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Comment by psanford | Hacker News Reader

Man I wish System76 or Framework or someone else could make hardware as nice as Apple. I just ordered an M2 Air which I will be primarily running Linux on. I'm replacing my Lenovo T480s (which was a great laptop) because I want _nice_ hardware. There are just so few options that even come close to competing with Apple.

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I have a 2019 Macbook Pro, and the only 'nice' part about the hardware are the speakers. Everything else is either meh or absolutely terrible (okay, the screen is okay too).

Compared to a cheap HP I have, the touchpad is slightly better, but since the touchpad is huge I trigger it more on the Mac, the keyboard is annoying because it has a fn key on the bottom row on the left, rather than ctrl and don't get me started on the touchbar. The fingerprint scanner... mostly works. The SSD is fucking slow, 10k IOPS. The laptop gets unberably hot when connected to an external display, since it cannot use the builtin video card. Fans can be adjusted to be at full speed... until you go into sleep, at which point they reset, so it gets hot again. I'm also not impressed by the battery life, it's probably the same as said 500EUR HP, sometimes even less (yes, fuck zoom, and the 1h battery life it gives me)

Do you know anything about the 2022 HP Elitebooks? The 800 and 1040 series look really good. 16:10 screens.

https://www.hp.com/us-en/laptops/business/elitebooks.html

There's plenty of good competition, just none of those options come with Linux—and as we saw with the Lenovo news yesterday, it's getting less friendly to install a FOSS OS.

Lenovo news was just a click bait which meant nothing. You can install FOSS OS as well as 5 years ago.

Yes and no. A lot of folks would be afraid to fiddle with their BIOS settings. Reading that step could scare some users off from trying—especially the sound of “disable ‘secure boot’”—but it's nothing a future Linux user should be scared of.

If you are afraid to fiddle with your BIOS, should you even be using Linux?

People shouldn't be afraid of technology, but we gotta come from a place of empathy—especially with people that are too old to have never gotten into PCs or now the younger generation who was raised on apps and mobile OS where even the file system is hidden, but really anyone can apply here. Linux, BSDs, et. al. should be for everyone. This includes easy-to-use interface for users with little current technical knowledge but also which means keeping some distros and DEs that don't belittle the experience power user.

Not belittling anybody.

But any grandpa or granny who can use YouTube, can do it simply by following instructions shown there.

People should at least be willing to do that.

I don't believe that there is any comparable hardware to the M* macbooks right now, linux or not.

Does Linux work well on those M chip Apple laptops?

It “works”, but not really well enough for general use. There’s a project called Asahi Linux dedicated to getting it to work, and it does run, but a lot of peripheral hardware (Bluetooth, accelerated graphics) is still not supported.

I’m not aware of any distribution other than Asahi (which is based on Arch) that can boot at all.

https://asahilinux.org/2022/03/asahi-linux-alpha-release/

And ”What works” section.

Based on the progress Asahi Linux has made in the last year, I expect linux to be a reasonable option (for folks who are comfortable with a Linux installer) within the next 12 months.

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