From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent
ssp.sh
ssp.sh
I somewhat regret my expensive switch from Linux to MacOS. MacOS is just so weird, it doesn't make any sense to me. For the first time in my life I feel like some tech-illiterate grandpa trying to figure out how to make his blasted computer do stuff.
I bought one for home use because I liked the hardware and the idea of running local llms. Long story short I'm still using my 6 year old Thinkpad running arch.
As for spaces: just create a few (important), then go to system settings and map alt 1-5 to switch between those
It's the first thing I install on any Mac.
Now I'm the opposite of you. I WANT to run Linux, and I have both a recent Framework and Lenovo laptop at home that I bought for this purpose. But I have some issue with Nvidia drivers, or just stuck down a rabbit hole trying to configure a GUI the way I want, or whatever, and I give up and go back to macOS where everything is familiar and works out of the box. I'm too old and/or busy to deal with that shit, but it probably reflects my age more than it does macOS vs Linux.
Nvidia drivers almost bricked my laptop once, and I'm glad a random guy in a Discord server could help me out because I couldn't even get to the boot screen.
Nvidia remains a problem on Linux, though they're making steps in the right direction. By putting all of their code in the secret and signed firmware, they can actually open source their drivers now, which is a lot better than how things used to be.
Still, I wouldn't buy Nvidia anything with a computer I want to run Linux on, it's not worth the hassle. Sucks that all developments related to AI are using Nvidia APIs though.
I use Linux since ~ 28 years, and having seen all the trouble with Nvidia drivers, I just avoid it. I just pick an Intel graphics Thinkpad, likely the previous generation to the last one, check compatibility in the Arch wiki and then buy it.
I don't think it's that. I've used Linux since high school as well and use Mac occasionally and I get the same feeling that Mac is weird and nonsensical.
The reason I'm pretty sure it's something intrinsical to Mac and not age, is that is that I also use Windows now and then and while I don't like it and I have lots of complaints about it, I find Windows in general does make more sense to me then Mac. It's just crappy and clunky and closed, but it's generally pretty straightforward.
And I've had people tell me that since Mac is unix compliant it's very similar to Linux but I've never found that to be the case. Mac in general is obtuse, poorly documented, rarely configurable, and I always get the impression they like to do everything based on some weird sense of aesthetic that they've cultivated over the years that seems to work for people fully invested in the Apple ecosystem but just makes no sense to anybody else.
Only thunderbolt docks work properly but they cost a lot more so an office with 95% windows will not bother buying them.
I used to work on Mac management but the constant middle finger to enterprise needs got me to look for something else. For example, can you finally have apple federated IDs without having your email and UPN the same in the directory? This has been broken for years since they introduced federated IDs and I wouldn't be surprised if it's still broken.
Edit: And oh! Why do I constantly have to (painfully manually) maximize windows. Preview is constantly choosing a different size, for example. Why is this not remembered.
I can't recall the last time an application in linux forgot its size after restarting.
Rectangle deals with a lot of that with key shortcuts.
I don't love MacOS, but I don't hate it. I have a bunch of extra utilities like Rectangle, BarTender, MonitorControl, Karabiner-Elements, that make things better.
I use MacPorts so when I open a terminal, I get a Unix/Linux environment.
Things I miss from Linux/X-11, primarily middle button copy/paste, and being able to run an X-11 app remotely over LAN/WAN. But a lot of that is configurable with terminals like iTerm2.
The trick is to capture the exact words you see in the Window menu, with the exact monitor name, and use those exact words when defining the keyboard shortcut.
A clunky PITA, but once setup, works like a charm.
I wanted to attach a build log to a Teams post (maybe we shouldn't be using Teams on Mac, but it's a corporate decision that's out of my hands), and I could not for the life of me figure how to get the file-selection dialog to look at the relevant folder (which was somewhere under /private/). In the end, I had to use iTerm to copy the file to somewhere the dialog could find.
The closest alternative I know of is dragging the target folder from an open Finder window into the dialog. Unlike pretty much any other OS, that doesn’t move the folder, but makes the dialog navigate to it. If you don’t have the folder open in Finder, you can do it with `open .` from a terminal.
Both of these approaches work in the open and save dialogs, and not just the Finder.
Re your second tip: how do you navigate up? I couldn’t see an obvious way to do that, either.
In many application windows you can navigate the hierarchical directory structure that contains the currently open file by right-clicking on the document name/icon in the window's title bar.
E.g. in Preview, Pages, Finder, ..., hover over the file or directory name in the window's title bar. If you right click on it, a pop-out will appear with a vertical hierarchical list of that file's parent folders. Selecting one of the parent folders will open a new Finder window at that location, allowing you to quickly navigate to a file's containing folder.
And some additions to the tips in other comments:
- Dragging a file or directory from finder to the terminal will paste its path onto your shell
- iTerm has Finder integrations. Right click on a folder in Finder, Services -> New iTerm2 Window Here
And you might enjoy some of these Finder tweaks from my "dotfiles" (just run them on the shell):
# Set Documents as the default location for new Finder windows
# For other paths, use `PfLo` and `file:///full/path/here/`
defaults write com.apple.finder NewWindowTarget -string "PfDo"
defaults write com.apple.finder NewWindowTargetPath -string "file://${HOME}/Documents/"
# Finder: show hidden files by default
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true
# Finder: show all filename extensions
defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowAllExtensions -bool true
# Finder: show status bar
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowStatusBar -bool true
# Finder: show path bar
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowPathbar -bool true
# Keep folders on top when sorting by name
defaults write com.apple.finder _FXSortFoldersFirst -bool true
# Enable spring loading for directories
defaults write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.springing.enabled -bool true
# Use list view in all Finder windows by default
# Four-letter codes for the other view modes: `icnv`, `clmv`, `glyv`
defaults write com.apple.finder FXPreferredViewStyle -string "Nlsv"
# Show the ~/Library folder
chflags nohidden ~/Library && xattr -p com.apple.FinderInfo ~/Library 2>/dev/null && xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo ~/Library
# Show the /Volumes folder
sudo chflags nohidden /Volumes
# Expand the following File Info panes:
# “General”, “Open with”, and “Sharing & Permissions”
defaults write com.apple.finder FXInfoPanesExpanded -dict \
General -bool true \
OpenWith -bool true \
Privileges -bool trueSo I suspect I would not like using apple devices
I was and am still surprised that I found nothing of that and even Ubuntu or fedora community look more "enterprise ready" to me these days.
That said, though, Macbooks are far and away the best laptop hardware you can get right now, and the combination of a POSIX/unix-like CLI environment and the ability to run common general-user desktop apps (Adobe/Microsoft/entertainment/etc) is very nice. On Linux you'd have to emulate some of the desktop apps, and on Windows you'd have to use WSL or Docker or such to gain a good *nix shell. And you'd have to put up with all the Windows ad spam and copilot spam.
But I do wish Apple would allow other operating systems on their laptops, and properly support them. I'd love to be able to properly BootCamp into Asahi or Windows for Arm with all the required drivers, etc.
I still kinda hate it because I can't get keyboard shortcuts to just fucking work. On the work MacBook I use the mouse more than I'd like because I can't reliably do stuff that I have done fluidly on windows and Linux for decades, mostly around keyboard cursor control, selection, jumping in blocks of words and paragraphs, sane use of home / end, page up/down etc. Just when I think I have it cracked, I try to select the next two words, or from cursor to end of line, and it's like "no sir, in this fucking app it does something completely different, good luck finding out why it how to fix it"
I agree about the hardware though. Since the early 2010s MacBook Pro has been the best hardware. Before the M series I had a MBP13 2015, and in fact, it's still the "kitchen laptop", running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
When picking up macOS, two things really help:
1. Having some macOS techies in your circle (co-workers or friends) to whom you can fearlessly ask random newbie questions, since there's a good chance there's a way that works well, which you are not discovering, and one or more people in your Mac User Friends group will have a good suggestion. (Maybe an LLM or Reddit can solve this, but real people are good, too.)
2. Leaning into whatever the macOS way to do the thing is. Don't try to do it the Windows or Linux way. Fall into the Apple paradigm. Don't fight it.
Most of the things Apple offers in terms of cloud sync don't work on everything so it's a pretty but useless walled garden to me.
It's a shame because I was a long standing mac user. Because it was a good and fairly open Unix with a good UI. But since iOS became popular macOS has moved into a direction that didn't work for me anymore. They care more about locking users into their ecosystem now than anything else.
When I have to touch Android or Windows, I feel absolutely awful because I am used to MacOS and iOS.
Likewise, Android and Windows users will feel awful when having to use MacOS and iOS.
It's simply a matter of habit and experience.
Having used Windows and Android for 10+ years before switching to the Apple ecosystem, I can say with confidence though that MacOS is not weird at all. It makes far more sense than the insanity that is Windows/Android.
* cpupower is pretty nice for manual control of your clock speeds
* the diversity of window managers allows you to have something like a mostly-black UI, which can help on OLED screens. You can even invert the screen color in X, if your programs insist on rendering black-on-white.
* not randomly cranking up the CPU for some windows whatever scan thing saves some power
And it seems the only Microsoft has working support… so sleep issues continue to plague linux… again… after we just solved them.
It makes me so furious.
For example, you computer to always go to kind of sleep when it is not necessarily what you want.
Like with the memory, you will not see app crashing upfront, but at some point macos stops all the other apps when you switch app. And like going from a web browser window, to a pdf, and back, or from a browser window to another, you will experience something like a 1s delay between your click and the window showing up from being minimized.
Stay away from ARM laptops and SoCs, they aren't there yet when it comes to Linux. If you like to tinker, go for it, but expect hardware to just not work, or worse, you'll get stuck on a kernel fork that never gets updated.
If you want a good Linux machine, buy one from a vendor that explicitly sells and supports machines with Linux on them.
IMO you can tinker as much as you want without forcing hardware compatibility issues upon yourself in order to have something to tinker with.
Any suggestions for something well built but lightweight and that one could figure out how to get 8+ hours of actual daily usage battery life on?
A recent ThinkPad with one of the latest AMD Ryzen U CPUs should have a very decent battery life. You just need some custom udev rules to set the right power saving states for different devices. Powertop should make this straightforward. IMHO, this is a great compromise, because you stay on x86_64 and Linux, you get within 3/4 of ARM's power efficiency, and hardware support is perfect. I've squeezed more than 11 hours from some models.
One thing that is often discounted is that Safari is marvel of power efficiency, which adds up to the efficiency of Apple M chips. IMHO, there should be dedicated Chromium and Firefox builds with compile flags and options that optimize efficiency. To counter that, running a barebones Linux setup is a good option. Keeping your CPU wakeups/s low lets you cross the 10 hour barrier.
Geat to know this about your experience with thinkpads. Due to your familiarity with multiple such devices would you be able to recommend a starting point for someone who wants something light with budget not being a constraint?
I've used the previous generation, and it's possible to get 10 hours of use on battery with some tweaks.
It's a very popular model, so it's well tested and everything should just work with the latest kernel.
Outside that maybe something like system 76. They advertise 14h for one of their models.
Regarding system76 I have heard really good things about their workstations but not about laptops. Have you used them? I recommend PopOS to anyone getting started with linux as the first distro though.
With a clean hyprland setup, light as a feather, battery lasts forever unless you run it hard.
Makes M4 Macs feel bloated and cheap.
Agreed about macs feeling bloated. I will not get overdramatic by calling latency in many functions unbearable but it is certainly quite high.
Battery is good enough (5-6hrs) for me on the AMD model (Ryzen AI 5 340) but definitely not Macbook territory in that regard.
I run Fedora and have coworkers who run Ubuntu and Arch as well without issue.
Framework is so close to having it all though.
The same that fill FOSDEM corridors with MacBooks, despite the main purpose of the whole weekend, or at least how its roots were almost 30 years ago.
Every new release I'd tick off more and more features that were unusable to me, hated all the iOSification of a desktop OS, and hated the new hardware lockdowns. The actual new features I liked were few and far between. So I just gave up on Apple completely. I had already left iOS at that point because of its locked down nature (no alternative appstores mainly and no hardware support for OpenPGP cards over NFC)
https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/arch-b...
Check it out here: https://github.com/unkyulee/micro-journal/blob/main/micro-jo...
The Mac sucks in the winter. The PC sucks in the summer.
The PC is however entirely unusable due to that without plugging an external mouse and keyboard in which is the problem.
It doesn't even get that hot with LLMs running with max fans, where the SoC is about 80º C.
Aside from those use cases, the M4 Max runs 43º C or less even in summer conditions.
There are newer trackpad for Windows, and the Surface line had pretty good trackpad as well (not Magic Trackpad levels, but perhaps 80% there ?
The more surprising part to me when I gave up on the Magic Trackpad moving to windows is I was over it in a week. I only ever used trackpads for a decade, but mouse's just work that much better on Windows/Linux, especially getting the extra buttons actual physical click helped a lot. The paradigms are just different enough that the Trackpad makes less sense than on macos.
To this day I still dont know why people worship Apple Silicon. Before it was even named and was mostly used by iPhone as A10, A11 and A12, when I stated these CPU are Desktop grade all I got was being laughed at. But then when it was put into usage by Mac using the same chip now known as M1, M2 etc. All of a sudden they are gold.
Apple did at one point has the leadership of PPW ( Performance per Watt ), but since then competitors have catch up. Qualcomm Oryon and ARM Cortex A930, even exceeding Apple if you look at other metrics. ( We will see what A18 has to bring us ).
-> the smoothness of the Apple trackpad
Because no other PC manufacturer is willing in invest into it and pay for it. For example speakers, it wasn't until Laptop reviewers paying attention and start saying how awful all the PC Laptop speakers were when compared to a MacBook before they started to improve. While Speakers were easier as it is low cost item. Trackpad isn't. But it got much better when Microsoft decided to invest into the PC ecosystem and Surface Laptop, so other PC manufacturers can take advantage of it. It still isn't quite as good as the one on MacBook. But Surface Laptop is pretty close, or may be just different as some would argue. Similar to Keyboard where Surface has the old MacBook 2015 scissors keyboard with better Key Stability, I value that as better than every keyboard that is currently with Apple.
Why do I worship apple silicon? Because it’s literally the best performing processor for a laptop on the planet. I can use it for a full day of work from the couch on battery, no performance hit, RAM maxed out, containers running, the fans never turn on, and it barely even gets warm. Or yeah, I can plug it in like a desktop and run multiple 4k high refresh rate monitors. And it’s not even that heavy or bulky.
all of that in one package was unheard of in a laptop before Apple silicon.
If you’re saying that desktop processors are still better, ok, but that’s a different story with different requirements. My MacBook is smaller than just the PSU and cooler I need for my nice desktop CPU.
My point is, it was available on iPhone. And has always been the case but people brush it off because it was an Smartphone SoC.
And I literally just stated there are ARM CPU Core offering available. You either compare the whole MacBook / Laptop, or you compare the CPU / SoC. The first being there aren't many choice compared to. The latter are there but not being used by laptop manufacturers.
And this is not the first time HN has mixed the two up. And god I missed the old Anandtech where this distinction was clear.
And yes, there are ARM laptops ASUs just brought out a laptop running on the Snapdragon X Plus. Geekbench Single Core 2231 versus the M4 at 3678.
I mean, I’m sure it’s fine for a lot of people, but fine for a lot of people isn’t all that impressive in 2025. The other ARM chips are still a long, long way off from getting close to base M series performance and features. When you start looking at the pro, ultra, etc M chips it’s another level again.
My point is HN was not impressed in any shape or form, even when presented with figures, when Apple silicon was used in iPhone, but is impressed with it when it was running inside a MacBook.
And you just basically reiterated my point. People are comparing devices, not CPU. ARM has Core design IP that could rival Apple's M3 design today. i.e from CPU IP Core perspective it isn't five years ahead. It just isn't being used in the current laptop range for different kind of reasons.
I participated in those conversations back then, it was a hotly contested issue, even aside from the weird criticism of individual opinions for not conforming to some imagined collective you don't seem to agree with anyway.
The point is that Apple's magic trackpad actually works great on Linux too. Smooth, responsive. accurate, multi touch and gestures, and all the rest. Just works. More or less exactly like it does on a mac. Too bad the blueooth stack on Linux is a bit unstable. Lots of issues with stuff randomly not connecting. Which of course isn't great with a trackpad.
The issue is that trackpads from other manufacturers just seem to be universally really, really bad in comparison to Apple's hardware. Particularly anything produced by Synaptics that I've had the displeasure of using is just mediocre shit in comparison. And they seem to dominate the market. It seems like they just gave up even trying to pretend to compete. If you see somebody using a wireless mouse, 9 out of 10 times they aren't using a mac. I work in a lot of co-working spaces. Lots of macs. Almost exclusively being used without a mouse. Just not a thing. The trackpad that comes with it is fine. If you see somebody using a mouse, it's usually with a windows/linux laptop.
That Samsung laptop was something I used in between two macs. My old intel mac died weeks before the M1 was supposed to come out. I used it for about half a year. I still have it and it runs Manjaro. From a software point of view, I can do anything I need to do on it that I would normally use a mac for and I'm actually completely fine with using it for work.
But the reason I went back to the mac is the hardware. Intel/AMD laptops are so completely miserably dreadful these days. Apple makes great hardware. Great screens, keyboard, trackpads, CPUs, etc. You always end up compromising on at least a few of these. It will have a great CPU but a shit screen. Or it will be overheating all the time and have a loud fan. Or weigh 10 kilos. Or have a lot of blinking leds and a fugly formfactor. It's always something.
I have considered putting Linux on my mac a few times. I'm pretty sure I could kind of make that work but the thing is that mac OS works well enough and I have no technical need to switch. And I can't really justify spending a lot of time trying to get things like GPUs. sound, touchId sensors, etc. to work. And I would expect having issues with all of that.
But in a pinch, I can live with a decent Linux laptop. I'd probably go for something a bit more premium if I had to go there these days. But Arch/Manjaro are great and do everything I need and I vastly prefer that over Windows.
Keyboard? Better than a Thinkpad keyboard?!
(Another option on some touchpads is to require a second tap for the "drop" action, and otherwise just keep the dragging active. It takes some getting used to, but then it works quite well.)
For those who keep moving between systems, there will be many more mistakes because objects will be dragged 'again' and involuntarily move where they shouldn't. It's so exhausting trying to deal with the "Apple way" of things, it's a total drag on otherwise pretty decent hardware.
The most important one is indeed SOFTWARE/DRIVER implementation. Using a hackintosh, the feeling is not the same as a MacBook, but close (depending on which Hardware is used). Furthermore there is ONE UI framework (AppKit?!) which makes implementing things like inertial scolling and rubberbanding pretty easy in one Place. On Linux you have multiple App Frameworks (GTK, QT, ...), which is significantly harder to coordinate and the backwards compatible X11 stuff. Did you know that libinput has only one permanent maintainer (Peter Hutterer)?
Of course the amount of Hardware to support is significantly lower on apples side, which makes optimization easier.
Still, all in all I think the Linux touchpad experience is very close to macOS on my Lenovo T480s with a glass touchpad from a yoga 7 in Arch / GNOME. The only thing that really is not as good and what bothers me From time to time is Palm detection.
┌─────────────────────────┐
│XXX │
│XX │
│X │
│ │
│ │
│ │
│ │
│ │
└─────────────────────────┘ gsettings list-recursively | grep 'peripherals\.touchpad'
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad accel-profile 'default'
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad click-method 'fingers'
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad disable-while-typing true
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad edge-scrolling-enabled false
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad left-handed 'mouse'
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad middle-click-emulation false
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad natural-scroll true
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad send-events 'enabled'
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad speed -0.044999999999999998
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-and-drag true
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-and-drag-lock false
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-button-map 'default'
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-to-click true
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad two-finger-scrolling-enabled true org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad accel-profile 'default'
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad click-method 'fingers'
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad disable-while-typing false
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad edge-scrolling-enabled false
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad left-handed 'mouse'
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad middle-click-emulation false
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad natural-scroll true
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad send-events 'enabled'
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad speed 0.0
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-and-drag true
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-and-drag-lock false
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-button-map 'default'
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-to-click false
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad two-finger-scrolling-enabled true
Either the
disable-while-typing false
The CPU architecture is great and I hope Qualcomm will soon be able to replicate it in normal laptops. I don't think desktop users care about that as much, though, and macOS has just as many infuriating particularities as any desktop Linux OS. It just comes with better drivers.
I thought this too for many years, but have found the trackpad on the LG Gram to be equal or better.
I'm a Sway user (ironically on Fedora Asahi Remix on a Mac) and I won't have it any other sway... er... I mean way.
I have no idea how people are still using alt tab in 2025.
Everything is full screen almost always. In a week I need windows tiled for maybe 2h.
These days I use niri which at its core, is just Alt-Tab blown up as your actual desktop.
Though you'll have to fiddle a bit with stuff like waybar, fuzzel and xwayland-satellite. But once you've configured that stuff you won't have to fiddle with it non-stop.
I'm currently running it on Fedora, to be clear.
The good news is Hyprland supports this quite nicely. I don't know when you last tried it but it's easy to float windows as needed in a dynamic way. You can assign a keybinding to toggle floating on a specific window and then you can move and resize it while holding either mouse button.
It also has a feature called "pin" to make something always on top which you can assign to a keybinding to toggle this as needed. Floating windows are already pinned by default on top of tiled windows so you only need to deal with this when you have 2+ overlapping floating windows.
Combining floating and pin together lets you overlap things in whatever way works best for you in a config-less way.
Optionally you can also pre-assign specific apps to always float or be pinned in your config file and toggle them with keybinds too.
I'm sure there's certain things that I do that are inefficient with floating windows - even despite with macos now having a bit of tiling management, but it's just easier to deal with on the brain. I'm not really organised or methodical for the most part and I kind of like it that way.
When I read things like this it really sounds like there is some reality distortion field in the mac world. How is that anywhere special? I'm running a thinkpad X1 as my 2 main laptops (it was my only work machine until 2 years ago) and I never felt the need to replace it. It gave me 8-10h battery life and the only issue I ever had was that 1.5 years ago the battery was reaching end of life and capacity started dropping very fast.
That was just a 70$ repair I could easily do myself.
My youngest daughter just inherited my mother's x220 (?) (she has been running Linux) that I got for my mother in 2011 or 2012. That never received any work and still works fine except that I didn't change the battery so you have to run it of ac power.
My older daughter and my mother both just got some used thinkpads that are >3years old and don't have any issues either.
So from my experience a 5 year lifetime for a macbook is really nothing special and definitely not "crazy good".
- The trackpad (but other manufacturers now have tolerable alternatives and anyway you can work without it)
- The screen : at an equivalent price point (and even more), nothing comes close to Apple screens. The cheapest MacBook have a better screen than most high end PCs.
- The audio : Apple truly did some sorcery to get such an awesome sound from machines that are flat as sheet. It’s so good that you can watch a movie on your MacBook without earbuds and don’t be bothered.
Everything else like build quality is overall better than most other alternatives but a few other manufacturers are also good at it.
I say this as someone who uses a MacBook for work despite loving Linux and who hates what macOS have become. The hardware is really that good.
Yes, other apps and companies do this, but out the box there are some pretty great options from Apple.
My m3 max mbpro I only wish was the larger screen one and not the 13 inch one … oh well. But I suspect it will last me — and be passed down as well — 8-10 years as well.
The trackpads are second to none. So are the speakers. The screen are pretty good. I wish mine got even brighter but the m4s do. The keyboard is finally awesome.
The OS just works. In fact I moved from Linux to MacOS. I thought I’d miss i3 and sway but with Magnet and a launcher I don’t. I live in a terminal and can split that as much as I like. And gui apps Magnet does a decent job.
There are projects to go even further and you don’t have to leave MacOS for all the tiling love.
https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst
But I get basically everything I need with Magnet.
So TLDR I used to be a huge Linux head (I still am…) but I’m practical now and tired and macOS is a small price to pay for such amazing hardware.
More on why I left Linux as my main platform: https://gigatexal.blog/pages/no-perfect-workstation/no-perfe...
One example: https://www.brightintosh.de/ but there's many others.
amazing!
* more a turn of phrase, a hug, a handshake, a thank you thank you thank you all suffice ;-)
I insta bought the suggested app
this brings up a good Q -- what monitors other than the absurd Apple XDR are out there that are good at high brightness. I'm loving the brightness above 500 nits on this main screen I want it everywhere.
"I learned to like nice things. I became a bit bougie, hah. I like the build quality of the Apple laptops. The amazing trackpads. The vibrant screens. And how, for the most part, the hardware and software just work together so well. Seamlessly connecting Apple Keyboards to my Apple Laptop, or my Apple Headphones to my Apple Laptop, etc., etc."
so boils down to this intangible "bougieness" they tricked you with. I dont know about Apple build quality. I have the experience that they absolutely slow down, break down faster, more expensive to get fixed, and the trackpad is annoying as hell. I haven't had any problems with headphones or connecting keyboards (wireless or wired) in non macOS laptops either. It is 2025 and all my computers work fine with such peripherals.
The screens look vibrant i'll give you that, but you pay for it anyway, like you could've paid with another laptop.
Now personally I'd be happier running linux and I'm looking forward to arch linux on asahi working on my laptop. But I will use macos (which I used to like but has become steadily worse over the years) just because of the hardware
I am not a sane, logical, rational person most of the time ... but I think not many folks are.
The screen is a mirrowy mess. PC Laptop with matte screens cost 500, MacBook 1500.
I’ve owned a hell of a lot of laptops and MacBooks are the best, not because of Mac, but because of the build quality. The touchpad is perfect, the aluminum body is rugged, the screen is amazing, and the audio truly is sorcery thanks to Apple acquiring Beat’s audionet.
The worst laptop for build quality were those HP Chromebooks.
ThinkPad’s are mid tier but still made of plastic.
Yoga foldable or a MS Surface is better.
MSI or Razor if you don’t feel like ever touching your laptop (:fire:)
Thanks Tim, but I prefer my day without bullshit propaganda.
Glad you know how my eyes work. You probably will say next that I can’t see the refresh.
Thanks for letting me know how my eyes work.
This one is very similar. I bought mine from Thailand
Comparable. Things you can't compare between two laptop screens.
> $689.99
That computer has neither an OLED display nor a price of $600.
Cracked the plastic case a bit but that was it. The most amazing part to me was not the HDD surviving but the LCD backlight. This back was when they still used those super fragile thin CCFLs.
It is my understanding that Apple did lock their trackpad tech behind a patent and that is why all the others suck. So it's really not their fault and it is very unfortunate if that's the case.
Apple threads are always so funny.
(The HomePod Mini sounds quality really sucks by comparison, FWIW.)
Because of this conversation, I just watched Ne Zha (the first one, from 2019) on my M1-generation MacBook Pro. It sounded okay. I didn't hate it like I'd hate listening on a tablet or something. But...
> I’ve never heard a BT speaker of any size sound that good.
My MacBook Pro didn't sound as good as the smallest bluetooth speaker that I personally own and use (Marshall Kilburn), which is battery powered and whose primary daily use in my life is playing podcasts while I shower. It definitely didn't sound as good as the budget brand PC speakers I use with my TV (Edifier 1700BTs), either-- with or without a subwoofer. It didn't even sound as good as my wireless earbuds, let alone my headphones.
I don't think my tastes are that fancy. I've never had a surround sound setup. I've never tried a pair of IEMs. I've never owned or pursued a "audiophile"-grade equipment. I'm not a basshead, either.
I can appreciate some of the nice qualities of my MacBook's speakers relative to the form factor. But at the end of the day it still clearly falls in the "not real speakers" bucket. They're laptop speakers, not magic.
They tend to be plastic junk.
Yes thinkpads are good, but most laptops are trash disposable hardware
I've owned old macbooks… I got scalded by the metal screws on the bottom in the summer because apple thought looking sleek was more important than proper cooling.
Macs were designed up to the thermal specs that should have been but never came.
Hence the m1: enough is enough
My >10 yo macbooks also have bad batteries. One of them won't last one minute, and will also overheat with minor workloads. They were not immune to overheating when new, but unreasonable overhearing (for the time) definitely didn't become an issue at within 3 years of purchase.
And that's with Intel macbooks. My M1 from Dec 2020 works like new (I'm sure the battery life has shortened, but not in a way that I notice). It overheated a couple times running LLMs—that's it. That's how I know the fans work.
Computing kind of stagnated since 2010 and plenty of hardware since then still works fine today and is usable enough for many tasks. Apple was nice for needing not all that many different drivers but its statnge integrations like drive fans to bios are obnoxious.
Every plastic laptop I've bought has busted within two years, whether it's mechanical stress or poor heat design. They feel less like reliable tools and more like toys. Looking specifically at you, thinkpads.
Meanwhile, the MacBook Pro I bought for myself for college 17 years ago still boots. The battery is dead, but that's an incredibly long life for any hardware of that complexity.
You can blame microsoft for that unfortunately. They made the vendors to change how it all works to workaround windows issues and it didn't even work.
I always buy second hand / refurb of repairable models.
I've been burned by Apple before. Not touching their stuff again.
But here I'll bite: I've had MBPs for work for like 15 years now and I bought a personal high spec Thinkpad. I now regret that purchase because my work machine is better than my personal machine in literally every way. My over $2k Thinkpad just sits there gathering dust because I don't want to use it. And unlike MacBooks, the secondary market for it is nothing so I can't just sell it and recover most of the loss.
Most of my macbook airs have lasted at least 7 to 8 years. None have actually died and were still intact, but I just gave them away, so I don't know how much longer they lasted.
My 2015 macbook pro (pre butterfly) is still going strong today; I did a battery replacement myself which was a huge pain in the arse, so it definitely feels replenished.
I have replaced many of my family members laptops with M-series laptops, nay issue, and I have a feeling they'll easily go a decade, though at some point they'll all need the battery replaced (but I will probably just have Apple do it this time - unless it is easy now with the repair manuals being available by Apple).
To each their own but I really don't want my laptop to imitate that.
Apple screens also tend to have pretty bad response times too. They are sharp and color accurate but fall down in places.
What I need is Apple MacBook hardware with a 100% supported Linux OS. This combination simply doesn’t exist and there’s no amount of money to make it happen (yes I know about asahi.)
On another note, I actually think that the most important things that work better on the Apple devices is the mic and camera, the rest is somewhat unimportant on the go if you work at a desk.
(That may just be on iOS though...)
Also as a side note, as a user, I agree you don't care whose fault is it, but then this is hacker news where we are interested in whose fault it is.
Prominent maintainers quit and in a couple of months there will be two years since latest m3+ macs are unsupported
This month's Asahi blog post begs to differ.
> This completes our transition to a fully upstream graphics stack, and as such we are retiring our Mesa fork completely...
we have managed to upstream a little over 20% of our entire patch set in just under five months.
Technically the macbook never sleeps, it enters a low power mode, except when it's blocked by specific processes or does additional background tasks (updates etc.)
How well it's done on windows or linux depends on the maker of the machine (you, if you built it). The Surface lineup will also enter low power mode as flawlessly, if that's what you care about the most.
It kinda matters.
As a laptop user this just makes me depressed :(
The clickpads are pretty imprecise and poor, and compared to this the Macbook is much nicer.
https://forum.devtalk.com/t/a-reason-why-mac-speakers-sound-...
Apple is actually driving their speakers closer to their actual physical limits which are driven by average power not peak momentary power.
IIRC, there is an algorithm which overdrives the speakers in physically dangerous zones only on some frequencies and only in short bursts of time with a throttle until the next over drive if necessary.
For the user it’s transparent because we are talking about timings in milliseconds so except if you play a static frequency you can’t notice anything.
Asahi explained that they had to reverse engineer this because they didn’t understand why the sound was so bad on Linux.
Most people use cheaper android phones, that are slower and with a much shorted timespan. then they try a 1k€ iPhone and it is great and conclude they prefer the iPhone to Android: it is not an apple to apple comparison, you should compare it to a 1k€ android lol.
Same things happens on laptops. If you try to use a 500-600€ laptop as work main machine for multiple years it will fall apart. Than you try a MacBook and it feels great because after 5 years is still usable.
Its not only the Pros, no "high-end" laptop running Windows or Linux with just 8GB of RAM can perform better than a MacBook Air with 8GB. I don't know how Apple has optimized memory usage, but my personal feeling is that 8GB of RAM on Macs is equivalent to 32GB on non-Apple devices.
I'm not some Apple fanboy—I've been using Arch Linux daily for the past month or two, and it's great. However, there isn't a day that passes without screen freezes during peak usage, and I need to reboot every day or two. This happens despite having 32GB of RAM, an RTX 4060, and a Ryzen 5 7600. That never happens with my 5-year-old MacBook Air.
I really wish Linux were as good as macOS, I really do. I'm pushing myself to use it even though I experience frustration every day, but this simply isn't the case. It's easy to optimize the system and applications for one specific hardware configuration (like Apple does), but it's very hard, if not impossible, to do this for every possible hardware combination available today. That's why Linux and Windows can't win this performance battle.
> Its not only the Pros, no "high-end" laptop running Windows or Linux with just 8GB of RAM can perform better than a MacBook Air with 8GB
Doesn't matter because for the equivalent price you can load up your non-Apple Machine with RAM to the Max, same with SSD Storage. With a MacBook you would need to prepare to cough up, up to 9k more than the base model for a huge SSD and RAM. No more than 1k for this elsewhere
> ve been using Arch Linux daily for the past month or two, and it's great. However, there isn't a day that passes without screen freezes during peak usage, and I need to reboot every day or two.
I don't need to reboot for Weeks, I'm using Fedora though. It sounds like you're doing something terribly wrong, as most Linux Users also don't need to reboot ever 1-2 days. Maybe you should try a more beginner friendly distro if Arch is too complex for you
Don't get me started on MacOS itself and its myriad of problems.
Again, I don't think the issue here is Linux itself
I know many people like their macs but it's not that single perfekt machine people want it to be
Thanks for confirming my point, we have actual benchmarks that objectively show this isn't the case but apple fanboys still make these sort of claims. The same with battery life, if you listen to apple fanboys you get the impression that battery life above 5h was simply unheard off until the M1 came along. I had a x200 in 2009 or 2010 that was giving me 10h+ in the large battery and I could even swap over to the smaller one to get another 6h (?) or so.
> I'm not some Apple fanboy—I've been using Arch Linux daily for the past month or two, and it's great. However, there isn't a day that passes without screen freezes during peak usage, and I need to reboot every day or two. This happens despite having 32GB of RAM, an RTX 4060, and a Ryzen 5 7600. That never happens with my 5-year-old MacBook Air.
The only thing I can say to that is that in my experience nvidia drivers have become objectively worse over the last 2 years. On my desktop I used to be able to play games without issues, but recently lots of them lock up after a while (only in games in my experience). My Intel laptop never has any issues. I'm now actively looking for an AMD GPU because it has become so annoying.
two things could be possibly true, people are sheep and people who interact with the platform can enjoy it so much that they become fans. This means that any person who actually enjoys using the technology is immediately dismissible because now they are fans. Right?
It’s so stupid because I’m a die hard linux user but I can definitely appreciate my Apple devices.
I’ve had this discussion so many times in real life, what is the value of a ThinkPad T-series over a ThinkPad E-series; or a HP Elitebook over an Ideabook? The specification looks the same, on paper. Why should I convince my employer to fork out an extra €500?
The truth is, the things that really matter to people don’t fit very well on a spec sheet. Build quality, palm rejection, colour accuracy, enjoyable sound, even the feel of the chassis. Apple seems to put a lot of care and attention into these things, so yes, they’ve optimised the operating system to be more pleasurable to use… and so it is, even in low memory conditions- they prioritise things the user might care about. (The currently active program, being responsive etc).
I’ll give another example, The Commodore64. It is so comically weak compared to even the micro processor inside my keyboard… so if compared to a full-blown desktop computer of the modern day (which is thousands of times more powerful still…) I should feel like the modern computer is better. Yet when I type on a Commodore 64 it is so immediate… there is no lag in typing, the words appear on the screen as quickly as they are pressed, it feels mechanical. It feels immediate. it feels direct.
Why? Clearly the Commodore 64 has much fewer resources, but it feels so much nicer to write text on a Commodore 64. Not because of the keyboard (I have a better one), not because of the processor (because it’s a weaker one). But because the latency of typing is so low that it is barely perceptible and that goes directly against the specification.
One cannot infer user experience from spec sheets.
And people interacting with the Apple ecosystem who become fans might have a point. No matter how much you don’t want to hear it.
What is annoying and was why I posted is that a significant number of apple users become fans as you say and somehow view everything that apple does as extraordinary, that leads to statements like in the article that apple is "crazy good" because the used laptops for 5 years without having to repair them. Surely you can admit that that is nothing special?! Similarly, saying osx runs as good on 8 GB as Windows or Linux on 32GB that's just objectively not true. There's been plenty of objective benchmarks which showed differently and I have used macs enough to know that if ram gets tight they grind to a halt just as much.
I just don't understand the fanboyism about a brand that it becomes like supporting a football club. Do I like thinkpads, yes I had good experiences (and I have trouble with laptops without a trackpoint). Am I a fan? No, Lenovo is just a company which makes plenty of crap, i.e. the new X1 carbon i got from work is a hot piece of garbage.
glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer" OpenGL renderer string: AMD Radeon Graphics (radeonsi, raphael_mendocino, LLVM 20.1.8, DRM 3.64, 6.16.0-arch2-1)
I've added a few env parameters Claude suggested in ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf, and now it shows: OpenGL renderer string: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
Will give it a try few days, to see how it behaves.
Versus a Mac where you can just start it and get working. It's possible with PC hardware, but it takes more work for the customer (or vendor).
That's just how this works. It's a performance vs. efficiency tradeoff.
And there's nothing special about your workload. It's small in comparison to many others that many other OSes on many other ISAs, including Windows & x86 w/ AWE, have been running for quite some time with no issue.
Applications do not allocate memory through the kernel, though. There's a layer between the application code and the kernel, usually the libc or equivalent, that takes the page and fills it with smaller allocations. And most allocators out there usually request pretty big chunks at a time too, measured in megabytes/hundreds of pages.
So what you are saying might be technically true if you were to dispatch all mallocs to the kernel, it is not actually true in the real world.
No wonder you are facing non-existent issues. Stop blaming it on Arch. If it was widespread, there would be a fix by now for it. You messed it up. It's upto you to solve it. Also it's not "your mac". Apple has full remote access and can brick "your mac" anytime. With apple, you get the feeling of owning without actually owning anything. Gotta give it to them
It wasn’t bad, and I’m sure I’d just get used to it if I picked one and lived with it, the same way I’ve gotten used to Apple’s dumb photo app
Using them side by side made it really obvious tho
I have way more accidental touches, drags, wrong palm detection, etc.
Windows isn't much better (or is arguably worse because "natural scrolling" still somehow isn't an out of the box thing).
And btw a used M1 Air, at almost 5 years old now, is still a great budget choice for anyone.
Author should have just put in a longer time frame.
If you think that's even close to good, then it's you who lives in a reality distortion field. But so are all of the PC laptop manufacturers, reviewers and buyers. I don't get it.
I desperately want to move to a Linux laptop (I run it on every desktop PC I own, and I hate that I have to deal with a locked-down system). I've tried more laptops than is probably financially healthy for me. There's no price point that buys you even close to what an entry-level Macbook Air offers, not only in terms of battery life, but also weight, screen quality and keyboard.
That's a laptop from 2016, IIRC at the time that was about the same you got out of a top of the line macbook. But I'm pretty certain that 2016 macbook would not have that battery life now, while I could easily swap out the battery and am back to 10h battery life.
But you don't hate a soldered down unupgradable system.
I doubt they are dead after 5 years - I have a number of decade+ old MacBooks kicking around the family, and they work just fine.
It's more that anyone in software is going to need to upgrade around the 5 year mark anyway, because too much shit has changed in the outside world (for example, Apple's transition to ARM processors, or Windows 11 requiring recent TPM support).
Yes I agree Apple make good quality hardware and I would be surprised if they died after 5 years. My objection is simply these statements that overly praise apple for things that are pretty bogstandard.
> It's more that anyone in software is going to need to upgrade around the 5 year mark anyway, because too much shit has changed in the outside world (for example, Apple's transition to ARM processors, or Windows 11 requiring recent TPM support).
One more reason to run Linux.
If only we could convince the platform gatekeepers to support linux. iOS is unfortunately a not inconsequential market to abandon, and there's no great way to build iOS software in a pure linux environment.
So are MacBooks just another level? Of course not! If you have to use something with the constant fear of it breaking down (and then the only options remaining buying a new one or repairing at the cost often as much or sometimes more than the cost of laptop itself) then that's anything but great. But what infuriates me is people asking "but how many times has that happened?", well, enough times in about half a lifetime! And their extra warranty (which are for + or +2 years, not sure) now cost a lot more than it cost the last time (w.r.t device price) I bought their extended warranty in 2012.
The problem is other than repair bankruptcy, other laptops, esp. at the lower segment of macs (Air et al), there really are not many good laptops in those prices. X1s are costly laptops. But if they offer comparable features then I'd say for repairability alone they will be great replacements.
> and don't have any issues either.
It's very different from something being great. While I absolutely hate Apple making their devices impossible to repair and fact more so making it an unwise decision to even try to repair for the cost, their laptops are actually quite good. But it stops there. Their phones are like ages behind competition and they have a business because of a captive/hostage user base :)
I have a mid 2014 15.6" Macbook Pro. It still runs fine. Apple doesn't support it though. I'm also not claiming 11 years is "crazy good" either.
On the opposite side though, I don't like giving old machines to non-techies. I'm actually planning to get rid of that 2014 MBP since it's sat plugged in but basically unused for 4 years, but I don't like the idea of a non-techie taking it and not getting security updates. If someone wanted it I'd prefer they know what they're getting. Sure it will view websites, run video from youtube, etc... but no support. Runs crazy hot too.
So if you tell someone buy a apple laptop you know they will get a good laptop but if you tell them to buy a Lenovo they might end up with the worst crap.
Perhaps not relevant if you're the sort of person who upgrades every year or two anyway. But a big deal if you're not.
At work, my Thinkpad from 2021 is still holding on, and has higher specs than entry level MacBooks from 2025.
This stuff last long:
* Build quality, regarding chassis and screws.
* Replacement parts are available. Hardware maintenance manual is available. A broken palm rest is something fixable.
* Handle it with care.
The biggest issue of ThinkPads is that the L-Series can be purchased (same hardware, bad chassis) and that bad panels can be ordered. Recently Lenovo removed the HiDPI panel option from the X13. Which is the worst possible idea. Another dumb idea is the ugly and useless camera bump protruding from the panel.
Apple takes always a lot money from and prevents these mistakes. But Apple loves to deliver bad keyboards. And the aluminium chassis is bad in comparison to magnesium chassis (much better feeling, never hot or cold).
Avoidable mistakes. None of these are hard challenges. As the biggest mistake “six rows keyboards”. The complete industry ruined laptop with 16:9 and after a decade we’re allowed to enjoy the much better 16:10 again. The keyboards are still small, squeezed things with awkwardly grouped keys. The X220 keyboard is a masterpiece in layout.
(I know, because I had both, fully upgraded)
Both problems appeared long past 5 years of usage, more like 7-8 years after I bought it. In fact I don't remember having a computer fail on me in within 5 years since I bought it. And I was buying cheapest crap possible for majority of the last 25 years.
I don't have much experience with Macs, but from talking with friends it seems they break more not less often.
My comparison was with Windows PCs, that always were super slowish after 2-3 years. The built quality always felt cheap. The battery was done after 2 years. Maybe it was also an unfair comparison, that I bought cheaper PCs, but at work I recently had to a dev HP laptop much later, and I had a very similar experience.
So maybe the problem is more windows than the PCs, but if you have used MacBooks, then you definitely know the difference. Running a Lenovo now, I love the much other things. Let's see how long it holds. ThinkPads are defenitely in a similar categories as Macbooks, kind of unbreakable. Love them too.
If a Windows PC is "super slowish" after 2-3 years, that's a Windows problem. You may want to run Linux as your main OS and booting Windows in a VM only for critical needs. Good Linux installs don't get "super slowish" at all unless you're running them on real bottom-of-the-barrel hardware.
The one I just retired was my portable workhorse from 2014-2024. I got annoyed towards the end bc the latest OS wasn’t supported (but still got security updates for my old macOS version at least).
Overall, I never needed to replaced battery, hard drive, cpus, screens or really any of the hardware on any of them over 2 decades. And I got at least 6 yrs out of each one.
I'm not an Apple fanboi, I have a lot of linux experience, back in the day built a Tivo like linux PC with TV capture card as a DVR and had to mess with all sorts of X11 settings, etc. Used to build PCs for gaming and mess with settings. The whole It Just Works is true with Apple, everything hardware wise is smooth. The annoyances of Apple software to me don't bubble up to the level of wanting to switch, but articles like above make me think about getting a cheap Mini PC to play around and see if things like Omarchy make the level of messing with settings much lower than it used to be.
I finally gave in and bought a MBP M3 Max 14" and the thing is a beast. Multiple days of battery life. Beautiful display. Indestructable casing and USB ports. Speaker quality is amazing - I can play music and podcasts in the background on it when traveling - I could never do this on any Thinkpad. The only thing it sucks at is the keyboard and OS X, but I've learned to live with both.
Doubt I'll ever go back to a Thinkpad or any non-macbook laptop until a company makes a similar quality one I can run Linux on.
Even considering this most people still tend to underestimate the lifespan of Windows PCs lol
Tge first one I bought in that way is still working after 14 years. I converted it from Windows to Linux a few years ago and My mother uses it for browsing, banking and email. Personally I'm using a 7 years old HP.
Batteries get upgraded when necessary and first thin I do after buying is adding RAM.
I don't get how 5 years is a good lifespan on a Mac?
Once on this site I saw someone talking about how the lifespan is so good they only had to replace their MacBook every two years instead of every year, and it just made me realize "crazy good lifespan" is meaningless.
It's probably because when everybody including your mom and dad has an Apple device, you really need something like the RDF to stay cool.
Anyway, I don't understand the evangelism around Apple. Evangelism is by definition toxic.
The evangelism will get you nowhere but a place where one company dictates everything.
Every IT survey I’ve ever seen shows Macs as more reliable. On the other hand the repairs are often more expensive. So there’s a trade off.
For me, my M1 16” is a champ. The computer is almost too good. I’d like to upgrade but honestly there’s no reason to so I just can’t get myself to ditch a perfectly good computer.
This worked quite well. The Thinkpads were even (just) fast enough to do YouTube.
The point is that it really quite depends on what your workload is. If I made them use AutoCAD on these machines from 2004 they'd quit. This particular workflow was not ideal, but doable.
I have a 2020 M1 MB Air that I would love to replace, but it would be daft to. I don't bump up against any limitations. One of my kids uses my old 2011 MB Pro for his school, which granted I did upgrade to an SSD as well, but even so it's quite usable.
Mac hardware has been pretty consistently good for a very long time. They've had some stinkers (hello MacTV), but otherwise you can usually depend on them.
Like others I'm not thrilled with some of the OS changes, but the alternatives aren't a lot better. Windows keeps shooting itself in the foot, and chasing the Linux desktop is an exercise best left to those young enough to have the patience. I'm so done with distro-hopping.
My sister had a 2011 MacBook Air until it stopped getting software updates in 2020.
My wife’s MacBook Air is 12 years old and my wife doesn’t want a new one (though it would drive me crazy). No issues yet, though obviously battery is not what it once was.
Anyway, I think MacBooks last much longer than 5 years if you can control your new hardware envy.
Just website inefficiency creep has made older devices obsolete, I think it has around 4gb of Ram which Chrome can chew through with a few tabs open.
And the real irony is past 5 years it drops off a cliff because of Intel Mac End of life.
Most people really don't care about tech specs for a daily driver. I mean, I love specs but my coffee table laptop is a Google Pixelbook (2017) with a metal body and ancient junk inside, but it still feels good to use.
IME, (possibly outdated), but thinkpads have some of the worst quality displays I've ever seen.
I have a 2008 Acer, a 2018 Thinkpad, a 2019 HP, a 2024 framework, and a 2024 MacBook.
I can't stand 1080p for personal use anymore, and never in my life on Windows or Linux have I gotten more than 4 hours out of a battery.
Framework competes on repairability, price and OS choice. Pound for pound, MacBook is a much better piece of hardware.
Now I’m not sure whether to install Linux on it (I’ve used Linux as my main OS before the Mac), or try to downgrade to Catalina again and just build whatever software I need from source.
My experience over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tinkering with to keep running well. MacOS is lower effort. I haven't run Windows in a long time, but compared to Linux, it also doesn't require constant tinkering.
While I also think Linux user experience becomes more and more "it just works", the incentives are such that a commercial experience like macOS is likely to always be a few levels above.
In my current job, we're using Ubuntu for our development machines. It's a solid system.
Now if you're talking Arch Linux... sure. The Arch devs love yanking the carpet out from under you and then telling you "you should have read that forum post from a week ago if you didn't want your system to break". But other distros, like Slackware, Debian, and Void, are quite stable across updates.
It's not the hours of debugging why grub suddenly broke or X isn't starting anymore it was long ago.
And it's almost always something you need to do at system upgrade time. It's not like your system doesn't boot all of a sudden.
Is it this or that you have the Linux skills to tinker so just do. Giving Linux laptops to non-techies yields self-sufficiency in people I've not seen with other OS platforms.
It depends. I've been running Debian since 2020-ish. I picked my hardware to run Linux. Nothing much changed for me between Debian 10 and 13 tbh.
> I haven't run Windows in a long time, but compared to Linux, it also doesn't require constant tinkering.
I would say Windows is a bit worse now. I find I have to use Rufus to enable some magic option to able Local user installation (I am not having a MS account), setup choco, install the stuff via choco and then set a desktop background.
> While I also think Linux user experience becomes more and more "it just works", the incentives are such that a commercial experience like macOS is likely to always be a few levels above
Most stuff just does work. If you are running exotic hardware, then sure. But if you have a bog standard desktop or laptop it will work.
The biggest problem with Linux tbh is that if you aren't using Gnome or KDE, the UI is just bit jank in some places.
Reading this makes me a little misty-eyed and I miss my solid old Thinkpads from 10-20 years back.
I'm considering making that same switch from MacOS to Arch, but I'm not sure if I should have confidence in something like Omarchy which is relatively new.
Etc.
I would love to try a linux laptop, but I want decent battery and no fan. Arm support for linux desktops is still very very limited and buggy.
I'm think about going in the other direction, because my p14s (2023) screen is starting to feel too small for my old eyes and the battery life was never good. I think a Macbook Air upgraded to 32GB would provide enough speed, whilst having a better screen. There doesn't seem to be an X1-like Thinkpad that has a 15 or 16 inch screen that I can find. One problem is lenovo has so many product lines it takes in depth research to find what you're looking for. Has anyone tried newer AMD cpus in Thinkpads? My workflow is very linux oriented and my brain doesn't like the idea that I'll need to develop on mac and deploy to linux. That seems too risky to me and I don't need or want docker if I don't have to use it.
https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/laptop/ryzen/7000...
> battery level not the same.
> touchpad.
The reasons for not using Linux on the laptop remains the same after decades :-(
It's really good nowadays, but the issues remain the same sadly, and it's not Linux devs fault either, it's just the manufacturer lack of support.
Shipito is one of many
I just wish Apple would let us have instant workspace navigation. It is pretty much the only reason why I wrestle with getting Yabai working on every major OS update. There is “reduced animation” setting but it has a short fade in-and-out animation and it drives me crazy.
Amen.
I tried switching to Aerospace, but it would become visibly laggy when connected to an external display and switching a screen that had Zed open for some reason. So I've switched back to Yabai :(
Having to replace a board and only lasting 5 years is good?
I had a ThinkPad that lasted almost 10 years, then an Acer Swift which lasted 5 years and was doing great until our home burnt down in a wildfire (!!), and now I have a several years old MSI which is doing fine. Also never needed any repairs for any laptop I've ever bought...
Seeing that quote makes me think Apple quality is shit...
Macbook Pros satisfy b), c), d) and e). I currently have an HP laptop that satisfies a), c), d), and e). But is just 43Wh (now 36Wh after a few years).
Didn't hear great things about the build quality and touchpad although these were just reddit reviews.
I really like the repairability though, so I'll be watching their product line.
Now I just want to get work down on an OS that feels like it belongs to power users and closely matches my deployment targets.
This is why I switched to Omarchy.
I'm very happy I went through the pain of setting everything up from scratch. It taught me how it all works. I just don't see how I'd get that same knowledge ever with Omarchy
I can from a time when sysadmins were expected to know C and kernel and TCP/IP internals, but that world is no more. Blame it on education, blame it on the pace of technology, I don't know.
I'm not sure how I feel about that, especially thinking about when all the people who know and can build low-level stuff retire and die off. Maybe AI will save them. Who knows?
Not everyone has a spare machine to tinker with.
With Omarchy you get a working good looking OS with thought out defaults and built in themes. It's ready to use, but can be customized.
To think, back in the 70s/80s before Minix and Linux, many of us had to do illegal things to even get access to computers running UNIX.
The entry barrier was high and risky, and so was the desire to learn.
Hyprland and desktop ricing is the desktop equivalent of configuring your editor.
Also curious about Windows on Arm, but my plan is to run Linux mainly (which hopefully gets better support at that point!)
Clearly this person just wants hackability and tweakability, which Arch will give you in spades. All power to them!
I'd say this is a "fine" alternative, but not an upgrade.
+1 for using an ARM processor though. Once you leave x86 and the fan parade, there is no going back. Silence is bliss.
That was years ago and I'm still on it.
That’s stable for you, even the ‘less nice’ parts are a feature of the distribution if you’re running a fleet. On desktops people have been running testing or unstable for this reason since forever.
Debian is great if what you want to do, is something that has been easy for 5 years. You set it up and forget it.
Debian breaks down whenever you try to do something new that requires some new dependency. Oh you want to run a Go program written in 2023? Now you have to download and install the new version yourself because the latest version in apt is 1.19. On arch stuff like that is generally not a problem. It's the best supported distro after the Debian based ones.
I was a bit surprised this is not a Debian Policy violation (and any Debian patches for security support may no longer apply), but at least the user experience will "just work". Cross-reference https://bugs.debian.org/1040507 .
That said while my specific example perhaps is obsolete, the general class of problem I described is not.
Ubuntu was by far the best option to actually use my system rather being constantly distracted by another little piece that fell out the wall
Probably from people who have never used it.
Whilst my gen 1 MB Air has been too slow for anything, my 2013 MB Intel still looks and runs great which the kids still make good use of. My latest M2 MB is by far the best I've ever owned with great build quality, performance, battery life where it's the first time I can confidently travel without a power brick.
Whilst Apple's non-Desktop hardware is always best-of-class, I've become increasingly dissatisfied with the direction of macOS and Windows which IMO have both become power-user-hostile and have switched to a Linux desktop full-time. Everyone's been predicting the year of the Linux Desktop for 20+ years, but I believe we're at a turning point for Linux adoption with Windows 11 becoming an intolerable ad/spyware infested marketing platform and Apple's continued ignorance of developers and ambitions of turning its neglected macOS into a locked down appliance.
Hopefully Valve can continue their investments in Steam Deck and Arch Linux to accelerate the adoption, their contributions to Proton have already IMO unblocked the biggest barrier to adoption. Whilst currently a happy Fedora user I like the direction, taste, philosophy and community behind Omarchy from what I've seen after kicking the tires in a VM, will look into switching over after they bring out their ISO.
I'm in a similar position to you OS-wise, I still use my Mac for things I specifically need macOS for but my main OS is definitively Linux these days. I use Kubuntu at work and CachyOS at home, needing a machine with a decent GPU for some of my projects got me back into PC gaming after a decade or so and gaming on Linux is actually good now which surprised me. People meme about the year of the Linux desktop but modern KDE is legitimately really good and certainly the least annoying UX out of the major desktop OS environments in my opinion.
But the UX of MacOS is just okay I'd say.
I need to heavily customize it, adding proper alt+tab, speeding up the animations, and so on.
My take is we'll see a surge of adoption with Macbooks if they release their rumoured budget laptop that maintains the reliability, light usage performance, and calibre of their Macbook lineup since the inception of M-series -- before or around the EOL of Windows 10: https://www.macrumors.com/guide/a18-pro-macbook/
I switched to MacBook in 2017. My first MB was a pleasure to use, solidly built and the keyboard a delight for a touch-typist.
But then Apple got crazily fixated on making them thin. By God they are some of the worst physical devices I've ever owned. That butterfly keyboard is so bad to the point of being non functional.
Fortunately they course corrected with M1 onwards. I still have their immediate predecessors of M1 as a secondary/backup device. While the spec is maxed out the physical device is just bad.
- iBook g4 12 inch. GPU died. Known fault.
- Mac mini. Ended up using this as a build machine for iOS. Had to replace the hardrive outside warranty. Took me about 2 hours to do. Now is running Debian and is a Minecraft server.
- Macbook Pro 2014 - dead. Glue'd on battery, ended up paying a local Mac repair guy to do the job. A year later The power brick (official) burned out the power lines on the motherboard.
Now the PC laptops are all still running.
- Dell E6410 - still works, Debian 13.
- Dell D-series - still works, window xp 64bit
- Thinkpad T480 - still works Debian 13.
The non apple hardware I can normally repair myself and thus I can keep it running forever.
Oh. Still in the honeymoon phase.
The book at http://ostep.org gets into some details.
Another useful illuminator: https://gwern.net/computers
As much as possible is generally done using simulators before testing on any real hardware.
I'm not questioning you, just curious and wonder if I miss something using only one monitor and Alt-Tabbing my way around.
It's pretty much ALL Omarchy. If you install Arch by itself you get a tty prompt... and that's about it.
Omarchy looks super impressive. Haven't used it myself, but the scripts and dotfiles in the Github repo (https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy) have been inspiring
- Linux is fast. Few years ago I wanted to run Linux and used my MacBook Air 2013 (one of the best machines I’ve had). It was amazing how Ubuntu ran so sleek especially comparing to the MacBook Pro 2018 with macOS.
- x86_64 feels less portable than arm. Since I got MBP from my work I’ve also got another machine for Windows. I’ve went with 13” MSI Perstige with 125H which was the latest back then offering hybrid cores (performance + economy). It’s 1kg is amazing and the OLED is also nice. But in order for the machine to actually compile and be snappy I need to ensure it’s not dropping to 0.4-0.8Ghz and then it easily gets warm and noisy.
The MBP 2021 also shows age. But even with more frequent fans and 80% of original battery it outperform the younger MSI since day one.
TL;DR
* Unless you need specific software, Linux distros are great and fast. Much more joy (imho) than Windows.
* SoC/ARM is still rare but it would be much more interesting comparison to current Macs in terms of portability (fans, battery life)
1. Macbook users who have/are using non-Apple laptops that find the average work-issued Intel laptops to be just meh or worse.
2. People that only buy some exclusive Lenovo, Framework laptops (that are not that common out in the real world (e.g: in US)) refuse to acknowledge the positive experience of Macbook owners.
I have had only 3 personal MacbookAir/MBPs since 2006 (and the previous i5 Mba is perfectly functional after a battery replacement and a HDD upgrade - sitting next to me running Mint Linux, that I plan to hand off to my 10yo.)
In the meantime, I've also had 4 other MBPs and 3 windows laptops through work.
In no way and form, the intel laptops were/are better than the macbooks on average.