I have to admit, I tried and failed to switch away from Apple. I bought a Linux Laptop - an System 76. I was surprised at how terrible the battery management of linux was compared with my mac. And that particular issue broke me.
I’d say System 76 is doing that but their execution has stumbled for the past year or so. They are working on their own Rust-based DE, to some level of success. I hope they get back on track.
A good pre-installed environment of current tools would be nice, of course.
Everything that was easy in *nix was a massive PITA in MacOS. I'm talking about things like basic desktop customization (focus follows mouse, customized mouse buttons + keyboard hotkeys combos to move/iconify/resize windows, etc). I ended up using open source X11 based utils for most things but my web browser & mail because as long as I stayed within X11, I could satisfy my 20+ year old muscle memory with focus-follows-mouse and my hotkeys. However, every now and then I'd blindly start typing and the focus was still on my mail client or browser and random things would happen (adding bookmarks, deleting emails, etc) After a year I never managed to unlearn ffm & my hotkeys, so I gave up, gave the iMac to my then in-laws, and built a new whitebox.
I realize there are extensions for ffm, but ffm on MacOS is a crapshoot in my experience and I was never able to find an extension that I like. Similarly, at the time, I could not find any extension that satisfied my muscle-memory window management hotkey/mouse button combos. I don't mind click to focus so much on a laptop, but I can't stand it on a desktop.
Over the years I have settled on *nix on a desktop and MacOS on a laptop..
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/PowerManagement/PowerSavingTw...
But generally powertop is enough for a significant boost. For certain manufacturers (ASUS is a good example), you want to use their vendor specific tools to manage CPU/GPU powerbands.
https://community.frame.work/t/guide-linux-battery-life-tuni...
Two of my last five laptops were macs, three linux boxes, if you consider corporate laptops as "mine". One of the three linux laptops just worked beautifully (wrt. battery and other driver issues), one didn't at all, and one worked poorly until I installed some software that shouldn't matter for battery lifetime, and since then it's had excellent battery management. There was a long list of dependencies, so I suspect that the software I installed depended on a package that solved whatever the problem was.
You may chance to buy hardware where someone really has tested and fixed linux. Or you may get something else.
FYI: The two good ones are some Huawei thing that weighs 1.3kg and a GPD P2 Max, a tiny toy, really portable, https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/hardware/attovax
I ran Linux solely from 1997 to 2004 on the desktop and switched back because it was such a pain in the ass to manage. Every time I go back, it just isn’t catching up to the mainstream OSs’ ability to manage without “futzing”.
My M2 currently lasts all day on the battery while spending half of it on conference calls and half of it writing code. Nothing can match that right now, but I am still hopeful for a Linux future.
They are not! Not even close!
I think this is where a lot of the negative opinion of Linux comes from, people lament some issue they have with their Mac and someone else will say, "oh you should try Linux, it's really good now." And so they do and are surprised to find that experience is vastly different.
Linux is a great choice for people who want the highest degree of control and freedom over how they interact with their computer. The trade-off is that sometimes you have to futz with it or report bugs.
If you view your computer strictly as a tool to let you get other things done, then you want Mac. All of the OS and UX decisions have been made for you and you get what you get, but you (should) never have to tinker with the system itself.
But! I believe System76 should ship their laptops with tools and/or settings and/or configs for other mainline distributions that maximize the experience on their hardware while allowing for the inherent customization Linux-based distributions.
I’d argue Sys76 is far closer to Apple than just installing Linux on a random machine.
> It’s just that nobody seems to care about Linux’s “out of the box” default configuration
The only possible way this would work OOB is if the OEM or the community maintained OOB settings for each hardware variant.
Heck, I was recently shopping PC laptops and would see variations in CPU OEMs (AMD vs Intel) for the same model.
Everyone I know that is stuck in big corporate OS spend more time than that every week fighting something their masters push on them.
Application install is a terminal command that's trivially easy to learn, there's no e-shop solution with ads and surveillance, and while I use i3wm I think most people would be about as comfortable in XFCE as in the MICROS~1 OS:es of yesteryears. You decide when to upgrade, there are no nagscreens or forced reboots.
At least for the last five years or so I've had no trouble with UEFI, WLAN or sound.
It's the basic things like not having to install third party utilities to have window centric window management (as opposed to app centric window management). Or being able to plug my Android phone in and be able to browse the files without additional utilities.
Outside of that, you lose no performance when running on battery, you get full performance when you need it, and high efficiency when you don't. Needing to manually choose a power/performance profile feels incredibly archaic to me, though I appreciate that some folks may want that level of manual control.
I have one 4 year old system 76 notebook with the NVIDIA gpu and that thing when running the 3d graphics mode is terrible (<3 hours), but its a gaming laptop and a beast (well 4 years ago it was..). I have 2.5 TB of storage, huge memory. Its more of a portable desktop than a notebook.
I really like software development on Linux much better than mac. There are a few things I miss from the apple side, but generally its been great.
On the Linux side, I've had great luck with AMD + recent kernels. I get around 6 hours now on my Thinkpad X13 gen 2 which is good enough for me.
I pick the right tool for the job and try not to apply ideology to tool choice.