You should give Framework a try. It's been a flawless experience with Fedora. And with the upcoming Framework 13 Pro, battery life and trackpad are expected to be on par (or in the case of battery, even better than macos)
The only way to get the battery life Framework advertised is on Windows' 'Ultra Efficiency' mode which cuts CPU performance by 25-50%, lowers brightness by 30% and deprioritizes everything in the background to such an extreme that responsiveness of those is measured in seconds.
It is not comparable at all to M-series or Snapdragon laptops happily chugging along at full capability and getting (compared to AMD / Intel) stellar battery life.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/arm-mainboard-for-fra...
Anecdotally, comparing to recent (but still older than these) generations of Intel chips I can run my M2 Max MacBook Pro with 78% battery health for longer (without any special considerations) than colleagues running their Windows Intel laptops in Power Saver mode, while performing similar tasks.
- Screen
- Speakers
- The unbelievable trackpad
- Battery life
- GPU performance (Linux gaming on this would be amazing)
When I play Bitburner, if I want to run it in the background, I have to run the game on Firefox or chrome. It’s a shame because safari actually gives best performance by quite a large margin.
Of course, currently Asahi only supports up to M2, so if you really want Linux, the Panther Lake should still outperform most of the 4 year old M2 devices. It remains to be seen which of the following can come sooner:
* new faster chips come out that support Linux
* Asahi finally supports M5
Right now it seems that the former is more likely to be true. But we shall see.
35% is the generational difference between the M4 pro to the M5 pro¹. Don't drink Apple marketing koolaid: this has less to do with x86 falling behind than it has to do with Apple using their stash of gold to outbid the intel/AMD competition out of the latest TSMC capacity.
An M4 Pro 12c gets 32731 out of TSMC's 2nm-E².
An AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 gets 35093 out of TSMC's 4nm³.
The true unsung hero of the "Apple M miracle" is TSMC, not ARM, and Apple mostly in the sense that it has the deepest pockets.
With the first M chips, anyone who could afford to wait 18-24 months was pretty much where Apple was at. This decreased to 12-18 months in the last couple years. Panther lake signifies that it could further decrease to 9-12 months.
¹: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6346vs6345vs7230vs6397v...
²: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M4-Pro-12-cores-Processo...
³: https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/ryzen-ai-9-hx-370.c365...
Don't get me wrong. I do really enjoy my FW but the mac hardware is still number one for me. I'd really love is an ARM based FW. Though if I could wave a magic wand it would be mac hardware running pure linux with no caveats. I really love seeing what Asahi is building