As someone who has been using Arch/Void + XMonad (and now Gnome), and with the price of the MacBook Air (M-series) falling within an affordable range, is it worth continuing to fiddle with Linux?
I’ve come to the conclusion that the MacBook Air’s M-series chip is just amazing. Nothing really compares to the battery life and quietness of this machine. Not to mention, some of the default apps (Notes, Reminders, Shortcuts, passwords, safari, etc.) seem incredibly hard to beat. And if you are into the eco-system you don't have to pay for different services.
I’m curious about other people's thoughts on this. I’d love to hear a Change My View (CMV) on this.
If you want, you can search my username with "macbook" and see my rants since 2015. The worst experience I had with it was it glitching out a hour before a national conference presentation that forced me to remake the slides on another person's laptop. I was sitting in the audience sweating bullets remaking those slides over the course of a grueling hour or so. I have never had the desire to buy another apple product since then and I don't miss it.
Linux just works, especially if you have a machine it works well on. Don't believe the naysayers, learn from my exprience.
Seconded.
> Linux just works
While there are instances where this is the case (System76 hardware w/ PopOS for example), This is certainly not true in the general, and this is coming from someone that's been on linux since the dotcom era. It's very very important you get a well supported device or it most certainly does not "just work", and that's goes triple if you're not using some flavor of ubuntu/debian (in the past fedora generally does pretty good too but I've not been keeping up with the fedora sphere since IBM drove me away from the redhat/fedora/centOS ecosphere). Thankfully, there's never been more options or support for linux on laptop, so it's not as near as difficult to achieve as it once was.
Linux does what it's told, which is why I love it, but if you don't know what you're doing, and/or if the autoconfiguration tools/drivers aren't compatible with the hardware in question, you've got a recipe for frustration for anyone that's new to linux/not in the mood to tinker.
I jumped from DOS in the mid 90s to Solaris to Linux in about 2001. BEen on it since. I got my first personal laptop in 2004 or so (IBM thinkpad T42). Then went through 2 X series laptops and am currently on an X1 carbon.
I consulted for a company for 2.5 years where I used a mac.
Maybe it's just me but I found the mac ecosystem very crummy. On Debian, when I wanted postgres, I did an apt-get and got it sort of like Trinity in the matrix asking for helicopter pilot skills. With the mac, I installed it using brew. That didn't work so there was an app for it and that had its own quirks. I put it down to my lack of familiarity with the system. I would have invested time to get familiar with it but, and this is my second point, Linux was did "just work" for 95% of what I wanted. All the annoying things about sound drivers, wifi cards, usb, fonts, video etc. from the 90s were not problems anymore. There were a few things that I needed to get running but they weren't deal killers. Definitely not as rough as what I had with postgres on the mac.
Hardware wise, I agree with the OP, I don't think think anything comes close to Apple's offering at that price point. The reason I stay away from it is because of the software. I much prefer Linux. There are also tangential points like working on the exact OS and machine where I'm going to actually deploy/debug production apps on is useful. This is alleviated to some extent by using a Linux VM on a mac if that's what you do.
My initial transition from Debian to OS X was painful. Once it settled in, it became comfortable. I like a lot of things about it.
I'll keep my M2 Pro for as long as I can but my next laptop is likely to be an AMD Framework to run Debian.
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They can be great if you have a large wallet and simply want a computer that will integrate easily with your iPhone or any other Apple products. I use an iPhone myself because I’ve had bad experiences with Android devices, but every few years I try a new Android phone anyway.
Apple does not care about their end users. The hardware they retail is overprivced and the M chips are over hyped, especially with ARM PC:s now available.
Their OS was great back in 2000-2010 but has since become more and more unstable, while Linux has moved in the opposite direction. Today I would argue Linux is at least as easy to manage.
Some apps integrate better with OS X, and the magnetic charger cable is a plus. Then again, using external monitors is difficult, and if anything breaks in your nice Apple laptop it will be difficult to mend and cost and arm and a leg. All in all, I would stay away from them.
* Recent Macbooks have an incredible battery life, that's for sure.
* macOS is not Linux, and Linux is not macOS.
I personally like Linux a lot more than macOS, therefore I run Linux on my laptop. It's not a pain at all: just make sure you get a laptop that is well supported (seems a lot easier than 20 years ago, I personally run on ThinkPads).
The way you write (e.g. you see running Linux on a laptop as "a trouble"), you sound like you like macOS better but were using Linux because it was cheaper. In that case go for a Macbook if it's now affordable!
On the other hand most of these microcuts can be researched, solved or scripted away. With my mac I have far fewer, but the ones you have, you’re often stuck with. Generally these are about flakiness with the automagic stuff. Like the camera feed switching to your iphone for a while (whether you want it or not), then suddenly refusing for weeks even when you do want it.
Also, the mac has no tiling wm that comes within a parsec of i3. I miss i3 daily. So. Much. Especially with multiple screens.
But then again, I enjoy opening the lid of my laptop daily as well. And being able to close the lid and put it in my bag, without first listening if it succesfully went to sleep. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I guess what I’m saying is: pick the annoyances that give you the smallest emotional response at this time in your life.
This is the kind of thing I could absolutely not stand unless I was getting paid for it. I paid for the laptop. This button does X. When I press this button, it needs to do X. Let me at least fix it so that it does X. If it was a free laptop or I was getting paid to sit around waiting for X to work again, that's absolutely fine. But if I paid for it, it should either work or let me fix it.
Don't use an ideologically-motivated distro that omits drivers and firmware because they are not Free enough. Use something fairly mainstream, like Ubuntu or Mint.
Update its firmware before you install.
Shrink the Windows partition but keep it, for things like firmware updates. Nuke the recovery partitions, though; they're junk.
Max out the RAM. Have 2 SSDs if they'll fit. OS on one, data on a physically separate one. Used RAM is cheap. Buy matched memory modules.
Avoid wireless anything if you can. Wired peripherals, wired network, wired audio. Wired stuff just works.
They are OK, but no better than OK and definitely not awesome. IMHO, the build quality is inferior, the keyboards are inferior, the upgradability is inferior, and the pointing devices are inferior. I don't want gestures, but I very much want 3 mouse buttons: I middle-click things hundreds of times a day.
I have 2 Latitudes in my "fleet" but neither is a machine I especially like.
The Mac wins regarding battery life (but deltas are shrinking) and - important when on the move - connecting with various WiFi SSDs (this can be quite critical).
The Linux ThinkPads win regarding keyboard quality, and hackability (as UNIX/Linux person, I prefer Linux' directory organization to MacOS', which is a mix of BSD and non-standard /proprietary stuff). I like than on my Linux boxes, any command is just there, whereas on the MacBook, 60% of the time I need a command not from the top-10, it's not there and I need to brew install it first, which sucks (this could be fixed by making a "distribution" of common commands for brew, I haven't even checked whether that exists).
Until recently, the Mac also won regarding weight, but now with the fantastic ThinkPad X1 Nano there's a high-quality high-mobility device with a great internal keyboard, good batteries and the weight of a feather that runs Ubuntu like a breeze.
So in the end, one ends up using the MacBook as an email/presentation machine and the Linux boxes (and, via ssh, servers of course) for technical work.
Ironically, the M1 in my MacBook doesn't get used for the machine learning research I do as that is all done on beefy (Linux) servers and/or GPU clusters. But it does improve the UI responsiveness.
PS: From my budget at work, I also got an iPad Pro (the lightest/smallest), and I was shocked how heavy it is. As a result, it hardly gets used apart from taking photos and scanning documents with its excellent camera. I was hoping to carry it to meetings, but I instead take the MacBook Air or X1 Nano along, both of which seem much lighter, esp. the latter (<970g). (I never use pens because I type faster than I hand-write and prefer my text to stay searchable; I understand results may look different for pen fans.)
Run 'brew list' to see what you have installed, then write a shell/ansible script to install these.
Save script to your cloud storage/source control and anytime you get a new machine, run the script.
iPad pro isn't heavy.
Do you have a heavy case on it? As many cases can weigh the same as the iPad itself or more.
Or you could go 'built for linux' laptops. Librem, System 76, Framework, ect. Or Thinkpads. Those things are tanks and just work.
My original reasons for switching to linux was Apple disrupting my workflow on each major upgrade and from what I can tell they have not stopped doing that.
I'm now using a Dell Inspiron with more updated specs (from 2019), but again, everything is recognized.
*And* I got to upgrade my RAM with a rather simple procedure, zero soldiering required. All of this, running a largely Free (as in freedom) operating system.
Thus I'd answer: yes, a Linux laptop is worth the trouble these days. YMMV of course.