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Comment by d0m | Hacker News Reader

I feel like all laptop but the macbook or macbook pro are total crap. Linux run perfectly fine on a mac.

Seconding this. Macs are definitely the nicest overall quality in terms of laptop hardware, and are also the most prolific in terms of hardware sold, so driver support is excellent. Macs also give you the most options for operating systems, allowing you to run OS X, Windows, or Linux with minimal hassle or hacking around.

I really wanted to get a macbook air to run arch linux on, due to its form factor, awesome battery life and reliability, but was dissuaded from doing so by the good folks over at freenode.org/linux..

Really? I ran archlinux for 6 years on a mac. At the beginning it was annoying to configure everything.. especially the non-standard stuff like the VPN in my university. But then, after a few years everything worked just fine out-of-the-box. The trickiest thing was to get the boot loader and the partition right. Sometimes hibernate was a bit tricky too, mostly because if you don't configure it right you need to restart the laptop, which is annoying. But other than that, it was totally fine.

There are some oddities with Macs. That fucking startup chime for one. You need to either mute the sound in OSX or have some way of editing NVRAM.

The lack of home/end and pageUp/pageDown keys has always made me cringe. Yes, I know you can remap.

No delete either. Though Fn + arrow keys does page up / dowm, home, end.

The lack of ethernet and (ports in general) is annoying for me. Had to use another laptop when my home router forgot its password and I needed cable to log into it. Need an extra cable to plug it into monitors, or TVs.

fn+delete deletes forwards.

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