It’s just like cars, there are people who are super comfortable just tinkering around with cars and fixing crap and say “this car is great” and if I tried to drive it it’d break down 5 minutes in and I would consider it a total loss.
Choosing a Microsoft laptop to use Linux is asking for trouble :) I had two of them, and Microsoft had this awful idea of the connected standby, which caused standby/suspend problems (power-hungry standby, which is a very serious problem on a laptop). At least the older machines should now have a good upstream support, in other words, everything working out of the box, with the exception of touch (Linux is just not there).
Regarding other brands, it depends. I remember IBM/Lenovo (Thinkpads) as always just working out of the box. Dell used to be also very compatible, but paradoxically, the Dell XPS developer edition is marketing garbage (it's not very compatible as they claim).
I've installed Linux on a couple of budget computers and they worked fine. I suspect that low-end laptops tend to be much more compatible, since they use more common/cheap components.
Bluetooth has started to be compatible just in the last couple of years - bluez is poor software (and Ubuntu has been sloppy in handling it), but it finally reached a usable level.
I don't remember having to do any tweak on desktop machine, except the time where I had a very modern Ryzen that was supported by very recent kernels only.
Also had to tweak kernel with a recent Ryzen GPU a few years ago on a desktop, but after that it worked. (Now the tweak isn't required anymore.)
I’m looking for an alternative when Apple stops supporting Mac OS on this machine, and I was surprised at how flakey the hardware was in Linux on a 7 year old machine.
What is graphics switching, there is one (integrated) GPU, no?
I have a windows running Lenovo t14 for work, and it’s a decent enough laptop but it’s sort of like the stone ages compared to my personal MacBook. It has a terrible mousepad, it’s bulky, it runs out of battery after a two hours even though its factory new (developer specs in non-tech enterprise), the screen isn’t very nice and it’s actually more expensive.
I ask because I kind of want to get out of the closed ecosystem. Not so much because I dislike Apple but because I figure that with the way things are going for big American tech companies I’ll likely dislike them sooner or later. But I’ve never found a Linux (or windows) laptop that came close to the daily usage of a MacBook Air. Obviously I’m not in need of a powerhouse or a computer, weight, battery life and a good mousepad is my primary requirements, but yeah.
Putting Linux on Windows hardware is a mug's game.
- extremely light (my 14 inch is a little under 1kg), you'll absolutely feel the difference when holding it vs holding a macbook air M1, and it is very significant.
- great screen
- amazing keyboard
- the fan is very quiet, but the laptop can get a bit warm under load
- the touchpad is lacking on windows but is amazing on linux (I mainly use ubuntu / pop os)
- expect 9-10 hours battery life in most use cases, it sometimes goes as high as 14h+ if you're simply surfing the web/reading or as low as 6 hours on heavy use
When installing a linux distro, in some rare cases you might need to tweak a few bios option just to start the installation, but everything after that works out of the box.
But, as great as the screen is, looks like it falls short of the 12" MacBook screen. Same 8GB of RAM in the base model as the M1, but memory bandwidth not the same. And the processor isn't going to keep up.
I mean, it's nice, but I picked the base model M1 Air about a year ago for $750 - still seems like the laptop to beat, if you can live with MacOS.
Having 16GB and up, though, an M1's fantastic. If I had to be resource constrained, though, I think I'd prefer something that handled Linux well.
Consider that even the best Windows laptops are worse than MacBooks (and I would say this was true before the M1 but is inarguable now), despite the billions of dollars of investment from Intel, AMD, Dell, Microsoft, etc. I think the Surface line has historically had the closest experience for Windows, thanks to Microsoft's investments, but battery life and heat have been an issue on all x86 laptops for at least 5-7 years, with very recent improvements only coming from AMD and now on the 12th-Gen Intel processors. But nothing exists that matches the battery life and power/performance of the M-series. You can get a more powerful machine, but not one that will have battery life worth a damn.
And even as trackpads have improved with the Precision Touchpad drivers, Macs are just better here. Period.
If you don’t count Chromebooks (and I really don’t), there is no one investing anything close to what Microsoft and OEMs are in Linux, not just in software, but hardware, so even the best scenarios are going to fall short. It doesn’t help that the latest and greatest hardware takes to hit the kernel (understandable, of course), meaning you’ve got a lagging timeline from when the stuff is new/hot and when it works.
My Framework is quite good and with Linux, but it took a few months for drivers to be included in most distros (Fedora being so bleeding edge made it a real hero), and now 12th-gens are coming out and I don’t know the status of those chipsets (though WiFi 6E and the like are supported), and Framework cares about Linux and that community.
System 76 and Tuxedo basically just buy Chinese or Taiwanese laptops from Clevo or Tongfang and can make some adjustments to the firmware and hardware config, but they don’t control the whole stack. And even Purism, who sells itself as offering an Apple-like experience, falls embarrassingly short (like, their own firmware updates are bricking $2000 laptops running 2019/2020 specs. And the keyboards are terrible and their own Debian spin distro is not great).
So it’s amazing we have what we have. That we can buy pre-configured Linux laptops. But unless you want to do a Chromebook and tweak into run Linux apps, nothing has the experience you have on Windows, let alone Mac.
Someone will try to refute what I’ve said, but unless the hardware is very specific and the distro is very specific, you don’t get anything close. And it absolutely won’t have the power or niceties of a Mac. It just won’t.
Future Apple hardware being usable with Linux is not a bet I would make. I used to run Linux on a PowerPC iBook, and it's been downhill from there.
Hardware designed to run one operating system isn't necessarily going to perform well with a different operating system, and expecting otherwise of every arbitrary machine on store shelves is unrealistic. Prospective buyers need to do research beforehand.
It had all the problems your average Linux install will encounter without the enthusiast-written drivers to work around manufacturers' lack of support.
That said, the Steam Deck seems to be the first non-enthusiast device where the manufacturer actually cares. Even laptops that get sold with Ubuntu preinstalled from the factory don't seem to receive that much support over the years.
My biggest gripe is docking station compatibility with the Dell TB16 which, to be fair, is largely own fault. Suspending the laptop while connected to three ext displays and input devices, then spinning it back up before re-connection produces some gnarly results.
1. sleep draining batteries: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1808957
2. keyboard lights turning on even when disabled: https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/keyboard-light-keeps-turning...
The second is just annoying; the first is serious (for a laptop).
Not true anymore.
> I had two of them, and Microsoft had this awful idea of the connected standby, which caused standby/suspend problems (power-hungry standby, which is a very serious problem on a laptop).
When? Which models?
ACPI S01x when well done works better than ACPI S3, and Linux support for S01x is now getting quite good.
On a X1 nano, I've got less than 0.2%/h of power draw: so 10h of sleep consumes about 2% battery
On the X1 Fold, I was able to reduce that to about 0.5%/h after some workaround for Intel drivers bugs: cf https://csdvrx.github.io/ or just the graph https://csdvrx.github.io/X1_Fold_(20RL_20RK)_Optimization/pa...
It's still a work in progress, but I can't remember ACPI S3 consuming less that 5% overnight and resuming instantly.
> I don't remember having to do any tweak on desktop machine, except the time where I had a very modern Ryzen that was supported by very recent kernels only.
Laptops often need more tweaks than desktops.
Of the 35 students in my class, 25 completed the installation without issue, with all hardware (never asked about fingerprint scanners) running fine. The rest required some help from expert googlers like me and some patience, in most cases related to Nvidia drivers. We got all but two to work fine or well enough in the end.
Having 5 to 10 consecutive bad experiences sounds like a fluke to me, given the 70% instant success rate I've seen.
Can’t they use a normal cloud instance or a VM?
A few students (those whose laptops we could not convince to run Linux) work within a VM, but that experience is comparatively miserable.
On one hand that’s kind of the whole point of open-source. Because it can be extended to support almost anything it usually is extended over time by someone else that has already had the same problems you do getting a thing to work. That’s not the same as just assuming everything already works without checking though.
There are some very suitable laptops that would have had support out of the box.
But I bought the (perhaps unspoken?) promise that it would be an easy test drive to find a crappy old laptop and throw Ubuntu on it… and those test drives ended up with me not wanting to switch to Linux.
It's not my experience at all. When I buy a computer to run Linux I normally get one with Linux preinstalled (normally the latest LTS Ubuntu). Then if I ever need to upgrade to a more recent version of Ubuntu it generally goes smoothly.
Desktops are somewhat more hit-and-miss, as are discrete GPUs (I hear the newer AMD GPU drivers are much improved, but have no personal experience with them).