Tell HN: The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is an excellent MacBook replacement | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is an excellent MacBook replacement

135 pointshunterloftis210 comments

If you would like to develop outside of the Apple ecosystem, find Windows clunky, and dislike fiddling with Linux to get it to work on arbitrary hardware, consider the X1 with Fedora. I bought one at the recent Black Friday sale: $1,700 for a 12 Gen i7-1280P, 32GB, 512GB SSD. I love this machine.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/thinkpad-x1-carbon-gen-10-(14-inch-intel)/21cbcto1wwus2

Physically, it's fantastic. Hats off to the engineers and designers for investing in the tactile experience. They made it lightweight but simultaneously substantial-feeling via rigidity and weight distribution. I now understand why Thinkpad keyboards are so well-regarded. Its trackpad matches Apple's, which is the highest praise I can give. The brilliant screen has an aspect ratio that's as good for building things as for consuming content. And battery life supports hours of binging netflix after compiling a bunch of code.

I've been even more pleasantly surprised by the software experience. This is a Linux workstation that "just works." Close the lid, it goes on standby - open, and it resumes instantly. Plug it into a 100Mhz ultrawide monitor via a lightning cable, and not only does it seamlessly extend the desktop at native refresh rates, but it also mounts all the devices that are connected via the monitor's integrated USB hub. I'm able to log in via my bluetooth kinesis keyboard consistently, without hassle. Updates are fast, easy, and tested on the exact hardware I'm using. I've been using it as my daily driver for a week and I've yet to dive down a rabbit-hole of outdated forum advice to get something basic to work.

Finally, and more subjectively, Fedora's out-of-the-box experience handily outshines both OSX and Windows. Window-snapping, global search, software installation via a package manager, resource efficiency, containerization support, configuration, etc.

I wanted to share here for any others who have tried, and failed, to find a legitimately better-than-Macbook development machine for the past few years.

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There is no such thing as a macbook replacement at the moment IMHO. There is literally nothing with the same quality, battery life, thermals, audio, display, keyboard and reliability on the market. Not even the most expensive machines can get anywhere near even an M1 MacBook Air on this front. The M1 MBP destroys everything else.

I develop software on it no problems at all. We are way past targeting one platform. Linux can be the destination for sure but like hell I'm going to do the dev work on it. Years of attempting to run Linux on a laptop or desktop have left a very unpleasant flavour in my mouth. It might work today but it probably won't tomorrow and I'm getting too old to waste my time futzing. It has to work right now, properly, today with no risks.

Note: I have a mandated Dell Precision 7670 for some work, one of the most ridiculously stupid computers ever made and far more expensive in this config than a high end MBP M1 Max and it's absolutely a pile of shit from a hardware and software perspective. If you ran Linux on it, it'd be worse than if it ran windows on it, which is already terrible.

You say, talking about Linux: "It might work today but it probably won't tomorrow". Can you elaborate?

I've had 20 years of anxiety about closing the lid, hibernating, sleeping. Numerous working configurations became non working configurations after kernel updates and distribution upgrades.

And that doesn't include some of the problems with the desktop software I've had.

On the server, zero hassle.

Came here to echo this sentiment. I even bought from a specialized Linux laptop retailer hoping that the hardware would have been selected because of its Linux compatibility; either an upgrade from Ubuntu 20 to 22 or a kernel upgrade or an nvidia update broke my ability to close the lid and trigger suspend.

I tried everything, dove semi-deep into systemd settings, spent hours online and pouring through logs and journald and forums and bug reports. Tried rolling back versions of damn near everything only to then break things I had installed after other upgrades. I tried doing some half-assed custom shell scripts that felt janky.

After several nights of losing all my free time after work only to wake up the next morning to a dead laptop battery, I treated myself to an m2 13” mbp.

No ragrets.

Suspend is an industry-wide new problem affecting almost all new hardware since Windows convinced hardware makers to make S0 the default, and some don't even support S3 in their bios any more.

Google about "modern standby".

It's driven by a software change in Windows, but it affects Linux too because all mamufacturers made bios changes to support the Windows change.

The point I'm making is, Windows machines have the same problem for the last 2 or 3 years. Even macs have an essentially the same problem, just that on mac it's easy to change a setting to fix it.

It's not a Linux problem, and by that I do not just mean the usual that it's not Linux's fault that hardware manufacturers cater to Windows. I mean everything has the same problem right now, and the fix is to A: hope both your hardware has a bios that still provides support for S3 standby, B: use it.

Seperately, I personally have just never used standby or hibernate. It's true that aside from the current industry-wide issue caused by "modern standby", it's always been a bit of a problem on linux. Especially since I dual boot and also just never know how long the machine will be turned off or how much charge it will have when I close the lid, or rather I don't want to have to worry about it. So I just decided decades ago that the entire suspend and hibernate concept was a bad idea and I don't use them, on any platform. My machines shut down and boot up every time on battery. Plugged in they merely go idle and turn the monitors off. No swap or hiberfile even cpnfigured on linux or windows. Ever since ssd's booting from scratch has been fast enough. Standby and hibernate are just fundamentally not good ideas IMO. I don't care how popular and how they work 99% of the time. I opt out of that whole idea, on any platform.

And everything else works great. My daily life on linux is all in all, less grief than Windows.

> After several nights of losing all my free time after work only to wake up the next morning to a dead laptop battery, I treated myself to an m2 13” mbp.

LTT just did a video on something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHKKcd3sx2c

tl;dw: It may not be a OS problem, but rather a problem of which sleep states are supported by your firmware, which would explain why nothing you did helped. Possibly suspend never really worked and Ubuntu just got meaner on the battery. Getting a MBP is valid fix if you disable "Wake for network access" on it.

I've been using Linux for ~18 years, exclusively for ~12, and I haven't really had notable hardware issues in ~7-8. I definitely haven't had much frustration with working hardware breaking (and pretty close to none since I switched to NixOS).

I do feel your pain, though. I remember things being brittle and finicky for a long time back in the aughts. But these days, almost all of that disappears if you give Linux the same kind of hardware commitment you'd give macOS, and just buy hardware that is made or sold with it in mind. You do still have to pretty much stay entirely away from NVIDIA, though. Unfortunately Linux vendors still sell hardware with NVIDIA's shoddy components and drivers because CUDA dominates GPGPU applications.

> if you give Linux the same kind of hardware commitment you'd give macOS, and just buy hardware that is made or sold with it in mind

This is true and good advice for those of us who are primarily committed to using Linux. It is however a significant disadvantage compared to Windows. It is quite a joy just not to have to think about precise hardware specs (& not to have to continually read up on their changes). Buy just about anything, from a top end laptop to some weird gadget from Alibaba, to vast scads of second hand machines and parts from ebay, and you can be near certain it will work with Windows. There's no point pretending that's not terrific.

It's also a real but lesser disadvantage against MacOS, because Apple do the hardware curation for you (part of what you're overpaying for of course).

On balance I still find Linux the best choice for my purposes.

Totally agreed. It's a point that I think people (like and including myself) who are passionate about Linux tend to be fussy about the framing of. It's ‘not Linux's fault’, and it can be painful to hear people talk about shitty desktop Linux experiences when you know the incompatibilities would have simply been avoided. It often feels like an unfair ‘apples to oranges’ comparison to compare OEM hardware on an OS it ships with to attempting to retrofit a Linux desktop onto random hardware whose supplier never even gave a thought to Linux compatibility.

There are some vendors where (for a premium) you can defer hardware curation to them, but too few of them provide laptops comparable in quality to a MacBook Pro or an X1 Carbon. System76 has some really top-notch desktops of various form-factors, and their firmware work on their laptops is awesome, but the chassis and design aren't on par with those top brands imo. Maybe the HP Dev One is on a par with an X1 Carbon?

> On balance I still find Linux the best choice for my purposes.

It's the same for me. The freedom, flexibility, control, and predictability I get out of running a Linux system make using a computer feel really good to me. Using Windows or macOS feels chaotic, confining, unreliable, intrusive, and alienating to me. Consequently I find that overall, choosing Linux gives me the smoothest, highest quality experience.

There are plenty of online accounts of "new Linux kernel versions" affecting working software. The last one I remember seeing is Linux in a MacBookPro hardware (I think MBP 2011) that started waking up immediately after sleeping due to some USB issues. Apparently the only known way to fix that was to "downgrade the Kernel" to some other version.

I am actually using Linux (Mint flavor) and use it for development. My main reason is that I hate Docker in Mac: The emulation layer uses a lot of RAM and high CPU, by necessity. While having Docker in Linux is transparent and requires pretty low resources.

I like Linux in general, but yeah, it still has A LOT of rough edges. The one that just bit me is the lack of Hibernate out of the box (it's 2022 ... come on!). And the process to enable hibernate is so fucking long: * create large swap, * edit some random files, * restart some random service. are they kidding me?

> The last one I remember seeing is Linux in a MacBookPro hardware (I think MBP 2011) that started waking up immediately after sleeping due to some USB issues. Apparently the only known way to fix that was to "downgrade the Kernel" to some other version.

Macs have hugely nonstandard firmware implementations, from EFI to SPI to Thunderbolt. You should always treat running Linux on Apple hardware like building a Hackintosh. It's not remotely in the same category as support for normal PC hardware.

I'll note my current up to date 2019 Mac running OS X currently wakes up immediately after putting it to sleep, so it's not like OS X or windows are immune from this kind of thing.

Not OP, but I found there's a sort of bell curve with Linux support on laptops.

Initially your hardware is likely very new, so some things won't quite work out of the box.

Then, assuming you bought a popular piece of hardware, things get progressively better for you: improved driver support land in the kernel, distros get better at auto-configuring for your hardware, etc.

Finally, 3 years out, upstream development has moved on, your specific hardware configuration is no longer actively tested, and things start to break left and right.

All in all, you have a small window of optimal Linux support for your hardware.

There are still components that you need to watch out for when buying a used laptop if one intends to run Linux. Broadcom WiFi is notoriously painful for example (have seen routine updates break those drivers several times over the years), and even though Nvidia provides official Linux drivers those can complicate things too.

The most painless Linux laptops are those that use integrated graphics only and for the best experience, use Intel networking instead of Realtek (Realtek often works, but it working well is highly dependent on the specific chipset).

FWIW, my Lenovo x1 from 2012 hasn't had an issue with fedora ever. Can't speak to other distros, reliability is key for me.

Macbook hardware is great, but you could not pay me any amount to daily-drive a recent version of MacOS. Big Sur was like the Windows 8 moment for MacOS, and it just compounded on the limitations that Apple had been building up to. Even if I couldn't have my "nice things" in Linux like KDE and VS Code, I'd still be using it simply on the basis that it behaves how I expect.

Apple has burned me too many times for me to feel comfortable paying them again. I much prefer choosing my hardware and software as opposed to suffering through whatever Apple says is right for me. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.

What particularly did you get screwed by with Big Sur?

The only problem I had was with a Qt app that would not run on it and that turned out to be a problem with Qt rather than macOS.

Coming from Mojave, I was really disappointed by the Playmobil design philosophy and limitations on executable linking. Also something must have changed internally, because post-Big-Sur Nix installers have the most ass-backwards way of working around APFS. Making a comfortable dev environment on MacOS leaves my machine feeling like it's bursting at the seams...

I'm sure it's a great tool for creatives who want to loathe Windows with the rest of us, but for development MacOS has become more of a hindrance than a help. Even WSL2 feels nicer to use than baremetal Darwin deployment.

What limitations with executable linking have you found? I couldn’t find anything specific and didn’t run into any issues myself.

All my 32-bit plugins broke in Ableton Live, and Proton stopped working when I tried Catalina. Without my music toolkit, games or preferred programming environment, MacOS doesn't really have much left for me these days.

That’s not really an executable linking issue. That’s the OS dropping support for 32-bit code in general from Catalina onwards.

And it was no doubt done to ease the transition to ARM… it means no need to implement 32-bit support in Rosetta.

Rosetta does support executing 32-but code in alternate code segments created in a 64-bit process, used by CodeWeavers’ Crossover: https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/jwhite/2020/11/18/okay-im-o...

This post here has a section on the reasons to drop 32-bit

https://pilky.me/apples-technology-transitions/

But essentially storage and memory savings, maintainability savings and some issues with the ObjC runtime.

I assume part of the issue too is being able to enable pointer authentication, which afaik uses the higher end bits to store data, and being able to do that allows them to secure the OS better. So 32-bit support likely was a security risk factor as a result too.

Same for me, I can't imagine myself doing any meaningful work on MacOS. It gets too much in the way and the user interface is distracting and slow.

> Macbook hardware is great

Then install Linux on the Macbook? Two setups ago I was running this config and it was pretty great.

I completely agree. There is literally no comparison, I cannot ever imagine going back to a windows.

Linux laptops for development work are pretty fantastic, imho.

> reliability

It was released 2 years ago.

> It has to work right now, properly, today with no risks.

There's still lots of desktop software that doesn't support AArch64, optimising for "just works" it seems a strange choice. Perhaps "just works (with a limited subset of programs)" seems more apt?

https://isapplesiliconready.com/for/unsupported

Weird that Wine is listed since I've got Wine on my M1 and it works fine running, e.g., Mineways. Maybe it's just some specific Code Weavers version? But Wine itself works fine on Apple Silicon.

So you ignored everything the post had to say and instead rehashed your own bitter experiences.

I have both a gaming laptop running Linux and a 2021 M1 MBP.

I prefer developing on the Linux gaming laptop, but anything outside of web browsing and raw development (listening to music, Bluetooth, share audio on video conference, gaming, accounting / office work, etc.) is horrible compared to MBP.

The gaming laptop has an RTX 2080, but I play games on the MBP, because Steam works better. I enjoy Steam better on Linux than on Windows, but not enough to waste hours just to relax.

Have you tried a System 76 linux laptop like the lemur pro? Pretty fancy. I've had one since 2020 and love it.

https://system76.com/laptops/lemur

No they don’t exist my side of the pond.

This could have been my reply. I even have the same stupid PC

I have had similar experiences to you in the past, which is why I posted about the different experience I had with the latest Thinkpad X1 Carbon that comes with Fedora Linux out of the box.

Can you provide more details about these three things?

- trackpad - your two sentences are very vague. Can you navigate with two fingers in a web browser? How is text selection? Or selecting a sentence out of a long paragraph, etc? In my experience nothing matches Apple in terms of precision and accuracy, but maybe Lenovo finally caught up recently.

- screen: I use the built in display quite a lot. The color on a MacBook Pro is really nice. How does the Lenovo compare?

- battery life: how many hours do you actually get? Your description is vauge and can be anything from 3 hours to 40 hours.

> - trackpad - your two sentences are very vague. Can you navigate with two fingers in a web browser? How is text selection? Or selecting a sentence out of a long paragraph, etc? In my experience nothing matches Apple in terms of precision and accuracy, but maybe Lenovo finally caught up recently.

I use the LG Gram 2022. The trackpad is nothing short of Amazing on Linux -- everything you expect works 2/3/4 finger gestures, panning; the scrolling however can use some tuning on Gnome.

I'm using the X1 Carbon Gen 9 with openSUSE Tumbleweed (Plasma)

> Can you navigate with two fingers in a web browser?

On Firefox, two fingers to the left does previous, two fingers to the right does next (if you are not in a horizontally scrollable area, in which case it scrolls). Two fingers to the top or the bottom scrolls (pixel perfect). Kinetic scroll works. Pinch to zoom works (at long last!! I think it started working a year ago or something).

> How is text selection? Or selecting a sentence out of a long paragraph, etc?

I select whatever I want to select with ease. I go to the first word I want to select, double-tap, move to the last word. The text autoscrolls if I go to an edge if it's a long chunk of text. Triple tap to select entire paragraphs. D&D works quite well too.

I'm very happy with the precision with both my HP Elitebook 840 G6 and My Carbon X1. They both have a huge, reliable touchpad. I've never tried a Mac seriously though.

> how many hours do you actually get?

10-11h if I pay attention. 6-7h easily. (i7 and 32G of RAM). I hope it will improve.

The touchscreen on both machines is surprisingly usable and useful. Both machine are quiet, and they are totally silent if I'm just typing or browsing the web. The fans can spin up during a video call or compile something for a long time, but that can be prevented if needed by forcing the powersave mode using KDE's UI for this.

+1 to all of this, and adding in that I use the Gen 10 on Pop OS and it works just as well.

The default trackpoint accel is a bit much for me, so I just have this set to run on login:

> xinput set-prop 'TPPS/2 Elan TrackPoint' 'libinput Accel Speed' -0.55

Apple has really set the standard on battery life - 10-11 hours would be considered on the short end for any modem Mac laptop. My air performs on par with some high end ultrabooks, yet easily does 12+ hours on a single charge. I usually have the brightness turned up quite a bit as well.

It’s stunning how far apple is ahead of the pack right now, I really hope the others catch up

AMD's 5000 and 6000 series CPUs are much more power efficient (6000 series being near m1 levels of efficiency) than Intel's current offerings.

Linux also tends to be quite a bit worse for battery life than Windows.

> Linux also tends to be quite a bit worse for battery life than Windows.

With a manual stock distro installation maybe, as the defaults are very conservative. But just install the "tlp" package (the laptop project) and the situation flips. At least that's my experience at work based on Dell Latitude laptops and Thinkpads T before. My battery life is way above my Windows using colleagues, and my fans are mostly off (unless big compilation or test runs) instead of mostly on. Of course it's very likely due to the anti-virus, but that's part of the corporate Windows experience nowadays.

Currently f/t linux user, been using it on and off on multiple laptops for 2 decades. Not once, regardless of tlp and other tweaks and many hours of twiddling and forum-reading and keeping stats for weeks on end, has Linux ever approached Windows' battery life on the same machine. I don't know how to relate that to your experience, other than to say that (1) I'm closer to comparing like with like (same user, same machine) and (2) every other linux user I've personally known has found the same as me.

Given the appalling and deteriorating state of desktop OS's, it seems unlikely I'll ever use anything other than Linux again. But I don't believe it will ever catch up with either Windows or MacOS on battery life. I just accept that as something I"ll have to live with.

I concur. On my Thinkpad T14 gen2, I have accepted I maybe get 3h of battery on a good day.

The battery is half the size of the lastest MacBook sure. But much less than half the battery life.

I don't have suspend issues. I am probably lucky.

I wouldn't code on anything else than Linux. But I got myself to enjoy CAD work on my gaming computer running windows. Not that windows is great. It's horrible. But because on windows the GPU and mouse acceleration works flawlessly and feels like an extension of my mind. On Linux somehow it is not as smooth. Mac feels sluggish too. As if there is some lag? But moving the mouse on windows feels just right (and yes I tried same hardware on windows / Linux).

I hate macos. It's buggy and slow. The touchpad is stupidly big. But precision is fantastic. It's an insult to everybody else really. Thinkpad touchpad is an insult of insult. People designing that crap should go to jail for the amount of time they waste on humanity.

Quite. Much does come down to your patterns of use. I'm plugged in about 80% of the time, so while I'd love more battery time it's not a primary concern. I barely use the trackpad. I don't game. Linux is still top notch for software development. But I don't think an ideological insistence that it's better on every dimension than every other OS is either convincing or helpful.

Apple outdid themselves. My 2018 Macbook Pro got only 6 hours away from the wall, and my friends tell me the 16" experience from that era was even worse. Imagining the battery life of those ill-conceived i9 models... just thinking about their idle TDP makes me shudder.

> I really hope the others catch up

When was the last time you tried a Ryzen laptop? Any AMD APU made in the past 5 years should perform pretty admirably relative to the M1.

I had a Lenovo laptop with an AMD APU last years (T14 AMD). It couldn't keep up with a passively cooled M1 performance-wise, the fan would start make noise with a minimal amount of work, and in Windows I'd get 6-7 hours of battery life, in Linux maybe 4 or 5?

I bought the hype and it was miserable. (Not to speak of S3 suspend-resume not bringing back the trackpad half of the time and S3 suspend draining the battery overnight.)

No one will catch up as Apple owns their entire design.

MS has to work with Intel, Nvidia, AMD, etc. Dell the same.

With Apple owning the entire design their results should make it clear communication overhead is what creates the market fragmentation. In order for all the bean counter fiefdoms to be appeased a laptop gets released that is great BUT 9 hour battery life (out of the box, 6 in 12 months), or 1080p screen, or bad thermal design, or nose camera…

It’s hard enough to align goals in one behemoth let alone half a dozen.

A whole lot of tech products then are designed as Beanie Babies looking to capture attention in the short term, boost quarterly sales, earn bumps for a VP.

Apple is the only consumer gadget company taking the approach of linearly designing the entire stack over time. Everyone else is just looking to get through the holidays right now, respond to the metrics in 2023.

I must be holding it wrong then, my work issued M1 MacBook Pro holds for around 6-7 hours of regular (for me) usage, but can barely do 4 hours in a Teams call (without the webcam!).

My work issue 13" M1 MBP 16G/1TB regularly does 10-12hrs, including 3+ hours of zoom with video.

The only time I have battery issues is if I am working in a tree and a linter gets over aggressive or something like that where the constant load makes the CPU fan spin.

Normally I go an entire day on battery and just don't think about it. Fairly bright screen, Amphetamine running to prevent sleep and display from turning off.

With more than a handful of instances, Chrome and Chrome-based apps (Electron/CEF) will eat into battery life to a degree I've not seen of too many other things. I can spend all day working in heavy IDEs like Android Studio and Xcode, doing frequent incremental compiles and still get better battery life than I would with a heavy Chromium tab/app load.

Teams specifically is horrendously badly engineered on top of being an Electron app. Technically speaking it's like the polar opposite of VS Code despite being made by the same company.

Teams is a shitshow, that we can all agree on. It doesn't work properly on any platform.

However, Chrome is the most popular browser by far. Does that mean that all the people bragging about their MBP's 10+ hour battery lifes aren't doing what probably the majority of users are (browse the web in a Chromium-based browser), and thus their anecdata isn't a representative sample?

It has more to do with the quantity of Chrome instances (tabs or electron apps) than it does with them running Chrome at all. A small number of tabs or 1-2 well behaved Electron apps will still have a sizable negative impact but it won’t chew through battery life like a heavy tab load or stacks of Electron apps will. The type of sites loaded in the tabs make a difference too; tabs with static documentation aren’t going to make the kind of impact a tabs with heavy web apps. Lots of variables.

That said, it’s not that uncommon for Mac users conscious about battery life to be using Safari where they can instead of Chrome, keeping Chrome instances down to a minimum. From what I’ve seen in discussions across the web, battery friendliness is one of the most cited if not the most cited reason why people use Safari.

I wish Google would pause feature development for a while and focus on efficiency, because that’s easily where Chrome is weakest, but that’s never going to happen so long as it’s the dominant browser. It makes Google more money to instead develop whatever they think will push more people towards Google services.

I get 7 hours on my dell laptop without teams running and 2.5 hours with. I guess you can see where the problem is.

Does it actually last 12+ hours? I can't tell, because Apple nerfed the battery life indicator to just give a percentage number. Does my laptop being at 2% mean 2 minutes or 20 minutes? MacOS refuses to tell me.

Load is unpredictable, so it sounds like they stopped showing a number that was always imaginary and now show the only actual data that exists. Sounds like an improvement.

What's the battery capacity and what does powertop report as a discharge rate for casual normal web browsing and hd video playback in a separate tab? (mine is 9 - 14 W)

I've never used a laptop with Linux that could stay unplugged for more than 3 hours, using a tlp configuration as well. (ignoring any laptop that can have an XXL battery which sticks out of it's standard frame).

Does it heat up while sleeping? (I may be in the market for a new machine, but reports of laptops cooking themselves on "modern standby" are... off-putting

No. It works fine. I put my computer to sleep rather than turning it off usually, sometimes unplugged. My bios is up to date (fwupd can be used to update it). You need to leave the Linux S3 mode disabled in the BIOS though, it's broken (or maybe they fixed it, but I haven't tried recently, the "modern standby" seems to work correctly on Linux now, at least on my machines)

>I'm using the X1 Carbon Gen 9 with openSUSE Tumbleweed (Plasma) ... Kinetic scroll works. Pinch to zoom works (at long last!! I think it started working a year ago or something)

May I please ask, are you on Wayland or X11?

In my experience that variable makes the biggest difference in touchpad behavior on Linux.

I've been using XPS 15 for many years and always felt that the trackpad experience is better (definitely in terms in accuracy and precission), and my encounters with partner's M1 air always make me question if I'm doing 'it' wrong (even after playing with the laptop for a whole day).

This frustration once led me to search for turning off the acceleration setting, which, last I searched, wasn't easily tweakable.

Anyone shares similar feeling when it comes to the trackpad?

Happy to:

Can you navigate with two fingers in a web browser? Yes. I've also been underwhelmed by non-Apple touchpads until using this. I'm not sure how much of the experience is hardware and how much is Fedora 36.

How is text selection? Identical to my Macbook: move to start of selection with pointer finger, press on touchpad with thumb, move to end of selection with pointer, release thumb.

Screen: I'm not sure exactly how to answer this; I have several Macbooks and I agree their screens are nice. I like the Thinkpad's screen more for development (it seems to be less glossy/give better contrast independent of external light) whereas I think the Macbook screens look better at broader angles (for example, a couple of people watching a movie, looking at the screen diagonally).

Battery life: I'll have to run it off charger for more than a day to see when it finally dies. So far I spent one day roaming around without connecting it, during which it was under constant use: programming during the day and streaming at night. Something on the order of 8 hours.

Found recently a no go for me against Linux on desktop (it's important for my workflows):

HDR, wider color space (P3 etc) + color management for all that things are not really supported in current Wayland desktops.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...

It will probably change next year (and the desktop software like players etc. need to catch up too) but monitors supporting these standards are existing for many years now. There is only Mac and Windows (Windows is even better with broader HW support actually) in this niche.

Color management still has major issues on Windows too. For a while I was running a calibrated profile on my Windows desktop and it doesn't consistently apply to every app, and you need to use a third party daemon to periodically reload the profile to make sure that the apps that can use it actually do. It's a mess.

I'm using an Apple MacBook Air M1 (2020) with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD and a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD at the same time. As an intense power user, I care less about budget and more about the quality of the machine I use.

I ordered myself the MacBook at work and privately purchased the X1 to put Ubuntu Linux on it (curious about the M1 and having had a great experience with each of a range of past ThinkPads - X61s, X220, X230, T41).

Both machines are very light, and not very rugged (for ruggedness, go for a Dell Latitude E6400 XFR or E7450). Both fell one time each, the X1 had no visible marks, but the MacBook Air now has a visible dent just above the logo. Thankfully, both machines remain fully operable.

The X1 is great for Linux, and that's my preferred platform. I'm biased towards that because it's not proprietary, but not out of purely ideological reasons, I just want to make sure the platform continues to exist. Thankfully, the Mac also has a Unix under the hood, alas often things are in weird locations or not installed at all, so I feel less "at home" on MacOS X. Also, having been a dual Linux/Mac OS X user since 2008, I find the usability of Mac OS is decaying - many things are hidden in non-obvious places. For example, it's not helpful if scrollbars are hidden and you have to exactly hover over where they ought to be in order to make them visible first - when you are on a call and need to pull up some data quickly, this is distracting. The Mac has longer battery life, and is often superior when discovering a WiFi network nearby; it's audio also works flawlessly. In contrast, on the X1 under Linux, occasionally the headset plugged in isn't instantly recognized without some fiddling.

Both machines are very fast, with the M1 being without equal. I notice it mostly when installing/updating new software, as heavy compute jobs are usually done on clusters or in the cloud nowadays.

I end up using the Mac mostly for e-mail, making slides and going on Zoom calls, whereas any development work tends to happen more on the X1.

Neither is a perfect machine. I'd love to have a Mac with a proper keyboard, or a ThinkPad with an M1 chip, and the former would be more of an improvement than the latter because CPU speed isn't the bottleneck for my laptop usage profile. For the time being, I shall continue to carry two laptops.

I can't speak for others, but for me it is 80% macOS (and its seamless synergy with everything Apple I own), and 20% hardware, what keeps me on Apple.

I like to say I go with the best operating system at the time. For most of my career that’s been macOS/X.

There was a time when I felt like what Windows had going on with Windows 7 was much better than what Apple had going on and I spent a few years primarily using a PC.

However, I’ve been back on Mac for years, and I feel like “advertisements in the start menu” indicates that Windows is going down a dark path.

I do have to keep a second PC around to use Windows as a lot of our engineering software is Windows specific, but I do most everything on the Mac.

For me it's more the hardware. I don't think AMD or Intel can compete at all with M1 Pro.

The performance per watt is insane, and given the ML/AI thing has blown up recently, I'm happy to have the neural engine.

The Apple screen is likely still much better ( colors, variable refresh rate ), the trackpad and it's integration.

It's an interesting world we live in where Apple is the choice for performance. For years and years everyone talked about how Macs were underpowered compared to their price tag.

Not really. Apple Silicon has good battery life, but it's performance is actually fairly pathetic compared to last-gen x86 chips. Like, compare the M1 to the Ryzen 7 4800u, a chip that was like 9 months old when Apple Silicon hit shelves. Both processors have competitive single-core and multi-core performance, and the GPUs are even pretty close in terms of performance profile. The real kicker? AMD's chip put up competitive performance on TSMC's 7nm node, whereas Apple was fighting with 5nm.

Honestly, if AMD had access to the same silicon Apple does, there probably wouldn't be any comparison. I'd argue their processes are half a generation ahead of Apple's designs.

That’s just peak performance, and ignoring the energy efficiency.

So, compare the power efficency. M1 idles at ~6w + 2-5 watts for the display. The 4800u idles ~10w + 2-4 watts for the display. A simple node bump would close the efficiency gap between the two chips, at least on paper.

Unless you’re comparing perf per watt as a curve, idle wattage is largely not representative of real world use. Similarly for peak performance if you’re excluding the wattage or throttling at those levels.

It's impossible to compare either of these CPUs because one is heterogeneous and the other is big.LITTLE. It's still fair to analyze their power consumption as a black-box machine though.

That’s true though from a user perspective, the PpW of the package is more important than the actual core.

Though of course there are other comparison issues like the ANE and video decoders making certain tasks significantly more efficient, so testing the whole package does become much more complex to represent.

Yeah this. I pay for the WHOLE THING to work, not just bits of it, depending on the whim of the QA job someone did at a distro vendor. Been burned too many times.

And now we have the M1, sorry but I don't want to know on the hardware front unless Intel get anywhere near it.

How do I copy files from my iPhone's download folder to my Mac again? My memory is rather fuzzy.

The theorem would be using iCloud to sync them. If that’s not an option I believe you should be able access the downloads folder when you connect your iPhone to the Mac via Finder. The third option being airdropping the files themselves.

Lol wtf work flow is that?

Man Mac iOS and osx are cooked af in workflows. Had a client recently run out of space on phone due to photos. Lol turns out apples sync is all or nothing. She couldn't free up space by telling iPhoto to not sync ancient ass shit, also extra iCloud storage. Can't use it while syncs on as your old phone only has 10gigs of space. Lol complete joke, told her to go rant at the local apple shop about it.

Predatory af and shite from apple. She can't even just plug phone in and strip the photos to a usb or external cus lol iPhoto/iTunes/apparently you should only do stuff how apple wants you to do stuff. Apple products are cooked af.

On and trying to find or free up space on the phone? Ahahhaha good luck, apple happily grouped 30% of the devices storage to "other apple apps" to with zero descriptors or indicators to what they were or how to delete them. Products a joke.

You don't, that would be using it wrong, like holding a phone touching it's sides /s

iCloud. Or Google Drive. Or OneDrive.

These are all such terrible answers to that question they serve as supporting the comment's implicated critique. I don't mean that your answer is incorrect. You are correct that these are the simplest means provided to accomplish that task.

But the provided means are gross.

You shouldn't need to go out to the internet, consume a cloud service, and come back, just to go from your phone to your laptop, and all of these big service providers shouldn't be making it so that that is the path of least resistance, or even damned near the only possible path.

It's a great example of how the incentives of the companies are opposite to those of the users.

If someone prefers another workflow, there’s always Android/Windows/Linux…

Saying 'workflow' misses the point and seems to almost intentionally miss the point by turning the criticism into a criticismmof something trivial or a mere preference instead of the fundamental wrong that it is.

The internet and the cloud are great and super convenient. But that is a seperate issue from companies steering everyone into actually requiring good internet speed and lots of bandwidth cap, and the consumption of subscription storage space, or worse free storage space where ypu are the product, not because ypu choose to but because no other option is even presented.

The critique was not about some preferred sequence of buttons to click no different from any other sequence. I decline to believe you didn't understand that when you said "workflow".

Airdrop. I find it's pretty reliable these days, though sometimes I have to toggle Bluetooth off and then on again on my Mac for it to work.

I tried developing on a PC... For whatever reason, my development setup (probably WSDL) crashes the PC every time it goes to sleep. Tried all kinds of remedies and it never worked.

Got so fed up I deleted windows and run Linux... it's working OK. It's not Mac OS X, but at least it doesn't crash.

I tried, I really tried.

Apparently Microsoft broke the whole sleeping procedure according to LinusTechTips https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHKKcd3sx2c

Yeah, I'm generally more productive in a macOS-like environment too.

With how diversity and customization are such highly vaunted qualities of Linux desktops, it's disappointing that the most fleshed out DEs are all built around a Win9X-type paradigm, with the only outlier being GNOME which is what one might get if they tried to turn iPadOS into a desktop OS. Where's the DEs inspired by macOS?

I own a first gen ThinkPad X1 Nano and while it's a great laptop in many regards (super lightweight and tiny, great screen, has support for proper S3 sleep, and generally good in respects that x86 laptops often aren't), its CPU undermines it entirely.

Even though it's built with the lowest spec Tiger Lake CPU that was offered at that point in time, it can't keep its fan off doing anything more intensive than web browsing. Even plugging in a rather pedestrian 2560x1440 60hz monitor is enough to keep its fan running. The CPU also sucks more power than it should given its performance, even in "Power Saving" mode under Windows 10/11 and Fedora.

I wish so much that in place of its Intel CPU there was an M1. That alone would increase its appeal dramatically. The ARM-based Thinkpads Lenovo now offers are a nice step in that direction but sadly their performance trails far enough behind the two year old M1 that it isn't an ace in the hole either.

Honestly depending on how things go I might just trade the Nano in for an Air at some point and do Windows Things™ through a Parallels VM running Windows for ARM or even just an RDP session to my custom build tower.

Maybe give one of the AMD versions a try if you can? My P14s Gen 2 AMD with a Ryzen 5 5650U has been very quiet even running multiple monitors, temps have been low generally in mid-30s/low 40s unless I really push it. Supports S3 sleep too.

Yeah, maybe. The main issue there is that I was buying for it specifically being a good laptop, with portability taking a front seat, without gimmicks that add fragility like a hybrid hinge. The X1 Nano (aside from CPU) excels at this, whereas P series for example makes compromises for better power, which I don't need. If I want power my well cooled 5950X/3080Ti tower offers that in quantities far greater than any laptop could deliver.

X1 series is sadly Intel exclusive though, with the closest thing with AMD being X13, but that isn't quite the same. There's also the Z series but those are weird to say the least and decidedly "un-thinkpaddish". Might just have to settle for X13.

The X1 Nano is my dream device with the form factor, keyboard, trackpoint, and 16:10 hd+ ips display all rolled into an incredibly portable package. I used mine from gen 1 release until this summer. I now have an m2 macbook air as daily driver because of hardware and power efficiency / optimization / integration and fanless design.

One day I hope Lenovo will figure it out, and I'll easily leave the macbook behind.

Honestly, the X1 Carbon is a nice laptop. And even if you don't want to run Linux as your main OS, Windows 11 really isn't bad. With WSL2, you can use have all of the benefits of Linux for development while being able to run whatever Windows apps you want, and it really was pretty easy to setup. You can even run VS Code on Windows and edit files in your Linux container. I had a period last year and this year where I was consulting, and used my Ryzen Desktop as my main work machine.

If I were looking to use something other than Macs (which I'm not), there are more good options now than there have ever been. Even though everything is still compared to the benchmark of Mac Laptops, which isn't an accident.

Do you know of any use cases that WSL2 might be lacking for the average developer?

Has there been any instance of you preferring a dedicated Linux box to WSL2?

WSL2 runs a Linux VM via Hyper-V at close to native performance.

However, it slows down if you do any type of cross-os file system communication. So you need an IDE that knows how to work around this (eg: VSCode with WSL2 plugin runs a server in the VM to avoid cross-os fs comm)

This (and directly accessing my network card) is why I'm sad WSL1 is no longer being developed.

WSL2 is for the most part totally usable for everyday development, but it does have a handful of issues that either need workarounds or are just infeasible.

USB passthrough isn't yet supported, so it's necessary to make use of something like VirtualHere[1] or some another TCPIP tunneling daemon running on the windows depending on what you're trying to do.

There seems to sometimes be issues with resuming from S0ix sleep where the VM process is still "running" but it gets stuck in a state where new processes just will not spawn. It's been a while since I messed with it, but my "solution" was disabling a VM security measure, launching Process Hacker 2 as admin, searching for "lxss" in the process list and terminating the corresponding svchost.

The actual linux kernel running inside WSL2 is interesting, it's microsofts own custom kernel[2] with some magic sauce for making everything play nice. Unfortunately, it (still?) lacks a fully-functional SystemD so making some programs work can be a chore. Also all the kernel modules compiled in, and it doesn't allow loading them dynamically with modprobe. There are some alternative kernels out there that solve some of these issues, though I haven't bothered to try any since whenever I run into these sorts of issues it's less of a hassle to just switch to a dedicated linux box.

For all of the issues that come with Windows 11, having WSLg make running graphical programs "just work" out of the box with rock-solid copy/paste, alt+tab, etc., really makes it a joy to work with.

[1] - https://www.virtualhere.com/

[2] - https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel

Native support for systemd was added in september. Still waiting on real USB passthrough, it’s the last thing on my list that keeps WSL2 from being my main development environment.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/systemd-support-i...

The only real remaining problem is low level hardware access. MS developed some very clever workarounds for giving WSL2 access to the GPU, but what about everything else?

For example, USBIP is great in many situations, and MS has worked to make it robust, but what I really need is the ability to assign a hardware device directly to the WSL VM - this is possible with Hyper-V, but WSL2’s hyper-v.

Until something like this is possible, for me it’s simpler to have a tiny linux box under my desktop and just use that.

I use WSL2 at work every day, and in fact I try to do as much work in it as possible. It's absolutely riddled with problems. Here are a few I can remember without getting out my work computer to look at my notes. Some of these issues might not ‘belong’ to Windows, but they're all things which could come up for you on WSL2 that are unlikely or impossible to encounter elsewhere.

  - there's a showstopping memory leak in WSL2 that absolutely destroys your computer in terms of CPU and RAM usage, and makes your WSL machines completely unresponsive whenever you spin up a bunch of Docker containers
  - the PATH passthrough feature of WSL2 sometimes causes ‘.’ (the CWD) to get added to the user's PATH if your login shell is Fish (????)
  - `systemctl status` is broken with WSL for systemd 251 and newer
  - enabling systemd support (and using syschemd to run systemd-based distros without leveraging Microsoft's support for it) causes issues where launching WSL in an unprivileged instance of Windows Terminal means you can't access WSL in elevated Windows Terminal Windows and vice-versa
  - using hardware PGP tokens or other smartcards sucks ass, because forwarding your GPG agent to WSL guests is a huge pain (apparently WSLg runs its own `ssh-agent` process, and I don't know whether it has access to USB devices¸but I'd bet not)
  - WSLg has random and repeated crashes which spam you with popups for some distros sometimes, and it can only be resolved by shutting down ALL of your WSL VMs
  - WSLg's RDP crap gives you the wrong cursor (and one that's way too small)
  - WSLg's window management doesn't show mouse cursor changes correctly, so you have to *guess* when your cursor is in the right place to resize a window
  - resizing windows with Super+Click or Alt+Click doesn't work (either ‘natively’ to the WSL2 VM or via, e.g., AltSnap)
  - sizing and moving WSLg windows sometimes breaks completely. I think somewhere in the stack there's confusion about the positions of windows, which may be related to multimonitor setups
  - window maximization for WSLg apps doesn't work right when you have more than one monitor
  - OpenGL acceleration randomly decides it won't work for unknown periods of time with WSLg
  - basically any VPN completely fucking breaks networking inside WSL, so have fun using it at work
  - random crashes and freezes (not super frequent), so sometimes you come back to your machine after the weekend and none of your WSL sessions are usable and you can't open new ones
  - the `wsl.exe` has some weird encoding issue or doesn't respect the encoding set for the terminal emulator. Piping `wsl --help` into a pager doesn't work right (either natively on the system or from inside an instance via interop)
  - case sensitivity differences across filesystems sometimes breaks git repos, depending on which side of the OS divide they live on and where/how you cloned them
  - access to the Windows filesystem from WSL is so slow that it can take literally multiple seconds for a basic git prompt to draw
  - access to the Windows filesystem from WSL is so slow and so limited because of Windows behavior with file locking that sometimes you run into locking issues where running git commands from WSL is just broken
  - when your virtual disk, which is sparsely allocated, fills up, it takes up additional space on your machine forever, unless you intervene. Enjoy permanently losing dozens or hundreds of GBs of disk just for experimenting with Docker, until you shut your WSL VM down, locate the disk somewhere in $env:LOCALAPPDATA, and shrink it manually
  - for some absolutely unfathomable reason, WSL2's new built-in systemd support completely breaks TRAMP sudoedit in Emacs (just hangs, no log output that I could generate). the old, third-party syschemd hack for running systemd does not produce this mysterious issue. (this one was quite a puzzle)
  - unusable Linux binaries located on your Windows PATH from Docker GUIs like Rancher Desktop, Docker Desktop, or Portainer can cause your in-WSL Docker client to think it should use them for password management, making it impossible to use `docker login`

It's janky as all hell. I imagine users who report unproblematic experiences are simply not attempting to replicate a very substantial fraction of what an engineer might typically do on an actual Linux workstation.

And of course, you have to deal with the usual Windows bullshit. I have to manually kill `dwm.exe` every day because after being logged in for a day or two, window management causes a form of input lag that renders the mouse completely unusable if I don't.

I think you are right in your suspects - I mostly have 0 problems with WSL2/WSL1 and using it daily and probably spend 50% of active time inside on of that terminal session.

For WSLg, I've played around for 15 minutes, tried gnome-terminal, xeyes and may be something else and disabled it - literally have nothing I'd want to run from Linux gui apps.

WSL2 runs at close-to-native or native speed when you limit your work to terminal. However beyond that: - I oftentimes need to run some GUI linux apps from inside the WSL2 -> and scaling (needed on a 4K screen) is really troublesome. No need to say that fractional scaling is nonexistent. - when logging to a remote machine (from WSL2) via ssh with X forwarding, and launching GUI apps remotely, the lags are so bad that it is hardly workable even on an ultra-fast network connection to the remote machine. Different from that, everything is butter smooth from a native Linux. - when I needed to create a user with a specific user ID (not 1000) I found that it somehow does not work full in WSL2, whereas it is just a stanard thing for a dedicated Linux. - there are very few, if any, any answers on the Internet about the issues above, I guess because the community of people using WSL2 the way I need is minuscule. The best tactics is to reach the WSL team directly ... and hope they fix some of the issues in the next build. So I fiddled with WSL2 for about a month and ditched it for a regular dual boot with Linux (and didn't boot into Win11 since then)

> With WSL2, you can use have all of the benefits of Linux for development while being able to run whatever Windows apps you want, and it really was pretty easy to setup. You can even run VS Code on Windows and edit files in your Linux container.

I feel like the people who claim that don't understand why people go with either linux or macOS

> If I were looking to use something other than Macs (which I'm not), there are more good options now than there have ever been. Even though everything is still compared to the benchmark of Mac Laptops, which isn't an accident.

That's a very opinionated point of view

I’m really looking at the framework laptops as well for my next laptop. The ability to fix and upgrade it as well as what seems like good build quality is enticing.

I got one last month and I'm very happy with it. Linux still has a a graphics issue with 12th-gen Intel, but the hardware has been great.

How’s the keyboard ?

It feels great to me. Nice and firm, with a tactile movement.

It has all the right buttons in all the right places, except for Home/End/PgUp/PgDown being hidden behind the Fn key, as is unfortunately the trend these days.

A long time linux user, turned to mac user, back to linux and now back to mac again disagrees with you.

The amount of time and energy I had spend fixing silly problems and integrations could've be better used somewhere.

In contrast with mac, I open it and do work and close it knowing it won't explode next time I open it.

The thing is though, when there is an issue on macOS (like it complaining a USB peripheral is using too much power and it has been suspended, of course without saying which USB peripheral, or the iPad you want to extend your screen to not showing), there's usually not much you can do. The OS is pretty closed down, very specific and the majority of materials online are on the "try turning it off and on again" level. With Linux distros there might be more to debug, but at least you can debug.

PS: If anyone has any ideas about my USB device, I'm all ears. A colleague advised the system report from the Apple menu, but it's a snapshot in time, so useless for my problem.

I downvoted you, because your comment doesn't bring anything to the conversation. Vague "silly problems" occur on every device, even on my microwave.

Just because you downvoted my comment doesn't mean it's not valid. Downvotes are a subjective measure of agreement and they do not necessarily reflect the accuracy or usefulness of a comment. Others may find value in my personal experience with Linux and Mac, and it's not up to you to decide whether my comment is relevant or not.

While it's true that every device can have problems, my experience with Linux was that the problems I encountered were frequent and time-consuming to fix. In contrast, my experience with Mac has been much smoother and I have had fewer issues to deal with.

> Others may find value in my personal experience with Linux and Mac

I don't see how "Linux bad, Mac good" experience would help anyone without providing any specific details. There are already millions of such "experiences" on the Internet. By the way, I have the opposite experience.

Also, you again provided no value with your comment and it's not just my subjective opinion, it's a fact. Your both comments look like ChatGPT.

No, I'm not a bot; I'm just lived enough in this area to have met countless "fsf" priests. The single voice mindset is way more similar to an AI than anything else.

Fell free to continue using linux on your workstation.

Where in the above comments did I insist on (or even suggested) using Linux? I just hate "this is bad" comments, they make the discussions unreadable and useless.

The M1 has completely and utterly outclassed Intel/AMD and there is no way I would buy one now except for games and ML workloads that need NVIDIA cards.

I agree the M1 is great hardware.

However, the feeling of speed is made up of much more than just the hardware's capabilities. The OS you use, the toolchain you have access to, impacts your experience as well.

This X1 matches 92% of a 2022 MB Air's single-core performance and 94% of its multi-core performance (https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/19092431). I'm happy to wait an extra 100ms for something to compile in order to have a nicer daily experience of the machine and operating system.

And 0% of its silence while doing all that. Also, I would check real benchmarks. I have seen much bigger differences.

m1/m2 performance is only great while you live within it's limits. It's all special optimization tricks in hardware to match up with certain common software operations. Great if your usage pattern matches.

It's almost like when hardware has special bits that make benchmarks scream because they know exactly what the benchmark software does, yet normal work is the same or worse than anyone else. It's not exactly that bad. M1/M2 does perform a lot of real work a lot better. But it's "a bit like that"

It's just that it only works if your usage matches what Apple targeted as what most people will ever need to do.

Can it drive a pair of 4K monitors? The only reason I've not bought one of the HP DevOne units -- https://hpdevone.com/ -- is the lack of support to drive external 4K monitors.

Purism Librem 14 can.

mine seems to drive both 4k monitors just fine! I use a Tunderbolt Caldigit dock. Windows 10

Lenovo's tech specs for the Gen 10 Carbon say it's capable of driving 3 external monitors, 5K on the TB ports, 4K on HDMI. So dual 4K is doable.

Usually if you check the CPU specs on the Intel website, the integrated graphics part in the details will tell you max resolution/refresh.

What is currently the best lightweight Linux laptop on market? I hear mixed reviews on System76 construction quality.

I run Ubuntu or Fedora on my laptops and desktops.

I was looking into MacBook Air, for battery life, weight and keyboard, but don’t want this MacOS black box.

How is Linux on a MacBook Air?

LG Gram series has a few light ones, have been using linux mint xfce4 on one for daily dev.

Regarding Apple Silicon, last I checked Asahi Linux had made some significant strides but with drivers YMMV. Might be worth looking into if you’re serious about running Linux on Apple Silicon. As for Intel, I’m not too sure. About as mature as it’s been for a while now, I reckon.

The Framework isn't bad.

I've had a few freezes on my recently-purchased 12th gen running NixOS, but I've juste applied the documented workarounds for the issue and am waiting to see if those resolve it.

Other than that, it's been a surprisingly solid experience. Sleep on lid close, wake on open, Bluetooth just recognized my ear buds, fingerprint scanner just worked after I enabled it... not a bad setup.

> How is Linux on a MacBook Air?

In my experience, older (pre-T2 and Apple silicon) models are relatively easy to get working.

I'm currently running Linux Mint 21 on an Air 2017 that was excruciatingly slow when running mac OS, and it got a lot snappier on linux. The drive is still slow, and I'd love to replace it, but the adapter that supposedly lets you connect an M2 NVMe to that silly we're-so-so-special-and-you-can't-have-an-M2 port didn't work with the spare drive I had on hand.

Oh, and due to restrictive licensing (on Apple or Broadcom's part) the wifi drivers and webcam firmware can't be included in the Mint installation media, so I had to bluetooth tether my mac to my phone to download and install the correct wifi drivers, and also had to download and install the webcam firmware manually.

The Lenovos tend to be pretty good for Fedora. (They're the standard systems that Red Hat gives associates for Linux.) Dell XPS 13 seem like nice systems as well and can ship with Ubuntu.

I’ve used thinkpads (and the X1 in particular) for many years. And I do think they’re the best option you have outside of the apple ecosystem. But they are far, far, far of being an excellent replacement for MacBooks. Specially after the new Apple silicon has shown up. The deep OS integration, power saving, performance, seamless upgrades of OS, build materials quality, trackpad, audio quality, etc, etc is far ahead on MacBooks.

But I do agree they are the best option if you hate or can’t pay or aren’t allowed to use apple products.

Unfortunately, while I loved and used ThinkPads for many years, the lack of a 4k or similar hi-DPI screen immediately makes this a non-starter. As does the pitifully poor brightness and color coverage. I’ve never understood how developers could work on a low quality screen after seeing (or using) the first MacBook Pro with a “retina” screen.

That’s not to mention the performance and heating issues that plague every high-end Windows laptop (i.e. the Dell offers 4k screens and above, such as the XPS 17”, but they suffer from thermal issues, suspend issues, and atrocious sound—not to mention being heavy and cumbersome).

Speaking from experience, having used Linux on a laptop as a primary development machine on-and-off for years, you’ll spend many hours of your life trying to fix trackpad issues, suspend and hibernate problems, fan issues, graphic driver hell, boot issues after kernel upgrades, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi “quirks”, etc. And that’s on Dell’s XPS line, not some oddball laptop.

Let me know when there’s a manufacturer that produces laptops with Apple’s XDR screen quality, similar performance, thermals, sound, build quality, reliability, etc., and with the ability to run Linux natively. Competition would be fantastic. Realistically, I don’t see it happening anytime soon.

I do, however, miss the keyboard and “nub”.

In a previous role at a Macbook only shop one team requiring linux machines got X1 Carbons as they best linux machine generally available and easily supportable.

Through a roughly 5 year period of trying various models they were consistently pretty reliable, and very easy to run Debian or Ubuntu on (our standard linux OS), through multiple OS versions too.

The screens and trackpads definitely weren't Apple quality. Not bad, but switching between my Carbon and my Macbook was pretty jarring. That said, it paired up immediately with my Logitech mouse (MX Master) that I got for it, and it was easy to get the driver to show things like mouse battery in the linux menubar, something macOS won't do for you.

Generally everything just worked out of the box, including things like USB-C charging, which was great to share chargers with the Macbooks.

The biggest issue we consistently faced was TPM support. At least once a year a kernel upgrade would totally bork a couple of machines as the TPM got reset of corrupted, meaning the machines would need to be wiped and rebuilt. After the first people would update and get broken we'd just warn the team to be careful around those updates.

I'm using both a 16'' Macbook Pro (M1) and a 14' Lenovo T14 (Gen 3), the former mostly for work and the latter for personal computing using Linux (Kubuntu). Both machines are great, the new T14 was the first laptop I was happy to replace my T460p with. I tried a few of the earlier Lenovo models but they were terrible and hardly offered any performance improvements over my 5 year old model.

The Macbook is of course an amazing device, build quality is great and if you're a fan of MacOS it's the perfect machine. It has a humongous battery as well (almost 100 Wh I think), which really gives it an edge over the T14 (50 Wh), especially since the base power draw is lower (7W vs. 11 W), which itself is ridiculous given the larger screen size. That said the T14 is the perfect Linux machine, everything works out of the box without issues, even the touchscreen and the fingerprint reader. There is still a minor issue when suspending/waking up (touchpad reactivity will degrade), but I hope there will be a fix soon.

Lets see:

> Integrated Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics

No Nvidia, nice, may work with OpenBSD

> 8 GB LPDDR5-6400MHz (Soldered)

Why Soldered Memory, not good. And who sells 8gb memory with a serious look :)

> 256 GB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe TLC Opal

Fine by me

> Intel® Wi-Fi 6E AX211 2x2 AX vPro® & Bluetooth® 5.1

Should be fine

> 14" WUXGA (1920 x 1200)

Edit, not bad I think - seems even better than 16:9, more vertical resolution, nice.

All in all, sorry, I will pass due to the Soldered Memory. But looks like a nice machine that could be used with a BSD

> All in all, sorry, I will pass due to the Soldered Memory

The specs are configurable, OP just linked to a specific configuration. Though the soldered memory is an unfortunate compromise to the conventional ThinkPad experience.

I don't think that any configuration has SO-DIMM RAM, you need to go to the T series for that.

The new T series models all have soldered RAM AFAIK. Lenovo seems to be putting SO-DIMMs only on select P series (i.e., actual mobile workstations, not T series branded as P).

But some have enough memory that you would probably not miss the SO-DIMMs, I mean, do you have a workload needing more than 32GB that you would run in the notebook (with the limited CPU and thermal constraints)?

But just 8GB in a non-upgradeable package is not for me.

> Why Soldered Memory, not good.

LPDDR5 does not exist in DIMM for technical reasons. Laptops with discrete RAM sticks use slower and more power hungry regular DDR5. There are pros and cons both ways.

The X1 line is supposed to be an ultrabook style laptop i.e. as thin as possible. Hence the soldered RAM. Furthermore power consumption with socketed RAM is higher.

The T series thinkpads usually have a soldered module and SODIMM slot, if you prefer that route. And of course there is the Framework with two SODIMM slots.

And as far as who sells 8 GB RAM laptops seriously... Lots of vendors, including Apple (and they charge $200 to upgrade that to 16 GB). Frankly I think 8 GB is fine for a lot of use cases, although maybe not in 5 years or so.

I don't mind soldered memory but it's hard to imagine buying a new laptop in 2022 with a mere 8gb if it's going to be soldered.

When did memory become that fast? did I miss 2ghz of progress?

I had one and quite liked it (gen 6 I think?). One caveat is that my E key broke and I swapped it. However, I noted the date and from the relative frequency of how often E is used (most common letter) vs A (second most common letter), I was able to accurately predict the month my A key would break. That’s… not great.

Carbon is a great material though - apple needs to stop with aluminum.

I own the 16", i9 (>$5000) version of this, and I must say: a) It's one of the best PC notebooks I ever owned. b) It's a piece of crap.

The keyboard is very (VERY!) wonky, got two replacements, it's systemic. The touchpad dies every 2-3 weeks, Lenovo service has been great, getting me a new one within 2-3 days every time, I gave up on replacing it after two months, and just use ... sorry ... a magic trackpad. The middle of it started bubbling up about 3 months in - leaving about a 3-5mm gap when closing the lid. Not that the lid ever closed tightly anyway. Don't even get my started on battery life. It doesn't exist.

Switched from using Fedora to PopOS. Which - for me - is an even better experience.

And just to be clear: It's the hardware that's crap, not the software. And: I have been a ThinkPad user for the last 30 years. Still have my 700C, and all the models inbetween.

Sure your battery isn't swelling? The poor battery life and fact that the middle is bubbling...

That sounds rough! I would probably look into getting a full replacement (possibly with a different model) from Lenovo, given such persistent "lemon" issues.

I'm happy that OP is happy, but he points out to the most highly regarded model of the most beloved non-Apple laptop brand as a great alternative...

And while X series Thinkpads are solid workhorses with reliable warranty, this is not true. I'm not even talking about that Lenovo/the whole segment still doesn't have a competitor for the original M1 with battery life/performance. But due to old rotten deals they are only offered with Intel CPUs that have terrible thermals, throttling, and have shaky Arc GPU drivers. I can't even choose them with the better AMD options out of the already uncompetitive x86 options. There are other lines like the Yoga 7 Gen 7 (that is more aimed at the macbook crowd) but those lack the business features that would put them somewhat in line with value.

Most serious non-Apple laptop makers are in a Catch-22 with their lucrative Intel exclusivity contracts.

I am glad for those that have found machines and operating systems that work for them. For myself, I also prefer a solid Linux (NixOS) workstation over anything else.

I also really like the M1 Macbook hardware a lot and think that's a sweet experience!

One thing of interest that I am noticing in the comments is certain comments coming off as "absolute truth" in regard to the experience with their preferred OS and hardware vs a less preferred alternative. I find it useful to chill out and realize that everyone will find things they like more about the OS and ecosystem they have chosen.

All OS-es have awesome strengths and frustrating weaknesses and I find it annoying when anyone tries to argue otherwise. Let people enjoy their chosen paradise!

> Plug it into a 100Mhz ultrawide monitor via a lightning cable, and not only does it seamlessly extend the desktop at native refresh rates, but it also mounts all the devices that are connected via the monitor's integrated USB hub.

@hunterloftis what ultrawide monitor do you use?

I own an X1 Carbon Gen 10, i7-1260P, 2TB, 32GB RAM with OLED screen and WWAN modem with Ubuntu 22.04. The webcam and the WWAN modem are still not supported under Linux.

I want to buy a Lenovo ThinkVision P40w-20 5K ultrawide monitor, but after googling I see that many people having problem with Ubuntu 22.04/Wayland.

Maybe it's working with Fedora, but not with Ubuntu?

What's the resolution of your UW monitor, and does the Intel integrated graphics fast enough for it?

@nivertech I use the Samsung c34j74x:

https://displaysolutions.samsung.com/monitor/detail/1280/C34...

It's 3440x1440, and yes the Intel driver under Fedora drives it flicker-free at 100 Hz.

I have an X1 gen 6 and I love it. Keyboard keys don't have the nice click to them like a mac or surface, it's more of a mushy feel. However thinkpads do have pgup, pgdn, home and end buttons which is a big plus if you learnt to type on a pc desktop.

-Recent X1s have switched to a higher TDP Intel processor (p instead of u series?), so I imagine performance has improved at the expense of more fan noise.

- I went with the matt 2k screen, which doesn't have the brightness of a macbook screen.

Thinkpads are often up to 30% off on lenovos website, but it seems that they don't discount the configurable options any more, which rules out getting a good price for a 32GB config.

> Thinkpads are often up to 30% off on lenovos website, but it seems that they don't discount the configurable options any more, which rules out getting a good price for a 32GB config.

Just to clarify here, I got a 32GB model at 51% off (that "sale" is now at 49%).

That's cool. Is that for an X1 Carbon or something else?

Yep, for the 10th gen X1 Carbon

I was thinking about getting one of these to replace my 6+ year old XPS 13. Did you compare this to the new XPS 13 Plus? It looks like for Linux laptops, these are pretty much the only two good options. How's the battery life?

T14S and other Think Pads are also pretty good. I use a latest-generation T14S and get about eight hours running modest workloads on Fedora.

ARM Macintosh Book has better battery life, but it does not run usefully run Linux (yet).

I did compare it to the XPS 13 - the XPS looked like a solid machine, but it felt a little cramped to me. I preferred the still-svelte-but-bigger 14" X1.

Another consideration was having a company that cares about Linux running flawlessly, and Red Hat gives their employees Thinkpads. That dogfooding means that if I'm having a problem, it's likely some Red Hat employee is having the same problem, so it ought to be fixed soon :)

I like my Framework with Ubuntu. Wish it wasn't Ubuntu but everything works.

Why can't you use Linux Mint which is based on Ubuntu?

The larger P series from Lenovo are also excellent, have 4k screens, and run Fedora flawlessly. They also have next day onsite warranty support which actually works.

The hardware is definitely not Apple level, but it's good, and for those of us for whom Apple software/ecosystem for various reasons are not a fit, the combination of Fedora and Thinkpad is something to be grateful for.

As much as I support the motivation behind System76 and Framework- and I own products from both- the quality is not (yet) professional tier. Fedora + Thinkpad is.

I have tried several non-apple systems with windows or Linux. No, sorry, but unless you want to go crazy behind the PC and/or operating system Apple wins hands down.

Compared to the MB, the fan is loud. I even stated writing my own fan control, but it can't fix the fan that's either definitely audible at 4500RPM or dead silent at 0RPM (which is not sustainable even for very light workloads on Linux).

Here's the script: https://github.com/luisgerhorst/fancontrol-tpx1c9

The solution I settled with was to use a 2m Thunderbolt cable to move the thing away from my desk. In an office environment this works, but in quiet rooms it may not.

My criteria for a laptop are: must be totally silent with no loud fans, very long battery life, must not overheat. Usually that rules out any Intel laptop.

You know what works as a MacBook replacement? Pretty much any laptop. I have yet to encounter a laptop that didn't run Arch Linux just fine.

Related: my take on the X1 Yoga (not Carbon), similar configuration: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/12/03/1600

Nice, but not world-shattering. Also noisy. Would not use it instead of a MacBook Air, let alone a Pro.

I purchased the ThinkPad P1 mobile workstation in 2018. It's a great machine but it's about as loud as a vacuum cleaner.

I’ve eyed the P series for years but ever since I got a MacBook Air, I have come to expect my machines to be silent.

So far I am impressed at the quality of my X1 Yoga Gen.6. The least bullshit, most work oriented machine I've ever had.

Excellent until the charging ports burn out, requiring a motherboard replacement: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/X1-Ca...

Macbook M1s have the exact same problem (and have less ports), and good luck getting that fixed for any reasonable price.

I've been considering moving from a mbp to an x1 for a while now, but a couple things are keeping me from it:

- mbp isn't dead (yet)

- x1 is made in china, human rights issues

- x1 is less repairable than other thinkpad models such as t14 or p14 (which are still made in china, however)

- now there is linux support for mbp for dual booting

Isn’t the MacBook Pro also manufactured in China?

Yes, but I got it several years ago and wasn't as concerned about China at the time

Future gens of mbp might not be made in China (but afaik they still are)

> x1 is made in china, human rights issues

I was under the impression that most MBP are made in China?

> I was under the impression that most MBP are made in China?

afaik they all are, but this was a purchase from several years ago

You might be okay with laptops from Taiwan instead of mainland China, for example ASUS. They have nicer laptops than Lenovo too.

And they have machines in different ranges to choose from, including light beasts such as the ROG Zephyrus G14 which manages to pack a lot of power including a dedicated GPU in roughly the same weight as an M series MacBook Pro.

Are all models made in Taiwan though? Where do you find the data to confirm where they source their parts from?

I've used Thinkpads exclusively for >20 years, last ~10 all X1s. I am typing this on an X1C Gen10 as well. It's an OK machine, but unless something shifts spectacularly, it will be my last Thinkpad: it runs hot, even with the fan on (I dont code anymore; this is just standard Office workload), its battery is ridiculous for 2022 (~6-7hrs in practice even with battery saver turned on) and it's glitchy (which granted may be Windows 11). At the end of the day, I can excuse all of these if a) it wasnt a nearly $3k machine (!), b) that Macbooks didnt exist.

And with me so will probably go my company's fleet as well. Thinkpads are still the best corporate series I've seen (including Macbooks) but the value for money just isnt there any more: what's the point of squeezing out depreciation as far as you can when you are starting at 2x the price/benefit?

Does this support 2560x1440p@60Hz x3? Lenovo promised that their thinkpad 14s with the thinkpad thunderbolt 4 dock could do it, but the dock fails to actually consistently display all 3 monitors, with one irregularly flickering.

Does the fingerprint reader work?

How long does the battery last?

Using Ubuntu, does hibernation work?

As a final tip, the touchpad might be good, but imho the real benefit of the thinkpad line is the TrackPoint. You can do basic mousing without moving your hands.

I don't know if the fingerprint reader works - I don't like them, so haven't tried to set it up (it's integrated into the power button, which of course does work).

I haven't spent more than 8-10 hours off of a charger, so I don't know what the death point is for the battery. At least a full day working & streaming.

I use Fedora, not Ubuntu, so I can't speak to Ubuntu's hibernation. Power management works seamlessly on Fedora: connecting/disconnecting battery, opening/closing lid when connecting/not, timing out to sleep, awaking on keypress or lid open, etc etc. All the annoying combinations that, previously, I've had issues with on Linux devices.

Thanks for the trackpoint tip! I do want to try to acclimate to it because that sounds like a nice workflow. It's hard to break muscle memory, though.

Why wouldn't you get one of the AMD ThinkPads?

That i7-1280P only has 6 performance cores on "Intel 7", when the Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U as in the Gen3 X13 ThinkPad has 8 performance cores on "TSMC 6nm-FinFet".

* Deep suspend has been hit or miss on AMD thinkpads; you can check Lenovo forums. I'm actually not sure if Intel is any better, but it is something to consider.

* Just because the node is slightly newer/better doesn't necessarily translate to overall better battery life. AFAIK 12th gen Intel is very competitive with even the newest AMD chips.

* Possibly a price premium on the AMD models? I'm not sure.

* The AMD models sometimes come with realtek WiFi chips with poor Linux support, so you might have to swap for a mediatek/qcom/Intel chip which is better supported. Extra 20 bucks and the hassle of having to pop it open. Also I think you might have to fiddle with the BIOS to disable the WiFi card whitelist, but I'm not sure on this specific thinkpad style/gen/model.

Because I wanted hardware that's already been tested end-to-end with not only linux in general, but the distro & version I'm using (Fedora 36).

Using the same hardware that Lenovo ships with linux out-of-the-box, as well as the same hardware that Red Hat employees use, is worth more to me than a couple of extra performance cores. CPUs have been "fast enough" for my use cases for years.

Lenovo has the absolute worst bioses of any laptops I've ever bought. None have LVFS/fwupdmgr support. My most recent one, bought from newegg, appears to be a limited mainline-china-only release that hasnt received A SINGLE BIOS UPDATE despite there being numerous high-sev platform updates for every other device in my arsenal.

Neither would let me re-enable S3.

Again, unlike my other devices, the Lenovos become almost useless if the internal display breaks. They require intervention on boot (internal disp only) if you use an unofficial power supply.

This isnt even counting battery life, the M1 performance, trackpad quality, trackpad click mechanism, trackpad size, on and on, etc. Keyboard deck flex. The list goes on. Complete stockholm syndrome vibes.

i have this laptop and am also very satisifed. zero issues. i run a minimal dev setup[1].

there is a simpsons episode where homer designs a car. it has a lot of cup holders and is very expensive. this is a lot like macos, and even more like the linux setups people struggle to get to work after migrating off mac.

architectural tip: fewer cupholders.

1. https://github.com/nathants/alpine-setup

I have a Lenovo p14s. I got it from work. I love it. I came from a 2020 MacBook Pro. I’ll never ever go back to MacOS. I love my thinkpad and fedora too much.

Granted, I feel they've been slacking on the (previously) legendary T series models, sadly...screen/trackpad suck and the chassis flexes

I set up and supported 200 X1 Carbons over the past few years.

This is terribly inadequate as a MacBook replacement. It's noticeably slower than any Apple Silicon machine, it has terrible battery life, the screen has the same absurdly-wide aspect ratio common to so many PC laptops, which makes them useless for so much real work, and the heat management is a complete joke. Fan runs, loudly, if you even breathe on the machine.

And of course, the trackpad is vastly inferior to Apple's.

>the screen has the same absurdly-wide aspect ratio common to so many PC laptops

I don't think that's right - pretty sure that the X1 Carbon has a 16:10 screen rather than the typical 16:9 one.

There are multiple X1 Carbon models. I Googled this and it looks like starting with the 9th-generation model, Lenovo finally got wise and switched from a 16:9 to 16:10. This is an improvement and I'm glad to see it, but I prefer the 14:9 aspect that's common on current Macs.

I have two. I am sceptical you have used 200 in real life as your comments at FUD compared to my experience.

To repeat: I set up and supported 200 of these. For over two years. Mine were admittedly running Windows, so I'm glad you are having a good Linux experience, but I guess our opinions just differ. In an extreme fashion. To be fair, there were pluses: it's very light, they didn't break a lot unless users were stupid, the screen was good quality even though it has an incredibly terrible aspect ratio and isn't tall enough for real work, and the keyboard is good, like in all ThinkPads. So it's not all bad.

But the heat issues and the terrible fan noise would be disqualifying for me.

> I set up and supported 200 X1 Carbons over the past few years.

...but the Gen 10 X1 with out-of-the-box Fedora, the topic of this post, was released just a few months ago.

> It's noticeably slower than any Apple Silicon machine

Given how fast it feels, this claim sounded unlikely, so I just ran Geekbench 5, yielding 1769 (single) and 8385 (multi-core):

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/19092431

The 2022 MacBook Air gets 1932 and 8919, respectively, so the X1 matches 92% of its single-core performance and 94% of its multi-core performance. You and I may have different definitions of "noticeably slower" and "terribly inadequate."

> Fan runs, loudly, if you even breathe on the machine

Ironically, the first time I've heard the fans is running geekbench just now, and even then they were quiet.

Given all this, I think it's unlikely we're talking about the same machine.

I've been using the X1 Carbon for my Linux laptops for at least six years (4th Generation), and mostly love it.

Is the keyboard as lovely as my x220 with xubuntu? Can I replace parts?

I wish they had one with the i9 and no Nvidia card.

Why are there ads on HN now?

There are regular HN threads discussing good development machines, especially from people hoping to find an OSS alternative to MS, Google, & Apple walled gardens. The hardware & operating system used for building products is a discussion relevant to many of us here.

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