Don't get me wrong, I really admire what apple has done with the M CPUs, but I personally prefer the freedom of being able to install linux, bsd, windows, and even weirder OSes like Haiku.
As long as you're ok being tethered to the wall, and even then, guzzling power.
The whole point of Apple Silicon is that its performance is exactly the same on battery as tethered to the wall AND it delivers that performance with unmatched power efficiency.
Its the same on pure desktop. Look at the performance per watt of the Mac Mini. Its just nuts how power efficient it is. Most people's monitors will use more power than the Mac Mini.
It'd be tempting if I had any idea what the software compatibility story would be like. For example, the company I'm contracting with now requires a device monitor for SOC2 compliance (ensuring OS patches are applied and hard drive encryption remains on). They don't even want to do it, but their customers won't work with them without it.
Surprise surprise, a quick check of the device monitor company's website shows they don't support ARM architecture devices at all.
I have the surface laptop 7 with the X elite in it. The only thing I've ran into that outright didn't run was MSSQL server.
It's not my main machine, that is still an M4 Macbook pro but I hop on it occasionally to keep up with what Windows is doing or if I need to help someone with something windows specific. I've got WSL2, Docker, VSCode, etc. all running just fine.
It's decent, but not amazing. Feels a little slower than my M2 Air I have but not much, most of that is probably just windows being windows.
Would be nice to be able to get Linux running on one of these
I wish Microsoft put more pressure on vendors to support ARM.
Which left me bitter quite honestly as I was looking forward to them a lot.
I wouldn’t be opposed to going back to Linux. But once you stop looking for power sockets all the time and start treating your laptop like a device you can just use all day at any moment, it’s hard to go back.
No.
Even if it was better than lima (and the builtin posix/unix environment), which: it ain’t, it doesn’t nearly make a dent in the mandatory online account, copilot shit and all the rest.
If you like Windows, you’ll find it better with WSL2. In fact, I see many developers at my org who claim they’ll switch to Windows (from Mac) when we make it available internally.
However, if you love Mac, you'll never find Windows palpable no matter what.
And then there’s all shades of gray.
There are certainly many more options on the PC side, but it's not because Apple actively blocks users from running another OS.
Once that’s done, any distro should be able to work.
You really think an average person shopping for a computer at Bestbuy cares about installing a different OS on their machine?
I certainly don't think that matters to the vast majority of the population
Sorry, I don't get the reference. What sort of expenses are you referring to? For the price of a used car you can get pretty much any workstation money can buy.