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Comment by baz00 | Hacker News Reader

While I appreciate the efforts here which will no doubt extend the life of some of this hardware, I will never use Linux on my M1 Pro MBP if I'm honest. I'm not really a big fan of macOS from a development perspective. But honestly the whole system integration thing is where it wins over everything else and that will never be replicated by Linux based on the last 20 years of experience. It'll be persistent problems and regressions. I don't have the time, energy or motivation left in me to deal with that sort of stuff now. It only ever gets to 80% done. The last 20% is too hard for people to nail down.

My supposed freedom I trade for friction. I'm not sure that's a freedom I want really.

Again though I appreciate the efforts and the skills of the engineers working on this project.

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I feel exactly the same way, sadly.

I sometimes sense in people a degree of enjoyment in the process of tinkering with Linux on a Mac (or any other hardware) to make it function properly. This mirrors the satisfaction programmers often find when grappling with a compiler or achieving the ideal abstraction. However, it seems that this sense of accomplishment, while valuable in its own right, shouldn't be derived from the tools I use for my primary tasks. I prefer my machine to just work, so I can focus on addressing higher-level, more significant challenges.

I say this as someone who would be absolutely delighted if a few distros just worked 100% seamlessly on an MBP or similar. That would be a dream honestly.

They will work. It will just take a while.

Someday, I will buy a used M2 MBP, run Linux on it, and it will be awesome.

That may be a few years from now though.

I think that's a little hopeful on the basis you can't really buy a used PC laptop and it'll be awesome. I've been trying to do that for 25 years and it has never been awesome. There was an inflection point around 2006 where a Linux desktop machine was usable and comparable to a windows or mac machine but they have since left it in the dust.

Linux didn't do a whole lot other than keep changing the UI and never finish it since 2006.

Have been doing the secondhand laptop+Linux for 15 years and I have never felt like I was missing out on OS features.

And while true circa 2006 (these Broadcom wifi cards...), I have not experienced compatibility/lack of drivers in ages.

I kind of did that with PowerBooks back in the days.

The hard truth was that used Thinkpads were a better option.

For the same price you could get 3 years old ThinkPads which were more powerful and in better condition than 6 years old PowerBooks.

But I did installed Gentoo on my PowerBooks G3 and G4 (it just took 2 days to compile Firefox). And ironically, this knowledge proved useful in my first job when I repurposed old IBM Power servers with it.

I agree. There’s a certain freedom in the speakers working correctly, you know?

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