Finding a laptop that works well is annoying, however.
It doesn't exist at the moment. :\
I would pay 2x the price of a macbook for a linux laptop with the same hardware quality.
The battery life and power/efficiency of my m4 pro is insane. It's so good that it's really hard to justify using anything else right now.
They're coming. Look for AMD Strix Halo chips. They're in the comparably comfortable efficiency range.
Do you happen to know any laptop that has a) equivalent screen quality (retina resolution), b) keyboard, c) trackpad but with full Linux support where all hardware pheripherals just work?
Can't speak for the keyboard, but HP ZBooks/EliteBooks tend to be decent.
I use it for development running Fedora Workstation. My job involves spinning up lots of containers and K8S KIND clusters.
I often reach for it instead of my 14" M4 Macbook. However, I will choose the Macbook Pro when I know I'll be away from a charger for a while. The HP, as great as it is, still has bad battery life.
The ISP driver which will enable the camera to work is in the process of being up-streamed, though. I believe they're targeting early 2025 for mainline Linux support.
Is that a typo?
There’s barely 4 months left in 2025.
People usually buy them for the keyboards and trackpoint, but imo the touchpad is still pretty solid. It is a bit small on account of the trackpoint buttons taking up vertical real estate but its pretty responsive and multi-touch gestures work perfectly in my experience. I believe newer ones have larger trackpads than mine, though still not as large as a similarly sized mac.
And furthermore, Superfish didn’t affect ThinkPads. Only lower end Lenovo models.
The 2.8k panels are overall inferior to Apple's across a number of metrics, but they have a higher pixel density than the Air 13, (and has the S-tier aspect ratio of 3:2).
The FW13 keyboard is objectively pretty decent but not perfect, and is much much better than any keyboard Apple has made in the last decade, could be personal preference but apple has been making some pretty bad keyboards for a while now.
Trackpad on FW13 is OK, no one even comes close to Apple, but it's pretty decent, nothing upsetting if you're comparing it to any non-apple trackpads.
Framework has excellent linux suppport, all hardware bells and whistles generally work out of the box on every Linux distro, but Fedora, Ubuntu, and Bazzite are officially supported by Framework they QA against all three and work with maintainers to resolve issues and you can be totally confident that everything will just work. (At least work as well as it would on Windows!)
The other two downsides relative to a macbook are build quality and support. Although the FW13 is pretty solid in practice, I have dropped mine dozens of times and throw it in my bag and treat it overall rough and it has take on some dings and scratches but everything still works. But the frame is not very rigid, it flexes in lots of places, and it just does not feel as nice and solid as a macbook. And support can be hit-or-miss, like with any small manufacturer.
It's a kind of confusing choice on their part to use cheaper plastic that does this so fast.
Most "business" centric laptops work great with Linux, as long as you use a well supported distro (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, openSuse). YMMV if you use other distros...
I have one and love it but it's not close to my wife's mac on battery life.
That just means 3024x1964. With other laptops you can either go up a step to 4k or down to OLED 2880xsomething.
Yes, the installer automatically (and reliably) resizes partitions for you. A minimum of about 70 GB for macOS is needed (anything lower is still possible but unsupported).
> You pick it at boot?
There's a default choice that will boot.
> And how “install and just use” it is?
Probably one of the smoothest Linux installs I've had in 10 years or so, since you just run the installer from macOS instead of flashing ISO files to an USB drive.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1c2yasr/can_i_b...
When I was first getting my feet wet with Asahi I was using these methods a lot.
I learned that my option, for a well tested and functioning distro is pretty much Fedora Remix. So I guess I won't be able to use Elementary OS sadly. I hope Fedora is or can be made to look and behave like Elementary.
Just one more question: is my mac hardware (and encrypted data) still protected the way it is protected before installing Asahi on it? Like device/theft protection etc.
My limited exploration/search on this topic kinda says in some way Asahi Linux lives inside the bounds of macOS (even all the data is available/readable in macOS which is fine by me). Is that so?
Apple devices probably have the strongest security model offered by any otherwise open consumer device these days, so yeah: Installing Asahi won't degrade security of the macOS installation.
Note that the Linux install itself will have weaker protection, since e.g. the fingerprint sensor is not yet supported. I also think disk encryption would be much harder to set up due to Apple's boot process (if it's even feasible at all currently).
There's a bit of a pain in that I could only get Brave to run Netflix, but all that meant was that I switched to using Brave for all of my browsing.
There's no official Tor build for it, but there is an unofficial one (that I do not use)
The only real pain I have with it is that Facebook's javascript for its reels chews up RAM something horrible, which freezes the OS whilst being processed, and often causes me to reboot it
There are a few other compile/transpile bugs here and there.... but I'm rooting for the it!!! Hopefully they can get sorted out soon.
USB-C output is indeed not working but actively making progress (so actively that some of the related patches have been sent to the kernel mailing list and merged this very week).
https://liliputing.com/asahi-linux-adds-microphone-support-f...
Sound output is garbage. Webcam barely works or straight up doesn't work on some apps. The built in microphone doesn't work with common apps like Google hangouts and Zoom. All on Ubuntu (latest). Certain input ports (like USB C) don't work for certain apps even though they work fine for other Linux users and they work on my other computers.
Oh, and when I was on PopOS, the entire system froze and crashed nonstop (sometimes I would go over a day without a freeze, sometimes it would happen within 30 seconds of booting). This stopped happening for a while after I did a complete system reset, but then it started happening again. The team was completely unable to figure out the issue despite it being fairly widespread. No hardware was damaged or corrupted as they claimed must be the case.
Basically, in my experience, Linux has a ton of issues still.
Do note that the context of my comment was Asahi Linux though.
The linux distro automatically shutdown if I shutdown the VM. I am using swaylock to lock the screen when I am away.
The Framework (Intel 12th Gen) also has the added benefit of heating the house, particularly with graphics "heavy" workloads (lots of windows open in GNOME Mutter, VMs, etc).
Screen I wish was brighter, and while I don't care, it doesn't have as many pixels as retina. The fan is not bad, but louder than a macbook. Battery I have not tested well, it is far away from battery life of a macbook. But the coreboot firmware allows me to set the charging speed (slower is better for battery) and the max charge level (which I keep at 60% when plugged in) Trackpad is great though, and keyboard is fantastic.
And all the parts are replaceable, as much as the Framework laptops. I don't know why they are not more popular.
Spoiler Alert: There really isn't anything that comes close to the macbook (even at 2x price).
How about half the price?
Huawei are probably banned in the USA these days, however, the hardware quality is top notch and everything Linux works just fine out of the box. Not everything is perfect though, it all depends on what you want to do. If you are okay with integrated graphics (so no Blender or other 3D applications) but do need genuine Intel floating point single-thread performance, then give Huawei a go.
I have had plenty of Dell XPS, Lenovo things and much else over the years and all of them have poor thermal management and tend to creak if you use less than four hands to pick them up. The Huawei machines are in a different league.
As for battery life, I think you are right, but I am inanely loyal to genuine Intel and that means plugging in. I don't have problems with that.
People do get triggered by Huawei though, because the dreaded communists will steal your soul and brainwash you into hating the American way of life. So you might want to just cover up the badging lest anyone be offended. Ironically, a Huawei Matebook X Pro running linux is the laptop that is least likely to spy on you because the camera folds down into the keyboard.
The Framework is also excellent, but with different compromises: that sweet display aspect ratio for instance, but no OLED.
Same, and I've been wanting this for 15 years now ...
I'm sure people will chime in and say framework, or other Linux-first vendors but they still make too many compromises.
Speakers suck, or the display sucks, or the microphones suck, or they get too hot, or they are too loud, or battery life sucks in comparison, or the chassis feels like cheap plastic and cracks and breaks easily.
There is no other laptop on the market that beats the Apple silicon macbooks right now.
I continue to tolerate macOS just for this hardware, and the rest of the OEMs seem to have zero intention at all to trying to catch up.
And I run a macOS-like GNOME theme that is pretty great.
That's less expensive than the ASRock NUC BOX-225H I bought... and that was without RAM/NVMe.
NixOS i keep wanting to throw in the bin randomly but i have to admit that when it all works, it's kinda beautiful to own - you can harness a lot of power for comparatively little spent in mental tax
BTRFS I find is a more elegant solution than OSTree for this use case, and it’s got a very minimal and polished happy path.
Silverblue covers way more use cases (not least multiple users), but the setup and secure boot encryption setup is very slick and macOS-esque philosophically.
However, one day when I tried to update the Nvidia driver it failed and when I tried to revert back I got a bunch of errors. My computer is foremost a tool to me and I don't particularly enjoy nor have time for stuff like fixing drivers.
Despite apple's flaws it gives me something that just works everyday.
Still got an ASUS netbook though, a market killed by tablets and chrombooks.
Go to any Linux distro subreddit right now and browse for people experiencing stability issues, random hanging, or no video on boot. Sometimes they don't mention it upfront but it almost always turns out they have an Nvidia card.
AMD and Intel GPUs have much better native open source support and (usually!) work out of the box without any effort.
Infuriatingly; I have a macbook because a couple years ago I wanted a laptop that just worked while keeping my familiar tools but it really feels like Linux is trending up in polish and macOS on the down with an intersect possibly happening in a couple years.
Then again, they may not care that much as long as they have the iPhone customer base.
I expect the MacBook to be replaced by the iPad any second now.
Or are you using Fedora on an Intel/AMD laptop?
In my experience, ThinkPads generally work fine.