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Comment by OptionOfT | Hacker News Reader

I have the feeling a lot of people take Macs because the other option is a locked down Windows, and Linux is not offered.

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This. I ran Linux at work until last year, when it was finally disallowed. I went with locked-down Mac over locked-down Windows.

The hardware for a Linux laptop right now is not great. Especially for an arm64 machine. Even if the hardware is good the chassis and everything else is typically plastic and shitty.

That is a surprising sentiment. Most dell and Lenovo laptops work just fine and are usually of reasonably good build quality (non-plastic chassis etc.).

arm64 is however mostly bad. The only real contender for Linux laptops (outside of asahi) was Snapdragon's chips but the HW support there was lacking iirc.

They give us Dell Linux machines from work. They suck so bad and we have so many problems. Overheating, camera is terrible, performance is bad relatively to the huge weight of the device. Everything is a huge step down from Macs.

Whenever I see Linux people comparing Linux and Mac I'm amazed at the audacity. They are not in the same league. Not by a mile. Even the CLI is more convenient on the Mac which is truly amazing to me.

Prefer my Konsole setup on KDE and I use both interchangeably all day tbh. Camera yea. The irony is heating issues become less of an issue with arm.

We are lucky in that we can choose our machines (within reason, and no real support if things get broken) and run an arch flavour.

I use thinkpad x1 carbons and have nearly 0 issues. The hardware is not quite as nice as a macbook but it does the job and is nice enough.

How is the Mac CLI more convenient? There isn't even a package manager in the box, they ship loads of old outdated tools too. Plus there's the whole BSD/GNU convention thing you have to watch out for.

I don't find my ThinkPad running Linux overheats, nor is it particularly heavy. And performance is comparable to the similarly priced MBP at the time. Camera sucks, but compared to my Surface so do the Macs...

Recently an article on HN front page was about a guy who had to file down his MBP because the front edge of it was too sharp and resting his wrists on it hurt his hands. At least two people in the comment section noted how the sweat on their hands over time caused the sharp edge of the MBP chassis to pit and it caused it to turn in to a sharp serrated edge that actually cut their hands.

You can say other laptops are "plastic and shitty" all you want, but Apple's offerings aren't necessarily the best thing out there either. I personally like variety, and you don't get that from Apple. I can choose from hundreds of form factors from a lot of vendors that all run Linux and Windows just fine, plastic or not.

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