Stick to the X, T & to some extent P series. Avoid nvidia graphics if you can.

Arch Linux (and to some extent OpenBSD) probably has the best support/documentation/fixes for any ACPI/APM management issues you have.

I have a top-end 2017 MBP and I just recently bought a brand new 7th Gen X1 Carbon for very cheaply (like $800) and it _screams_ in comparison to the Mac.

COPR [2] is interesting, like PPA, with the worst user experience I've ever seen. The patched kernel I was interested about was already compiled by somebody, and available through COPR, but good luck finding which repo has an up-to-date version of the package you're interested. The whole Fedora COPR site is more than useless.

I mean, the default experience was pretty good, but being the unstable branch of Red Hat means there's a lot of breakage, every release changes something big and you're constantly on the bleeding edge without the safety net of a top notch wiki like Arch Linux has.

1: https://fedoramagazine.org/docker-and-fedora-32/

2: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/

  $ cat ~/.config/autostart/map-caps-lock-to-ctrl.desktop
  [Desktop Entry]
  Encoding=UTF-8
  Version=0.9.4
  Type=Application
  Name=Map CAPS LOCK to CTRL
  Comment=Remaps the CAPS LOCK key to another CTRL key
  Exec=/usr/bin/setxkbmap -option 'ctrl:nocaps'
  OnlyShowIn=XFCE;
  StartupNotify=false
  Terminal=false
  Hidden=false

If you look for a Laptop, Dell XPS are pretty good. If you buy one used, avoid the one which has the camera at the bottom of the screen. People look right up your nose in meetings I was told.

Steam is also at a point where I can just install native windows games and run them with barely any trouble.

Needless to say, I can no longer work on macOS or an Apple device. The speeds you get with a bare-bone install and a window manager are unparalleled.

It's not perfect and perhaps not good replacement for many of those things, but it is so practical. Especially if you live in a small apartment where desktop and TVs would take a lot of space.

I also tend to do different types of work in different places.

* Coding - Desk with monitors * Meetings - Table looking out of the house * Writing - chilling out on a couch

This is exactly what I've returned to as well, and I'd forgotten for a while (or maybe didn't understand) what was so good about this setup. Working only in my own "do work stuff" office at my own desk means when I'm not working, I'm free to enjoy things without technology getting in the way, and I find that when I do get to my desk I'm a lot more focused, energized, and ready to go. Best of all, I don't have to deal with obscure laptop config issues.

I have a Linux box: it's an ATX tower, a 40" monitor, an Apple Magic Trackpad 2, and most significantly a mechanical keyboard. The importance of the latter can't be overstated: having good key travel, Cherry MX switches, and tactile feedback makes development a vastly better experience.

My work is done in a nice quiet room and I don’t have to or want to travel. I never understood why people want to optimize for working on trains, planes and in meetings. Even when I was going into the office, I didn’t need to bring my computer home because I had the exact same machine at home since it was so cheap.

I do have a 2015 Macbook Pro and an Acer E5-575g laptop as well. If I feel like working on the couch or in bed, I can absolutely do that, but I never do. Mostly the Mac is just there to test Mac things or compile iOS things. The Acer was just so cheap and it also runs Manjaro perfectly.

People may be most familiar with WireGuard as a light-weight proxy, but as a true virtual private network, it's also been great for making my home desktop accessible to my laptop on the go (desktop <-> digital ocean droplet <-> laptop).

Couple it with a USB switch and you won't have to bother with unplugging cables when switching between your work laptop and your personal desktop. (The only thing I have to unplug and move between my laptop and desktop is my microphone cable).

Stop buying, using, and supporting the Apple ecosystem. Vote with your money. The new chips are faster. So what? The laptop you have today works fine, you don't need the latest and greatest hardware.

Wayland already has trackpad support that's nearly identical to macOS.

Gnome with a dock is basically the same desktop experience - Pick a distro of your choice.

I can honestly say I prefer my linux XPS to my work macbook, by a large margin.

Plus - It doesn't spy on me. I actually own it. I can release software through channels that aren't entirely abusive.

Basically - The only thing Apple does truly well at this point, in my opinion, is marketing how great Apple is. But it turns out they just aren't all that great.

Don't buy their shit.

Develop for open systems. If you write a program for Windows, make it also available on Linux, or at least make sure it works well on Wine. If you develop for the web, make sure it also works well on Firefox. If you develop for smartphones, make also an Android version, and make sure it also works on AOSP without the Google libraries (or with an alternative replacement). And so on. That way, if these ecosystems become too closed, users will have an alternative; and the existence of that alternative might even help prevent these ecosystems from becoming too closed in the first place.

Don't buy Apple products.

Don't use Apple products.

Don't support Apple products.

Don't develop for Apple products.

Raise awareness among those who would listen.

The forcing function, for all the attributes you listed, over the last 10 years has been the iPhone.

Even the headway’s in 3rd app support that the Mac will get now, is funnily because of the iPhone. Can you imagine what it must look like to Bill Gates from 2003? “Wait you’re telling me that a not yet built device with zero support for existing apps is going to magically make macs have the most abundant catalog of apps in 17 years?!!”

There’s only way counter action to those problems — stop buying apple products.

/disclaimer: I love apple products. But I didn’t mean any of the above with sarcasm.

Write blogs about how Apple's business practices threaten the profession of developers, how they can hamper innovation, and how they work against the interest of the consumer (see e.g. IDFA). Also discuss the idea of breaking up Apple in a hardware and a software company, and how this would help improve the market and provide a brighter future for general purpose computing.

And then there are basic things, discussed also by others, like not supporting Apple in any way, i.e. not buying their hardware, not developing for that hardware, and not recommending friends and family to buy Apple products.

More harsh things you could do are: buying an Apple laptop and returning it (your right as a consumer; make sure you state a reason), or putting a license on your FOSS software that is more restrictive on Apple's closed hardware.

I am not at all convinced Apple wants to go that route so the future of the mac doesn't look scary to me it looks pretty great.

I don't have any intention to contribute to the mac ecosystem. I still hog in what I like best - the terminal.

I treat the mac as a client - web+cloud is my backend. The client should feel good to me with decent battery life and snappy experience, and maybe some gaming. But I don't care much else about it.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/10/12/apples-mac-sees-s...

The new Macs are fast and have great battery life, but I wouldn't worry about them taking over the market. Windows machines and Chromebooks are arguably better versus Macs now than in 2015 when you couldn't find a laptop outside of a Macbook with a decent trackpad or high resolution screen.

create a killer app for the average person that _only_ works on linux, and force users to move.

If your app is attractive enough, and there is enough developers doing this, it will force users to slowly migrate.

To compete, walled-gardens will court you, and you can then negotiate conditions to make it better (instead of taking just money that they will offer).

Get a job at one of Apple's competitors, and make those competing products better.

Apple beats competitors because their product lineup is simpler and their products don't generally suck as much.

Look at Microsoft's attempt at ARM notebooks a few years ago compared to Apple's now. The difference is staggering.

If we want to see people move away from Apple, they need worthy competitors.

The CPU is good, but it's not a miracle. Ryzen is still faster, what makes waves is that this is the first time an ARM CPU has beat Intel.

The biggest problem is that none of the DEs really fit my tastes — they all have to be poked and prodded into kinda doing what I want them to do, but they're never quite there and it's incredibly frustrating. I've also faced similar issues with starting with a bare WM and snapping together smaller pieces.

To get what I want I'd likely have to build my own DE from scratch, which I'm not even necessarily averse to, but I have no idea where to start with the mess that is X11 and Wayland and all the "build your own WM" tutorials that could be used as a springboard are written for building hyperminimal borderless tiling WMs, which aren't straightforward to adapt for a more "typical" floating WM with titlebars and the like.

So I guess the endpoint of this rant is that it's frustrating that building one's ideal Linux desktop from the ground up isn't all that accessible in reality. The configurability and openness is there on principle but it's difficult to take advantage of past a skin-deep level.

Like you, my Linux installs have been incredibly stable for a long time, even with a rolling release distro which is often considered "unstable."

I use Linux at work, and while I struggle with a few tools others do not as regularly (e.g. video teleconferencing software isn't always optimized for Linux, but overall it works fine), I also don't encounter tons of errors they do. From Apple updates bricking machines, to obscure Bluetooth/Wifi issues that you can't fix, or having to run Docker in a VM, I'm pretty convinced I've got it better.

Install some drivers

Install some apps

Configure things and set up my ui

There's a lot less forum hunting, obscure edge cases you run into, random things not working and all those other problems I remember.

Part of it is my experience at this point, but another large part is just the general improvement of the linux ecosystem over those years.

It really has improved drastically from my first days using it regularly in 2007-2008 or so.

With Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 I'm able to develop the same without having to dual boot and feeling just as native as running Linux on the system, and I can use Windows software like, say, Photoshop. Visual Studio Code integrates automatically, it's like I've got a Linux 'Window' open.

And when I want to switch off I'm back in Windows for a full gaming environment etc.

I'm completely switched over to full-time Windows now. Maybe not a good thing, but it sure is convenient.

It's arguably easier to use than windows and macOS because it doesn't require a bunch of separate sign-ins to do things.

I think the only "hard part" for the average user is getting into the boot settings to actually install ubuntu. For a developer I think it's a non-issue.

This might be the first time someone could have said 'I use Arch' but decided not to.

The kind of people who use GNOME or Ubuntu or whatever the 'windows competitor' is always seem to be having problems, but are also the kind of people who see needing to use a terminal as a problem in itself.

I've never ever had a problem with i3, emacs, firefox, and simple <20 line configs. Terminal is fine, it's what most GNU tools are built around in the first place. It's apt that people who really love Linux and appreciate what it does out of the box, and who don't feel the need to turn it into Windows or MacOS, also seem to have the least issues with it.

There is an illusion that there is not as much to learn in Windows or Mac, and in fact all that knowledge is even harder to grasp as a lot of it is proprietary and not transparent.

Of course, the fact that I have the chops to fix things is key, because I really, really do (Systems Programmer, 30+ years building OS and system-level things), but for the Ubuntu experience key factors have also been: pick your hardware nicely (e.g. Presonus=great Audio for Linux), use package management, do frequent manual updates, and use containers/virtualization for anything where ones hacking around might be dodgy - i.e. keep the work part of workstation in mind with all system updates/installations, etc.

Decades of Linux desktop usage means, to me, the cliche is over. Linux is an awesome desktop workstation. Everything just works, audio, video, graphics .. WINE is perfectly functional .. and there is zero bloatware or concern about walled gardeners.

I was so impressed, I installed it next on a ~2 year old Asus Flip, and everything worked except for the fingerprint reader. Battery life was about 2/3rd of what I got in Windows 10 (which was already not great) but I used it for a couple of weeks, sometimes getting work done on it, and sometimes playing around with things like Steam - I could play Torchlight on it, or stream Torchlight II from my Windows 10 desktop. Neat! Ended up going back to Windows for better battery, but aside from gaming, the experience was very much on par with Windows, with some things better and some things worse, but no huge differences.

I'm very comfortable with Windows 10 and WSL, and I don't expect Linux to take over as a daily driver any time soon. So I guess in a way, I did "give up" on switching over, but if an employer handed me an all-Linux machine, I think I'd be perfectly pleased to use it all day for work, even if I head back to Windows when I want to play StarCraft.

Not sure if something like this already exist (especially with ZFS and Btrfs) but it would be nice if there was a easy to use system restore manager you could boot into and restore your system to a last known working state. Again, keyword easy. Yes I'm technical enough to where I could fix it but I just don't have the time.

> What I'm trying to communicate is, Linux desktop is usable, and it's worth pushing over the hump.

Huge fan of all of the above.

I do think though that now desktops are less inherently compelling than they used to be. They used to represent a center of activity, a locus of control for the user.

Now, a very sizable % of our computing is off in far away clouds, & the desktop itself is a less compelling, less interesting place to invest time.

My hope is that the Free Desktop / Linux world can begin to grow new roots, become more connected, & return to a little bit more of a place of prominence & relevance. Lots of visioneering & pioneering & engineering to do.

They've been fairly happy with it and they're not very technically savy.

And even then, moving your entire setup from a machine to another have never been easier, when you know how to do it.

Corporate OSs are more polished, that's undeniable, Apple especially provides the best out of the box experience, but it's nothing comprared to the flexibility I can experience using Linux.

I can have a beefed up work laptop with Plasma and all the effects enabled and the same exact setup on the cheap low end laptop with XFCE.

Everything, really, just works.

And when it doesn't, I can somehow make it work.

There have been times I spent days trying to make the Nvidia card work, but it was because I was looking for the perfect setup that I usually don't experience on Windows or MacOS, but there's nothing I can do about it, no matter how much time I spend trying to fix it.

It's simply out of reach.

I'm aware that that's not what the average user is willing to go through, and that's perfectly fine, I don't feel better than them because I use a more complicated system, but I cannot go back to being limited in what I can do because I am not allowed to.

Also, modern distros are really really stable out of the box.

The laptop I use as a replacement for media server is an Ubuntu 20, it was an Ubuntu 18 and 16 before, I simply upgraded it to the new version and it worked, every time better than before.

If there's something I've learned in the past 25 years is that freedom do comes at a cost, but as of today, that cost is actually negligible.

P.s. forgot to mention that I do not have to care anymore about bloatware, automatic updates, things calling home, software you rely on going out of business and, most of all, lack of support or documentation

You make it sounds like it's a simple as "take vanilla ice cream if you like vanilla and take chocolate if you like chocolate".

It's not, if you read the comments, you realize there's much more to the debate, it's about ethics, the future of computing, our societies, monopolies, privacy, independence, freedom, and much more.

From food to clothes to electronics, there is an ethical choice behind what you buy and we shouldn't reduce it to "pick your favorite color" without considering the monsters we are feeding by buying this or that product.

When I turn the sensitivity down low, it caps the max "flick" speed to be sluggish. When I turn the sensitivity up high, even tiny delicate mouse movements lurch my pointer halfway across the screen.

More than anything else, I want a mouse acceleration curve that works like macOS or Windows. Both those operating systems come out of the box good defaults and good configurability. Linux has neither.

https://www.dell.com/community/Inspiron/Switching-Fn-and-lef...

Aside from operating system, the actual PC laptop hardware just isn't up to the standards.

But for new projects, I honestly do not know what will people do.

If Amazon continues to evolve their Graviton chips, and other cloud providers follow, it will be quite tempting to try a 100% ARM setup...

I hate to fall back on the "good enough" argument, it's absolutely pathetic that we're here, but PCs are, generally, good enough. Battery life and performance are both pretty stellar in ultrabooks. I'm looking forward to larger & larger tablets becoming a thing, with Apple again alas having to lead the charge there too by introducing 12 inch tablets, which thankfully, others are doing.

In general, a fixed closed ecosystem can advance wonderfully, especially fueled with a multi-trillion dollar market capitalization. But a lot of people are betting on literally everyone else on the planet, to suss & finagle better ways forward, organically, over time, with hopefully building inertia, and I think, maybe not for this decade but some decade, those bets on everyone are good bets.