run Linux on an m1 makes me feel more confident that the hw won't stop being useful when Apple ceases support, and moves on to m2 or whatever.

>If nothing else, the ability to run Linux on an m1 makes me feel more confident that the hw won't stop being useful when Apple ceases support, and moves on to m2 or whatever.

That's the problem, that diverts the market. M1 will never officially support linux, and it will never have drivers equivalent to OSX. Apple products are wasteful by design. That should dispel confidence, not increase it.

I tend to agree with you, but I also think it's important to remember that people are doing this free work entirely on their own. They want to do it for free. As much as I'd like to see the effort go toward a hardware OEM that deserves it, the labor/work doesn't exist and merely needs allocation. It exists specifically because people want to do it for Apple's hardware. The choice is likely between nothing or Apple, not between <OEM> or Apple. From a purely Linux perspective, this work helps make Linux even more of a force, so there's definitely reason to appreciate it :-)

Which one of those has the best hardware?

The Dell hardware has gotten amazing and for most users Linux will run great on it. Look for models that ship OEM with Ubuntu.

Lenovo ThinkPads are also fantastic, and very repairable. They're certainly not eye candy but Linux is a first class citizen.

I'm stoked about the frame.work laptop also. Haven't gotten one yet, but I will.

The reality is that the M1 beats pretty much all Intel-based laptops when it comes to getting the sweet spot on performance, battery life and silent operation.

Yes it's costly, restrictive, the hardware still has some flaws and you can't replace parts but most Apple users, myself included, are happily paying the price.

I have an M1 Macbook Pro for a few months now and it's blazingly fast, the battery lasts for 15-20 hours and I've only heard the fan for a few minutes so far while stressing it with heavy compilation. Under normal circumstances it's entirely silent. I wouldn't trade it for anything else at this point.

You're not "happily paying the price". That assumes you've had to go through the genious bar destroying your monitor, or losing all your data, or having to buy a whole new macbook because a $1 component died and Apple prevents it from being replaced.

Again, it's just advocating against yourself. Nobody cares until it happens to them, and then they wonder how things have gotten this bad.

It's unfortunate Dell laptops are limited by Software. Their hardware is pretty good otherwise. And linux runs flawlessly for the most part.

You must be fun at parties

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