> But the quality of MacBooks is just another level. I had 3 or 4 so far since 2010, and each of them held at least 5 years. Crazy good.
When I read things like this it really sounds like there is some reality distortion field in the mac world. How is that anywhere special? I'm running a thinkpad X1 as my 2 main laptops (it was my only work machine until 2 years ago) and I never felt the need to replace it. It gave me 8-10h battery life and the only issue I ever had was that 1.5 years ago the battery was reaching end of life and capacity started dropping very fast.
That was just a 70$ repair I could easily do myself.
My youngest daughter just inherited my mother's x220 (?) (she has been running Linux) that I got for my mother in 2011 or 2012. That never received any work and still works fine except that I didn't change the battery so you have to run it of ac power.
My older daughter and my mother both just got some used thinkpads that are >3years old and don't have any issues either.
So from my experience a 5 year lifetime for a macbook is really nothing special and definitely not "crazy good".
I’d say it’s barely 3 things :
- The trackpad (but other manufacturers now have tolerable alternatives and anyway you can work without it)
- The screen : at an equivalent price point (and even more), nothing comes close to Apple screens. The cheapest MacBook have a better screen than most high end PCs.
- The audio : Apple truly did some sorcery to get such an awesome sound from machines that are flat as sheet. It’s so good that you can watch a movie on your MacBook without earbuds and don’t be bothered.
Everything else like build quality is overall better than most other alternatives but a few other manufacturers are also good at it.
I say this as someone who uses a MacBook for work despite loving Linux and who hates what macOS have become. The hardware is really that good.
The audio is magic because Apple overdrives their speakers by analyzing the signal to stay under the sustained power limit of the speaker, instead of clipping everything at the sustained power limit.
https://forum.devtalk.com/t/a-reason-why-mac-speakers-sound-...
Also add a very important feature of ‘lid is closed - the computer is asleep and it wakes up when lid opens’. Both windows and Linux are simply broken in that regard.
What I need is Apple MacBook hardware with a 100% supported Linux OS. This combination simply doesn’t exist and there’s no amount of money to make it happen (yes I know about asahi.)
It's not really Linux' fault. Most It's Microsoft that forced this, and most vendors don't know how to deal with this and work proper firmware. I think Framework and Valve fixed theirs. I have a GPD and just found out that the reason I kept getting it wake from sleep was some MS related option triggering an ACPI IRQ 9 sleep wake.
On another note, I actually think that the most important things that work better on the Apple devices is the mic and camera, the rest is somewhat unimportant on the go if you work at a desk.
As a user I don't care whose fault is it. I want my laptop to go to sleep when I close the lid; I want it to stay asleep while the lid is closed; I want it to wake when I open the lid. Only macs seem to be able to do that consistently; I'd be glad to be proven wrong, but over the past decade I haven't found a counterexample yet.
I’ve never had a problem with a system76 or tuxedo computers laptop using suspend correctly. If you want it to just work, you may need to buy from a manufacturer who you pay to make it just work. Otherwise you’re comparing a dyi setup to Apple.
There's another issue: Windows keeps turning off the screen after a few minutes of idle time, no matter what I try. They have options to control this, but the hardware seems to override these options for some reason.
You can dual boot Asahi Linux
It seams asaho is basically dead at this point.
Prominent maintainers quit and in a couple of months there will be two years since latest m3+ macs are unsupported
> It seams asaho is basically dead at this point.
This month's Asahi blog post begs to differ.
> This completes our transition to a fully upstream graphics stack, and as such we are retiring our Mesa fork completely...
we have managed to upstream a little over 20% of our entire patch set in just under five months.
Guy is talking about laptop lasting for 5 years as not something that is special, and you respond with awesome sound quality.
Apple threads are always so funny.
Uh he provided counter points to your distortion field comment, he doesn't have to just +1 the exact point of view of the parent comment.
But here I'll bite: I've had MBPs for work for like 15 years now and I bought a personal high spec Thinkpad. I now regret that purchase because my work machine is better than my personal machine in literally every way. My over $2k Thinkpad just sits there gathering dust because I don't want to use it. And unlike MacBooks, the secondary market for it is nothing so I can't just sell it and recover most of the loss.
Have you used the cheap Dells and HP laptops that most people buy (not high end IBM machines)?
They tend to be plastic junk.
Yes thinkpads are good, but most laptops are trash disposable hardware
They are plastic junk, but even they are likely to remain technically functional for more than 5 years. It's mainly things like battery life, screen & keyboard quality that make those laptops annoying.
In my experience and my family's you are lucky if they last 3 years. If they last 5 years there's usually a subpar experience, e.g. they overheat significantly at 2 years. OTOH, we have a few macbooks > 10 years still working.
There's the need to dust fans and then there's the possibility that OS computing requirements have risen which isn't often a Linux thing on old hardware.. OsX had exactly the same problem and had to make a minimizing release IIRC.
Computing kind of stagnated since 2010 and plenty of hardware since then still works fine today and is usable enough for many tasks. Apple was nice for needing not all that many different drivers but its statnge integrations like drive fans to bios are obnoxious.
And macbooks aren't overheating?
I've owned old macbooks… I got scalded by the metal screws on the bottom in the summer because apple thought looking sleek was more important than proper cooling.
ARM MacBooks aren’t overheating.
No, it was intel piece of shit that promised new nodes for years and never delivered.
Macs were designed up to the thermal specs that should have been but never came.
Hence the m1: enough is enough
> even they are likely to remain technically functional for more than 5 years
Every plastic laptop I've bought has busted within two years, whether it's mechanical stress or poor heat design. They feel less like reliable tools and more like toys. Looking specifically at you, thinkpads.
Meanwhile, the MacBook Pro I bought for myself for college 17 years ago still boots. The battery is dead, but that's an incredibly long life for any hardware of that complexity.
Booting once a year isn't "life" for a computer.
I am on my 3rd Thinkpad already and while I still like them they are not close to Apple quality. On my current one keyboard touches the screen when it's closed so the screen becomes dirty quickly. After Windows 11 upgrade it auto-dims on battery after like 30 seconds and I can't figure a way to turn it off. Hibernation never worked properly (apparently AMD/Windows issue). You don't need to deal with any of that on a Macbook. I would switch instantly if I didn't need to run Windows.
> Hibernation never worked properly
You can blame microsoft for that unfortunately. They made the vendors to change how it all works to workaround windows issues and it didn't even work.
It is amazing that after decades Microsoft still cannot nail such an important usability issue... There's no way I can use Windows laptops full time.
The sound on MacBooks is impressively loud and clear, but it's also not actually good sound. Because it couldn't be, in that form factor. So for things where you actually care about good sound (i.e., music, movies, TV), you probably still want headphones or speakers anyway.
it does actually sound good
If you bought even a small bluetooth speaker that sounded the same as an MBP, you'd think "this thing kinda sucks... no bass, but at least it's small; what do you expect". Either that or you aren't someone who cares about sound (which is fine)
I have a stereo system with a DSP which I've spent quite a bit of time adjusting with tools like REW. I do care. I'm obviously adjusting my expectations because the laptop is indeed small but it really does sound great and I prefer it to typically boomy resonating bass-heavy tuning of small speakers. It's also very good at stereo separation, can even do behind-the-listener flyby from a Dolby Atmos test file.
Yeah, it's always funny how they cope. Also, it's not "your iCrap". Apple has full remote access to iCrap devices and requires internet connection for activation which is hilarious. Plus, you give away the right to have any privacy. You are totally owned by them
[flagged]
Also durability. I’m shocked that something that looks so good can withstand by downright abuse. I hold my MacBook Pro with one hand and fling it around and I’ve lost track of the number of times it has fallen down. But except for some chips at random places, it works perfectly fine
I'm not really sure that's remarkable, maybe compared to the netbook level machines. Now that HDs are gone the only cause of failure I see from my coworkers is extended vacations and remote work in tropical climates.
Ah, I guess the point of the thread was to share only data points consistent with the distortion.
As a mostly Dell user I'd add the camera and microphone: the difference in quality on a standalone laptop is just mind blowing. Audio output can be tuned with the right equalizer profile but microphone filtering and camera quality just doesn't come anywhere close to a Macbook.
The MBA screen is /alright/. It's better than a lot of Windows machines but you can get better for the price for sure. I'd argue the screens in the Surface line are comparable and arguably better, 3:2, brighter, 120Hz at basically the same price. And there's loads of 4K OLED Windows laptops if you're willing to pay for them.
Apple screens also tend to have pretty bad response times too. They are sharp and color accurate but fall down in places.
Laptop OLEDs aren't usually the best wrt color accuracy and uniformity. I've tried two. One had green splotches across the screen, the other just displays a certain range of gray shades with a green tint (so e.g. a black-to-white gradient test image has a green band in the middle). And there's always a static noise pattern of sorts due to non-uniform pixel brightness.
Even the Air has a great builtin webcam, so I don’t have to carry around a webcam like I used to do with my old laptop (which is more than 8 years old and I still use because it has replaceable batteries and ssd lol).
Somewhat unfair since it's technically a tablet, but the Surface Pro webcam is very very good.
This. My 2013 MacBook Pro lasted just shy of 10 years no issues.
My m3 max mbpro I only wish was the larger screen one and not the 13 inch one … oh well. But I suspect it will last me — and be passed down as well — 8-10 years as well.
The trackpads are second to none. So are the speakers. The screen are pretty good. I wish mine got even brighter but the m4s do. The keyboard is finally awesome.
The OS just works. In fact I moved from Linux to MacOS. I thought I’d miss i3 and sway but with Magnet and a launcher I don’t. I live in a terminal and can split that as much as I like. And gui apps Magnet does a decent job.
There are projects to go even further and you don’t have to leave MacOS for all the tiling love.
https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst
But I get basically everything I need with Magnet.
So TLDR I used to be a huge Linux head (I still am…) but I’m practical now and tired and macOS is a small price to pay for such amazing hardware.
More on why I left Linux as my main platform: https://gigatexal.blog/pages/no-perfect-workstation/no-perfe...
It's possible to increase the brightness in software on M1, by faking HDR (desktop capture -> scale brightness to HDR -> display).
One example: https://www.brightintosh.de/ but there's many others.
you just made my day I am so happy with this I could kiss you!* just saved me a bunch of coin cuz I was considering trading up for a m4 or otherwise to get better brightness
amazing!
* more a turn of phrase, a hug, a handshake, a thank you thank you thank you all suffice ;-)
I insta bought the suggested app
Check out https://github.com/alin23/Lunar it's the most advanced app on mac when it comes to controlling screens
I read why you left linux as your main platform.. You say you are "practical now and tired" implying GNU(+linux) is unpractical and tiring, which is perfectly wrong in my opinion. Not only my opinion but also in your own opinion, as you also write how package managers are better in linux, macOS is not as hackable, how much it is locked down etc. So it comes down to this paragraph:
"I learned to like nice things. I became a bit bougie, hah. I like the build quality of the Apple laptops. The amazing trackpads. The vibrant screens. And how, for the most part, the hardware and software just work together so well. Seamlessly connecting Apple Keyboards to my Apple Laptop, or my Apple Headphones to my Apple Laptop, etc., etc."
so boils down to this intangible "bougieness" they tricked you with. I dont know about Apple build quality. I have the experience that they absolutely slow down, break down faster, more expensive to get fixed, and the trackpad is annoying as hell. I haven't had any problems with headphones or connecting keyboards (wireless or wired) in non macOS laptops either. It is 2025 and all my computers work fine with such peripherals.
The screens look vibrant i'll give you that, but you pay for it anyway, like you could've paid with another laptop.
Well I have a desktop running arch linux as my main computer at home. For my laptop though I use a mbp purely for the build quality because I have never found a laptop that is as good at the current generations of mbps for thermals, trackpad quality, sound quality, screen, battery life.
Now personally I'd be happier running linux and I'm looking forward to arch linux on asahi working on my laptop. But I will use macos (which I used to like but has become steadily worse over the years) just because of the hardware
Interestingly, I really don't like MacBook trackpads. The actuation force is too high for my taste. Maybe this has changed.
I always just enable tap to click and also adjust the speed to max. Once your brain gets use to this it works great (for me).
It's adjustable
Apple screens are terrible. They use PWM at all brightness levels just to save a couple bucks and burn my eyes.
The screen point is just not true anymore. There are quite a few laptops at the ~1000$ price point with significantly better screens, such as the Zenbooks with OLED screens.
Screens are not really that good. My 600$ lenovo has a way better screen than my m1 pro 16”
What Lenovo model + screen option do you have that is better than the M1 Pro 16 inch screen? I've yet to see anything better.
It has an OLED screen so image quality isn’t even comparable. It is worse in terms of glare but not unusable and I don’t use it outside much
Which $600 model has an OLED screen?
https://www.microcenter.com/product/678489/lenovo-ideapad-sl...
This one is very similar. I bought mine from Thailand
> 16" WUXGA IPS Anti-Glare Display
> $689.99
That computer has neither an OLED display nor a price of $600.
This has a WXUGA display, i.e. 1920x1200. It’s not comparable to the high DPI display on the MacBook Pro.
One quite nice display is the 2880 x 1800 16" OLED on the Samsung Galaxy Book series --- I kind of miss it when using my MacBook Pro.
Sure, Apple doesn’t have a monopoly on nice displays, but they’ll sell you a laptop with a high DPI display for $1000. It’s hard to get a laptop with a comparable display for much less. And if you save any money you’ll pay for it in performance and build quality.
What specifically isn't comparable?
Comparable. Things you can't compare between two laptop screens.
He doesn’t have nano texture, I can guarantee that. His screen probably has fingerprints and glare and all sorts of issues like visible pixels.
I’ve owned a hell of a lot of laptops and MacBooks are the best, not because of Mac, but because of the build quality. The touchpad is perfect, the aluminum body is rugged, the screen is amazing, and the audio truly is sorcery thanks to Apple acquiring Beat’s audionet.
The worst laptop for build quality were those HP Chromebooks.
ThinkPad’s are mid tier but still made of plastic.
Yoga foldable or a MS Surface is better.
MSI or Razor if you don’t feel like ever touching your laptop (:fire:)
"Visible pixels" are a total non-issue already on a 1080p screen, and a near-non issue on 768p. There's just no ambiguity about this, it's a matter of simple physics. Maybe you'll need to go up to a 1200p screen or thereabouts to cope with crappy rendering on the software side (allowing for a 0.7x factor or so in image spatial bandwidth/resolution due to lack of proper anti-aliasing), but anything above that is just plain overkill. Unless you like to look at tiny portions of your screen with a frickin' magnifying glass, of course.
I don’t wear glasses, I can see pixels on a 1080p screen just fine whereas on a Retina display or anything with 4k+ I can’t at a normal distance.
Glad you know how my eyes work. You probably will say next that I can’t see the refresh.
You can see pixels up close on a 1080p screen if you have good eyesight, but that's not the way you're supposed to work with a screen as a matter of ergonomics. Even on a laptop, you're always looking at the screen as a whole, not just seeing a tiny portion of it in your field of view.
I can see pixels at rest when sitting at my desk and a 1080p monitor 27” or more is on it.
Thanks for letting me know how my eyes work.
That's exactly what I meant by "up close". A 27'' monitor should be 3 or 4 ft. away in order to comfortably look at the whole screen. Any other choice is terrible ergonomics.
Ugh, it is 3-4 feet away when it’s on my desk. Jesus. Want to keep going? Keep telling me I’m looking at it wrong.
You can definitely see the resolution difference between a 1080p 13" display and a 13" 'retina' display. You may not care about it, but I think it's uncontroversial that it's a visible difference.
you might want to check in with an ophthalmologist
> He doesn’t have nano texture© […] His screen probably has fingerprints and glare and all sorts of issues like visible pixels.
Thanks Tim, but I prefer my day without bullshit propaganda.
I didn’t think the M1s had that anyway.
Laptops only get fingerprints on the screen, unless they're touchscreens, when they try to be stupidly thin like MacBooks do, so that the screen routinely touches the keys. It's stupid design.
I agree for the screen and the audio but the trackpad on the mac is significantly different from any other laptop so you either love it or hate it. Personally I hate it and would rate it similarly as a cheap laptop. My brother loves it though.
What's there to hate in it?
It's hard to describe, when you never used a mac in your life, it feels weird with plenty of ghost inputs.
To each their own but I really don't want my laptop to imitate that.
Some of the Apple integrations are so great. Copy and paste between devices, airdrop, call handling and messaging, the notes app, preview app. PDF handling (my god is the windows default hot garbage in comparison).
Yes, other apps and companies do this, but out the box there are some pretty great options from Apple.
Using my IPad as a second monitor still feels like sorcery. I can have a dual monitor setup wherever I work without cables or fuss.
All very true! Seamless integration with my AirPods is really nice.
> - The trackpad (but other manufacturers now have tolerable alternatives and anyway you can work without it)
It is my understanding that Apple did lock their trackpad tech behind a patent and that is why all the others suck. So it's really not their fault and it is very unfortunate if that's the case.
> The screen : at an equivalent price point (and even more), nothing comes close to Apple screens. The cheapest MacBook have a better screen than most high end PCs.
The screen is a mirrowy mess. PC Laptop with matte screens cost 500, MacBook 1500.
I like thinkpads and use my x220 from 2012 or what is it quite a lot. For my work, it beat my mbp 16' intel one I had in 2019 on just feeling faster (with Linux). But the apple silicon airs (for me airs: pros are just too bulky) ones are not beaten at the moment. And I try a lot as I really want to run Linux and not mac os x. But there is nothing better for many reasons (most mentioned here and yeah I could care less about the sound). I sponsor asahi linux for that reason. If Chinese vendors would be smart, they would open up whatever hardware they ship and get all geeks on board which pushes the rest. They are not though so for now, it's macbook airs for me. Hoping for Frame.work to get there though.
I’ve had 5 personal Mac laptops over the last 25 years. And all of them overlapped their service lives bc I usually had 2 active laptops at a time. None were the Pro, just iBooks and MacBook Airs.
The one I just retired was my portable workhorse from 2014-2024. I got annoyed towards the end bc the latest OS wasn’t supported (but still got security updates for my old macOS version at least).
Overall, I never needed to replaced battery, hard drive, cpus, screens or really any of the hardware on any of them over 2 decades. And I got at least 6 yrs out of each one.
I think that a lot comes down to apple only selling quality laptop but a brand like Lenovo sells both cheap crap and quality laptops.
So if you tell someone buy a apple laptop you know they will get a good laptop but if you tell them to buy a Lenovo they might end up with the worst crap.
I believe this is one of the main contributing factors in people who strongly prefer iOS devices over Android as well. With iOS, there are no options really. You buy high end or you don't buy. With Android, people will end up buying some 150-200€ phone and being shocked it doesn't compare to their 1100€ iPhone.
It's different now with the main Android manufacturers offering 5-7 years of security updates. But for a long time the lifetime of an Android device was 2 (maybe 3) years, where as iPhones offered 5 years (maybe up to 7).
Perhaps not relevant if you're the sort of person who upgrades every year or two anyway. But a big deal if you're not.
that's a good point. and for sure also one element of why we discuss using past each other here in the comments for some things
IME I tend to get a new MacBook every five years or so just because I like new hardware, but none of my old MacBooks were anywhere near end of life after 5 years. One I gave to a relative was in use for around 13 years until it failed (but it was really abused so I actually think it was a good run).
My wife’s MacBook Air is 12 years old and my wife doesn’t want a new one (though it would drive me crazy). No issues yet, though obviously battery is not what it once was.
Anyway, I think MacBooks last much longer than 5 years if you can control your new hardware envy.
My gf uses my ~10yo air and it is amazing she can stand it.
Just website inefficiency creep has made older devices obsolete, I think it has around 4gb of Ram which Chrome can chew through with a few tabs open.
My X220 from 2012 also runs fine. I use now use a X13 because AMD Zen3+ is faster and provides much more battery runtime. The magnesium chassis and the crisp keyboard are awesome.
This stuff last long:
* Build quality, regarding chassis and screws.
* Replacement parts are available. Hardware maintenance manual is available. A broken palm rest is something fixable.
* Handle it with care.
The biggest issue of ThinkPads is that the L-Series can be purchased (same hardware, bad chassis) and that bad panels can be ordered. Recently Lenovo removed the HiDPI panel option from the X13. Which is the worst possible idea. Another dumb idea is the ugly and useless camera bump protruding from the panel.
Apple takes always a lot money from and prevents these mistakes. But Apple loves to deliver bad keyboards. And the aluminium chassis is bad in comparison to magnesium chassis (much better feeling, never hot or cold).
Avoidable mistakes. None of these are hard challenges. As the biggest mistake “six rows keyboards”. The complete industry ruined laptop with 16:9 and after a decade we’re allowed to enjoy the much better 16:10 again. The keyboards are still small, squeezed things with awkwardly grouped keys. The X220 keyboard is a masterpiece in layout.
an x220 also costed the same as a macbook pro at the time.
(I know, because I had both, fully upgraded)
I believe there is a similar situation in the mobile space with iphones, at least here is Europe where they are not ubiquitous.
Most people use cheaper android phones, that are slower and with a much shorted timespan. then they try a 1k€ iPhone and it is great and conclude they prefer the iPhone to Android: it is not an apple to apple comparison, you should compare it to a 1k€ android lol.
Same things happens on laptops. If you try to use a 500-600€ laptop as work main machine for multiple years it will fall apart. Than you try a MacBook and it feels great because after 5 years is still usable.
You can easily pay $1000+ for a Windows laptop and still end up with a worse trackpad or keyboard than what all MacBooks have. I've made that mistake myself.
I got a razer blade that is around the same price as a macbook. At first it seemed like great build quality, but after replacing an inflated battery, an SSD that liked to shut off randomly and being blocked off latest windows due to the "old" CPU (this is a 2018-2019 laptop mind you) I've given up on it. Meanwhile my mom is still using my 2013 Macbook Air
The trackpad on my X1 Nano (and the associated Linux experience) is a daily annoyance to me compared to the macOS+M1 MacBook Air experience.
I have way more accidental touches, drags, wrong palm detection, etc.
Windows isn't much better (or is arguably worse because "natural scrolling" still somehow isn't an out of the box thing).
Funny thing to say in 2025, but you are probably better off using Linux. The Windows drivers ecosystem is a mess, manufacturers don't care to develop or maintain drivers beyond the "get the product out of the door" phase.
I am using Linux, though?
My experience in the mobile space from having a personal lab with all the flagship phones paid for by my employer was that the hardware on the Android phones was at least as good as Apple but everyone other than Google made the software side feel janky
It wasn’t bad, and I’m sure I’d just get used to it if I picked one and lived with it, the same way I’ve gotten used to Apple’s dumb photo app
Using them side by side made it really obvious tho
(That said, I liked the Pixel 4a better than the iPhone 15 Pro I’m typing this on)
FWIW, I liked the Pixel 4a better than the Pixel 9 I'm typing this on
Pixel 10 is heavier than the pixel 9 allegedly.
You simply can't compare anything to MacBooks. I had a Dell that I paid about $2,000 for, and it was really good (or so I thought). Then at work, I got a MacBook Pro, and that's when I saw the difference.
Its not only the Pros, no "high-end" laptop running Windows or Linux with just 8GB of RAM can perform better than a MacBook Air with 8GB. I don't know how Apple has optimized memory usage, but my personal feeling is that 8GB of RAM on Macs is equivalent to 32GB on non-Apple devices.
I'm not some Apple fanboy—I've been using Arch Linux daily for the past month or two, and it's great. However, there isn't a day that passes without screen freezes during peak usage, and I need to reboot every day or two. This happens despite having 32GB of RAM, an RTX 4060, and a Ryzen 5 7600. That never happens with my 5-year-old MacBook Air.
I really wish Linux were as good as macOS, I really do. I'm pushing myself to use it even though I experience frustration every day, but this simply isn't the case. It's easy to optimize the system and applications for one specific hardware configuration (like Apple does), but it's very hard, if not impossible, to do this for every possible hardware combination available today. That's why Linux and Windows can't win this performance battle.
For what little an internet strangers comment is worth, I had similar issues and they disappeared when I swapped from Nvidia to AMD at the start of this year. Nvidia's drivers have had some kind of push since then but they have always been sort of wonky.
This is interesting to hear. I bought Nvidia because I thought they had better drivers and have a lot of support for AI and stuff, but now, in retrospect, this seems like a bad idea.
For AI, NVidia does have better tech, but on Linux at least the driver situation with AMD is infinitely better.
Oh, this was a great thread. I just investigated a bit which drivers I use, gpu.. And it turns out my arch was using built-in GPU (how?)
glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer" OpenGL renderer string: AMD Radeon Graphics (radeonsi, raphael_mendocino, LLVM 20.1.8, DRM 3.64, 6.16.0-arch2-1)
I've added a few env parameters Claude suggested in ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf, and now it shows: OpenGL renderer string: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
Will give it a try few days, to see how it behaves.
Wow. Your original comment reads very differently now.
> You simply can't compare anything to MacBooks. I had a Dell that I paid about $2,000 for, and it was really good (or so I thought). Then at work, I got a MacBook Pro, and that's when I saw the difference. > > Its not only the Pros, no "high-end" laptop running Windows or Linux with just 8GB of RAM can perform better than a MacBook Air with 8GB. I don't know how Apple has optimized memory usage, but my personal feeling is that 8GB of RAM on Macs is equivalent to 32GB on non-Apple devices. >
Thanks for confirming my point, we have actual benchmarks that objectively show this isn't the case but apple fanboys still make these sort of claims. The same with battery life, if you listen to apple fanboys you get the impression that battery life above 5h was simply unheard off until the M1 came along. I had a x200 in 2009 or 2010 that was giving me 10h+ in the large battery and I could even swap over to the smaller one to get another 6h (?) or so.
> I'm not some Apple fanboy—I've been using Arch Linux daily for the past month or two, and it's great. However, there isn't a day that passes without screen freezes during peak usage, and I need to reboot every day or two. This happens despite having 32GB of RAM, an RTX 4060, and a Ryzen 5 7600. That never happens with my 5-year-old MacBook Air.
The only thing I can say to that is that in my experience nvidia drivers have become objectively worse over the last 2 years. On my desktop I used to be able to play games without issues, but recently lots of them lock up after a while (only in games in my experience). My Intel laptop never has any issues. I'm now actively looking for an AMD GPU because it has become so annoying.
Come on, let’s be real for a moment.
two things could be possibly true, people are sheep and people who interact with the platform can enjoy it so much that they become fans. This means that any person who actually enjoys using the technology is immediately dismissible because now they are fans. Right?
It’s so stupid because I’m a die hard linux user but I can definitely appreciate my Apple devices.
I’ve had this discussion so many times in real life, what is the value of a ThinkPad T-series over a ThinkPad E-series; or a HP Elitebook over an Ideabook? The specification looks the same, on paper. Why should I convince my employer to fork out an extra €500?
The truth is, the things that really matter to people don’t fit very well on a spec sheet. Build quality, palm rejection, colour accuracy, enjoyable sound, even the feel of the chassis. Apple seems to put a lot of care and attention into these things, so yes, they’ve optimised the operating system to be more pleasurable to use… and so it is, even in low memory conditions- they prioritise things the user might care about. (The currently active program, being responsive etc).
I’ll give another example, The Commodore64. It is so comically weak compared to even the micro processor inside my keyboard… so if compared to a full-blown desktop computer of the modern day (which is thousands of times more powerful still…) I should feel like the modern computer is better. Yet when I type on a Commodore 64 it is so immediate… there is no lag in typing, the words appear on the screen as quickly as they are pressed, it feels mechanical. It feels immediate. it feels direct.
Why? Clearly the Commodore 64 has much fewer resources, but it feels so much nicer to write text on a Commodore 64. Not because of the keyboard (I have a better one), not because of the processor (because it’s a weaker one). But because the latency of typing is so low that it is barely perceptible and that goes directly against the specification.
One cannot infer user experience from spec sheets.
And people interacting with the Apple ecosystem who become fans might have a point. No matter how much you don’t want to hear it.
I can definitely appreciate that some people like apple hardware and software. I have a colleague who swears by it, he also only uses defaults on any software out of principle. It's not my thing, and I get frustrated every time I sit in front of a mac and can't change things the way I want. That's OK, everyone is different.
What is annoying and was why I posted is that a significant number of apple users become fans as you say and somehow view everything that apple does as extraordinary, that leads to statements like in the article that apple is "crazy good" because the used laptops for 5 years without having to repair them. Surely you can admit that that is nothing special?! Similarly, saying osx runs as good on 8 GB as Windows or Linux on 32GB that's just objectively not true. There's been plenty of objective benchmarks which showed differently and I have used macs enough to know that if ram gets tight they grind to a halt just as much.
I just don't understand the fanboyism about a brand that it becomes like supporting a football club. Do I like thinkpads, yes I had good experiences (and I have trouble with laptops without a trackpoint). Am I a fan? No, Lenovo is just a company which makes plenty of crap, i.e. the new X1 carbon i got from work is a hot piece of garbage.
I've had a MacBook Pro for about a year. I've got actual burns from the case, I couldn't use a external screen without it being attached to power and it was incredibly loud, I didn't like the OS, the support I've witnessed was horrible, ...
I know many people like their macs but it's not that single perfekt machine people want it to be
You really come off as a Hardcore Apple Fanboy
> Its not only the Pros, no "high-end" laptop running Windows or Linux with just 8GB of RAM can perform better than a MacBook Air with 8GB
Doesn't matter because for the equivalent price you can load up your non-Apple Machine with RAM to the Max, same with SSD Storage. With a MacBook you would need to prepare to cough up, up to 9k more than the base model for a huge SSD and RAM. No more than 1k for this elsewhere
> ve been using Arch Linux daily for the past month or two, and it's great. However, there isn't a day that passes without screen freezes during peak usage, and I need to reboot every day or two.
I don't need to reboot for Weeks, I'm using Fedora though. It sounds like you're doing something terribly wrong, as most Linux Users also don't need to reboot ever 1-2 days. Maybe you should try a more beginner friendly distro if Arch is too complex for you
I use WebStorm, CLion, Cursor, 2-3 Claude Code instances, Chrome/Brave with 50+ tabs, Docker, and a bunch of other things on MacBook Air all at the same time. It works. Never freezes. Never crashes. I tried that on Windows recently, and now on Arch with a lot more memory (32), and it simply can't handle it. I reboot daily. Freezes in the middle of the work. It may be the issue with nvidia drivers as other pointed out, but that's precisely my point. Apple has very limited number of drivers to maintain, and they can improve them to perfection. They are not perfect, of course, but compared to alternatives, it's light-years ahead.
I also use a MacBook as my daily driver, but have used different ThinkPads for years and there is no way that that workload should bring any medium specced TP to its knees like you're describing.
Good to know. Many people recommend ThinkPads, but my experience has been with Dell. In the future, I might consider a ThinkPad or a Framework laptop.
I use Dell at work, Thinkpad at home. Either gets the job done, but to me it's clear Thinkpads have superior quality, at least if you don't go for the cheapest model. Keyboard and battery life are so much better on my old Thinkpad compared to 2 years newer Dell of same price range.
Ollama crashed my MacBook just last week, they definitely crash, as they might not have created the “report this application” feature if they didn’t.
> using Arch Linux daily for the past month or two
No wonder you are facing non-existent issues. Stop blaming it on Arch. If it was widespread, there would be a fix by now for it. You messed it up. It's upto you to solve it. Also it's not "your mac". Apple has full remote access and can brick "your mac" anytime. With apple, you get the feeling of owning without actually owning anything. Gotta give it to them
MacOS isn’t more memory efficient, you can’t be when using 16KiB pages vs 4KiB. That’s a lot of wasted memory.
My experience running multiple bloated Java JetBrains IDEs, Chrome with 50+ tabs, begs to differ.
Reread my comment. Yes, macOS (or ARM, here) wastes memory. For every 1KiB page you have, you're wasting 15KiB of memory.
That's just how this works. It's a performance vs. efficiency tradeoff.
And there's nothing special about your workload. It's small in comparison to many others that many other OSes on many other ISAs, including Windows & x86 w/ AWE, have been running for quite some time with no issue.
It's definitely not. I use mac pro for work and it chugs around 16GiB (out of 64) of RAM on IDLE! It also has the worst keyboard I have ever used with a crazy big trackpad which I absolutely hate
Yes, buy a flagship Samsung phone and you'll see how Apple is lightyears behind in design.
I had a MacBook once that lasted for 13 years, and that's what I used to assume people meant by "crazy good lifespan".
Once on this site I saw someone talking about how the lifespan is so good they only had to replace their MacBook every two years instead of every year, and it just made me realize "crazy good lifespan" is meaningless.
Not necessarily meaningless, but maybe relative, i.e. a person who generally replaces non-Apple laptops every X years would replace MacBooks every Y years, with Y > X
I set up some Thinkpads from (I think) 2004 to use during Covid when some employees were doing work from home. Replaced the rust drive with an SSD and they used VNC to get onto their work desktops. It's a CAD shop with most everything on the server, so it's not feasible to do WFH with a laptop (not enough grunt, moving data over the Internet is slow), and it made much more sense to just do VNC.
This worked quite well. The Thinkpads were even (just) fast enough to do YouTube.
The point is that it really quite depends on what your workload is. If I made them use AutoCAD on these machines from 2004 they'd quit. This particular workflow was not ideal, but doable.
I have a 2020 M1 MB Air that I would love to replace, but it would be daft to. I don't bump up against any limitations. One of my kids uses my old 2011 MB Pro for his school, which granted I did upgrade to an SSD as well, but even so it's quite usable.
Mac hardware has been pretty consistently good for a very long time. They've had some stinkers (hello MacTV), but otherwise you can usually depend on them.
Like others I'm not thrilled with some of the OS changes, but the alternatives aren't a lot better. Windows keeps shooting itself in the foot, and chasing the Linux desktop is an exercise best left to those young enough to have the patience. I'm so done with distro-hopping.
Defect rate is a probability distribution so some people will get 10 heads in a row and others will get 10 tails, and since it’s the internet, and since it’s kinda amazing we hear about both. But most people get a mixture and post nothing.
Every IT survey I’ve ever seen shows Macs as more reliable. On the other hand the repairs are often more expensive. So there’s a trade off.
For me, my M1 16” is a champ. The computer is almost too good. I’d like to upgrade but honestly there’s no reason to so I just can’t get myself to ditch a perfectly good computer.
I think the issue of 5 years is not hardware, but software instead. Windows gets somehow bloated and unusable after a few years. Every time I used Windows machines they have to be reinstalled with the OS after some time. With macs I have been using them non-stop since 2010 and never had that problem.
Also worth noting that Apple actually defines and decides the lifetime of their own computers using software support, whereas Windows and Linux typically support hardware indefinitely (that might be changing with Windows 11).
My sister had a 2011 MacBook Air until it stopped getting software updates in 2020.
OP here, thanks for the comment. True, I should have elaborated a bit more. Actually my 10 years old MacBook is still running as my wife's computer and the 15 years computer, I gave to a friend, which used it for a long time (not sure if still).
My comparison was with Windows PCs, that always were super slowish after 2-3 years. The built quality always felt cheap. The battery was done after 2 years. Maybe it was also an unfair comparison, that I bought cheaper PCs, but at work I recently had to a dev HP laptop much later, and I had a very similar experience.
So maybe the problem is more windows than the PCs, but if you have used MacBooks, then you definitely know the difference. Running a Lenovo now, I love the much other things. Let's see how long it holds. ThinkPads are defenitely in a similar categories as Macbooks, kind of unbreakable. Love them too.
Definitely just a Windows issue, and even there I'm sure Windows 7 (the last usable Windows) on a 10 year old computer with an SSD would still feel fairly snappy. I use Linux on a ~9 year old computer and everything except editing photos/videos is instant. I don't know whether to expect demosaicing to be faster on newer CPUs. IIRC a new CPU might have hardware decode for 10 bit 4:2:2 h265, so that would help.
> My comparison was with Windows PCs, that always were super slowish after 2-3 years.
If a Windows PC is "super slowish" after 2-3 years, that's a Windows problem. You may want to run Linux as your main OS and booting Windows in a VM only for critical needs. Good Linux installs don't get "super slowish" at all unless you're running them on real bottom-of-the-barrel hardware.
agreed. that's why i moved on now from macos to linux :). also installed Omarchy linux on a very old dell laptop, and it was super fast compared to windows.
Every ThinkPad I ever owned is still setup and waiting to be used. My T420 is about 14 years old and I still use it from time to time. It was older than 5 years when I got it.
I don't understand the claim. Since 2012 I have also.owned only Lenovo laptops and I've changed it only for a more performing one every 5/6 years, but they are still working flawlessly.
We run dell or HP laptops at work. After 3 years they get replaced. I usually buy my old work laptop to use it for personal use or to hand off to my family.
Tge first one I bought in that way is still working after 14 years. I converted it from Windows to Linux a few years ago and My mother uses it for browsing, banking and email. Personally I'm using a 7 years old HP.
Batteries get upgraded when necessary and first thin I do after buying is adding RAM.
I don't get how 5 years is a good lifespan on a Mac?
The point is corporate wouldn’t need to replace the Apple MacBooks after 3 years. I’ve got an M1 air bought what feels forever ago and it’s still as fast as I need it to be. I’ve also been using hp laptops in my previous job and they couldn’t even wake from sleep when needed (but would wake in backpacks to the point IT explicitly forbade putting sleeping laptops in bags. Absurd.)
I agree with your point that 5yrs is not "crazy good"
I have a mid 2014 15.6" Macbook Pro. It still runs fine. Apple doesn't support it though. I'm also not claiming 11 years is "crazy good" either.
On the opposite side though, I don't like giving old machines to non-techies. I'm actually planning to get rid of that 2014 MBP since it's sat plugged in but basically unused for 4 years, but I don't like the idea of a non-techie taking it and not getting security updates. If someone wanted it I'd prefer they know what they're getting. Sure it will view websites, run video from youtube, etc... but no support. Runs crazy hot too.
Why not recycle it? I thought Apple in general can trade in old device?
[flagged]
Which large hardware company is any better in this aspect?
It’s true if you buy/compare a random MacBook and a random PC. A 5-year lifespan and good performance is basically guaranteed for all Macs, but you have to make sure you don’t have one of the crap Windows PCs (the ones that do stuff like spinning hard disk boot drives, motherboard attached to flimsy frame without reinforcements, 4GB RAM, etc.)
Even considering this most people still tend to underestimate the lifespan of Windows PCs lol
> it really sounds like there is some reality distortion field in the mac world
It's probably because when everybody including your mom and dad has an Apple device, you really need something like the RDF to stay cool.
Anyway, I don't understand the evangelism around Apple. Evangelism is by definition toxic.
Yes, it couldn't possibly be because, y'know, Apple devices are actually good.
The parent poster said that other brands are good too.
The evangelism will get you nowhere but a place where one company dictates everything.
> So from my experience a 5 year lifetime for a macbook is really nothing special and definitely not "crazy good".
I doubt they are dead after 5 years - I have a number of decade+ old MacBooks kicking around the family, and they work just fine.
It's more that anyone in software is going to need to upgrade around the 5 year mark anyway, because too much shit has changed in the outside world (for example, Apple's transition to ARM processors, or Windows 11 requiring recent TPM support).
> > So from my experience a 5 year lifetime for a macbook is really nothing special and definitely not "crazy good". > > I doubt they are dead after 5 years - I have a number of decade+ old MacBooks kicking around the family, and they work just fine. >
Yes I agree Apple make good quality hardware and I would be surprised if they died after 5 years. My objection is simply these statements that overly praise apple for things that are pretty bogstandard.
> It's more that anyone in software is going to need to upgrade around the 5 year mark anyway, because too much shit has changed in the outside world (for example, Apple's transition to ARM processors, or Windows 11 requiring recent TPM support).
One more reason to run Linux.
> One more reason to run Linux.
If only we could convince the platform gatekeepers to support linux. iOS is unfortunately a not inconsequential market to abandon, and there's no great way to build iOS software in a pure linux environment.
Indeed. I'm running 2019 Thinkpad X1 extreme gen 2. Runs a bit hot but still snappy with latest Fedora KDE edition. Just had to do a 100$ battery swap. The all aluminum chassis of MacBooks are lovely indeed; however considering I like the UI flexibility Linux provides and the crazy premium Apple charges for higher specs, it is pretty hard to justify.
I have an 2015 X1 3rd Generation Broadwell ticking along running Fedora KDE too. My Enter key is cracked and some of the speakers are failing, battery health at 70% was my daily driver for its initial 5 years now it primarily runs a browser and vscode. Still very capable No problems with sleep or wake, even Intel Rapid Start hibernation works although is a huge security hole.
MacBooks are great laptops until the day they break and you are out of warranty; or you are in warranty and Apple in its infinite wisdom and power decides they are not going to honour that repair. So MacBooks are laptops which you use with the constant hope that it doesn't break.
So are MacBooks just another level? Of course not! If you have to use something with the constant fear of it breaking down (and then the only options remaining buying a new one or repairing at the cost often as much or sometimes more than the cost of laptop itself) then that's anything but great. But what infuriates me is people asking "but how many times has that happened?", well, enough times in about half a lifetime! And their extra warranty (which are for + or +2 years, not sure) now cost a lot more than it cost the last time (w.r.t device price) I bought their extended warranty in 2012.
The problem is other than repair bankruptcy, other laptops, esp. at the lower segment of macs (Air et al), there really are not many good laptops in those prices. X1s are costly laptops. But if they offer comparable features then I'd say for repairability alone they will be great replacements.
> and don't have any issues either.
It's very different from something being great. While I absolutely hate Apple making their devices impossible to repair and fact more so making it an unwise decision to even try to repair for the cost, their laptops are actually quite good. But it stops there. Their phones are like ages behind competition and they have a business because of a captive/hostage user base :)
I think it comes down to quality of materials and manufacturing. It would be interesting if someone knew of failure rate data of laptop manufacturers. I bet Apple's is far lower than others, maybe this is because they control the OS and firmware, etc. I don't care enough to go research but an HN thread isn't likely representative of "normal" laptop users.
I'm not an Apple fanboi, I have a lot of linux experience, back in the day built a Tivo like linux PC with TV capture card as a DVR and had to mess with all sorts of X11 settings, etc. Used to build PCs for gaming and mess with settings. The whole It Just Works is true with Apple, everything hardware wise is smooth. The annoyances of Apple software to me don't bubble up to the level of wanting to switch, but articles like above make me think about getting a cheap Mini PC to play around and see if things like Omarchy make the level of messing with settings much lower than it used to be.
I don’t know what he’s talking about. I’ve not had a Mac last less than 7 years as a main workhorse, and my 2014 first generation 5k 27” is still going strong as a living room machine. It could still be my daily driver to be honest.
Try to get replacement parts for a random xy-20003940-fe laptop they are not there or not there anymore after 3 years.
Well, yeah, and my mom was using my old 2012 MBP until it was a decade too. Main reason to upgrade to an M1 Air was the battery and the performance improvement that comes with a decade of processor and efficiency improvements. And I bet that’ll last another decade. I sold my previous two work MBPs back to family members as well, which they’re still using.
And btw a used M1 Air, at almost 5 years old now, is still a great budget choice for anyone.
Author should have just put in a longer time frame.
As I said somewhere above, I am not trying to say that apple hardware is bad and I'm sure they last a long time (although when the battery eventually dies I heard changing that is not straight forward). My point is, that apple is not "crazy good" for making laptops that last 5 or even 10 years, that's just normal in the upper segment.
No it isn't. If the cheap SSD inside has reached it's write limit it's a paperweight
For an average user the SSD will never reach its write limit though. But I agree, SSD's should be always user-replaceable.
Same here, my personal computers are from around 2009, the latest one from 2018, all PC laptops.
At work, my Thinkpad from 2021 is still holding on, and has higher specs than entry level MacBooks from 2025.
I use both, have not spent money on buying personal macbooks, have bought many a thinkpad. I have had to repair far more thinkpads than I have had to get macbooks repaired, the batteries last longer on macbooks. I still prefer linux to macOS, but hardware wise, I’d much prefer an m4 to an x86 thinkpad.
Compare their used values at 5 years
I’ve never had 8h of battery life on a Thinkpad. More like 3h. Also my last two T series stopped working completely after ~4 years (dead motherboard / broken usb-c ports / cracking casing). The speakers, screen, touchpad all suck as well, let's be honest. The best thing about a Thinkpad is the keyboard and that it can run Linux.
I finally gave in and bought a MBP M3 Max 14" and the thing is a beast. Multiple days of battery life. Beautiful display. Indestructable casing and USB ports. Speaker quality is amazing - I can play music and podcasts in the background on it when traveling - I could never do this on any Thinkpad. The only thing it sucks at is the keyboard and OS X, but I've learned to live with both.
Doubt I'll ever go back to a Thinkpad or any non-macbook laptop until a company makes a similar quality one I can run Linux on.
I bought Lenovo laptop back in 2016. It's still working - now as a media Control center. The only problems with it were LCD screen showing "deglueing" like there's a drop of transparent liquid behind the screen in 1 corner, and keyboard not working for a few keys. Neither are relevant for the current application.
Both problems appeared long past 5 years of usage, more like 7-8 years after I bought it. In fact I don't remember having a computer fail on me in within 5 years since I bought it. And I was buying cheapest crap possible for majority of the last 25 years.
I don't have much experience with Macs, but from talking with friends it seems they break more not less often.
yep agree, people have really been brainwashed into thinking this isn't normal wtf
> 8-10h battery life
If you think that's even close to good, then it's you who lives in a reality distortion field. But so are all of the PC laptop manufacturers, reviewers and buyers. I don't get it.
I desperately want to move to a Linux laptop (I run it on every desktop PC I own, and I hate that I have to deal with a locked-down system). I've tried more laptops than is probably financially healthy for me. There's no price point that buys you even close to what an entry-level Macbook Air offers, not only in terms of battery life, but also weight, screen quality and keyboard.
> > 8-10h battery life > > If you think that's even close to good, then it's you who lives in a reality distortion field. But so are all of the PC laptop manufacturers, reviewers and buyers. I don't get it. >
That's a laptop from 2016, IIRC at the time that was about the same you got out of a top of the line macbook. But I'm pretty certain that 2016 macbook would not have that battery life now, while I could easily swap out the battery and am back to 10h battery life.
> I hate that I have to deal with a locked-down system
But you don't hate a soldered down unupgradable system.
I've owned several laptops over the years and have come to regret each of my non Apple laptop purchases which never got more than 3-4 years life without some hardware failures, Surface was the worst which died after 10 months of low sporadic usage.
Whilst my gen 1 MB Air has been too slow for anything, my 2013 MB Intel still looks and runs great which the kids still make good use of. My latest M2 MB is by far the best I've ever owned with great build quality, performance, battery life where it's the first time I can confidently travel without a power brick.
Whilst Apple's non-Desktop hardware is always best-of-class, I've become increasingly dissatisfied with the direction of macOS and Windows which IMO have both become power-user-hostile and have switched to a Linux desktop full-time. Everyone's been predicting the year of the Linux Desktop for 20+ years, but I believe we're at a turning point for Linux adoption with Windows 11 becoming an intolerable ad/spyware infested marketing platform and Apple's continued ignorance of developers and ambitions of turning its neglected macOS into a locked down appliance.
Hopefully Valve can continue their investments in Steam Deck and Arch Linux to accelerate the adoption, their contributions to Proton have already IMO unblocked the biggest barrier to adoption. Whilst currently a happy Fedora user I like the direction, taste, philosophy and community behind Omarchy from what I've seen after kicking the tires in a VM, will look into switching over after they bring out their ISO.
I used a 2015 MacBook Pro up until 2021 when I replaced it with its M1 successor, the 2015 MacBook went to a sibling where it's still their main machine. Apparently it works fine, a little slow but perfectly usable for decade old hardware.
I'm in a similar position to you OS-wise, I still use my Mac for things I specifically need macOS for but my main OS is definitively Linux these days. I use Kubuntu at work and CachyOS at home, needing a machine with a decent GPU for some of my projects got me back into PC gaming after a decade or so and gaming on Linux is actually good now which surprised me. People meme about the year of the Linux desktop but modern KDE is legitimately really good and certainly the least annoying UX out of the major desktop OS environments in my opinion.
Ya, the hardware is just too good, and I guess a combination of software and hardware that delivers the instant sleep/wakeup and killer battery life.
But the UX of MacOS is just okay I'd say.
I need to heavily customize it, adding proper alt+tab, speeding up the animations, and so on.
I don't know if anyone else agrees, but for some reason no one can replicate the smoothness of the Apple trackpad. And now with that PLUS the heatless apple silicon - I don't think I could go to another OS and the x86 hardware world. I would just feel like I'm in clunky-land. Now don't get me wrong, I like a lot about Linux desktops, but Mac gets a lot of things right. I don't want to take anything away from people migrating from Mac, but the PC didn't kill Desktop Linux, Mac did.
> no one can replicate the smoothness of the Apple trackpad
There are newer trackpad for Windows, and the Surface line had pretty good trackpad as well (not Magic Trackpad levels, but perhaps 80% there ?
The more surprising part to me when I gave up on the Magic Trackpad moving to windows is I was over it in a week. I only ever used trackpads for a decade, but mouse's just work that much better on Windows/Linux, especially getting the extra buttons actual physical click helped a lot. The paradigms are just different enough that the Trackpad makes less sense than on macos.
It helps that windows has excellent desktop management/hot keys out of the box, which is a majority of what the Mac trackpad does for me (aside from clicking on things).
I think so far some of the surface devices and some of the Razer (yes, the one making computer mices, keyboards and such) had been the closest.
I did a lot of research regarding the trackpad situation on modern Linux and there are several reasons the macOS experience feels better for most people.
The most important one is indeed SOFTWARE/DRIVER implementation. Using a hackintosh, the feeling is not the same as a MacBook, but close (depending on which Hardware is used). Furthermore there is ONE UI framework (AppKit?!) which makes implementing things like inertial scolling and rubberbanding pretty easy in one Place. On Linux you have multiple App Frameworks (GTK, QT, ...), which is significantly harder to coordinate and the backwards compatible X11 stuff. Did you know that libinput has only one permanent maintainer (Peter Hutterer)?
Of course the amount of Hardware to support is significantly lower on apples side, which makes optimization easier.
Still, all in all I think the Linux touchpad experience is very close to macOS on my Lenovo T480s with a glass touchpad from a yoga 7 in Arch / GNOME. The only thing that really is not as good and what bothers me From time to time is Palm detection.
I use Fedora+Gnome on a 2021 MBP and the hardware+firmware+driver+software combination is perfect as far as I'm concerned.
How does the Palm-Detection work? To test this, you can do the following: Place your palm where the X-es are, then try to scroll with two fingers or move your mouse. I don't like that the mouse does not react anymore if the palm is placed there - it should just be ignored.
┌─────────────────────────┐
│XXX │
│XX │
│X │
│ │
│ │
│ │
│ │
│ │
└─────────────────────────┘I performed your test and mouse movement and two-finger scrolling still works if my palm is there. Even 3-finger window switching gestures. My palm is effectively ignored.
I do agree that Apple Silicon is way, way more energy efficient and comparable to some top desktop x86 chips, but.. From reading different reviews and tests apparently it's normal for the CPU/SoC to reach a temperature of up 100C at full load, with the case being around 45-50C. Do you mean "heatless" as in specifically the outside case temperature - so those x86 laptops heat up the case way more than that?
My M4 Max under full load for audio transcode required manual fan curve changes to get the temperature down from 110º C (yes, it really got that hot) to 95º C (much better).
It doesn't even get that hot with LLMs running with max fans, where the SoC is about 80º C.
Aside from those use cases, the M4 Max runs 43º C or less even in summer conditions.
As the owner of an M4 Pro and an Intel Ultra 7 laptop, the M4 pro is uncomfortably cold most of the time. The ultra 7 is uncomfortably hot.
The Mac sucks in the winter. The PC sucks in the summer.
The PC is however entirely unusable due to that without plugging an external mouse and keyboard in which is the problem.
I am no fan of touchpads and I am using track points even on my external keyboard (I got a panic beginning of the year since you cannot buy non US versions from Lenovo anymore). However the touchpad on my Z13 is actually pretty decent. I got used to accept the emulation of haptic buttons.
I actually hooked up my magic trackpad to Linux at some point because I got so frustrated with the crappy touchpad on my Samsung laptop. I also have a logitech wireless mouse for it. Anything is better than that crappy touchpad.
The point is that Apple's magic trackpad actually works great on Linux too. Smooth, responsive. accurate, multi touch and gestures, and all the rest. Just works. More or less exactly like it does on a mac. Too bad the blueooth stack on Linux is a bit unstable. Lots of issues with stuff randomly not connecting. Which of course isn't great with a trackpad.
The issue is that trackpads from other manufacturers just seem to be universally really, really bad in comparison to Apple's hardware. Particularly anything produced by Synaptics that I've had the displeasure of using is just mediocre shit in comparison. And they seem to dominate the market. It seems like they just gave up even trying to pretend to compete. If you see somebody using a wireless mouse, 9 out of 10 times they aren't using a mac. I work in a lot of co-working spaces. Lots of macs. Almost exclusively being used without a mouse. Just not a thing. The trackpad that comes with it is fine. If you see somebody using a mouse, it's usually with a windows/linux laptop.
That Samsung laptop was something I used in between two macs. My old intel mac died weeks before the M1 was supposed to come out. I used it for about half a year. I still have it and it runs Manjaro. From a software point of view, I can do anything I need to do on it that I would normally use a mac for and I'm actually completely fine with using it for work.
But the reason I went back to the mac is the hardware. Intel/AMD laptops are so completely miserably dreadful these days. Apple makes great hardware. Great screens, keyboard, trackpads, CPUs, etc. You always end up compromising on at least a few of these. It will have a great CPU but a shit screen. Or it will be overheating all the time and have a loud fan. Or weigh 10 kilos. Or have a lot of blinking leds and a fugly formfactor. It's always something.
I have considered putting Linux on my mac a few times. I'm pretty sure I could kind of make that work but the thing is that mac OS works well enough and I have no technical need to switch. And I can't really justify spending a lot of time trying to get things like GPUs. sound, touchId sensors, etc. to work. And I would expect having issues with all of that.
But in a pinch, I can live with a decent Linux laptop. I'd probably go for something a bit more premium if I had to go there these days. But Arch/Manjaro are great and do everything I need and I vastly prefer that over Windows.
A few years ago, I compared the trackpad on a ThinkPad T14 and a T14s and found that while on paper they are similar, the T14s has noticeably less friction with better tracking accuracy. I'll put blames on the PC vendors for playing around with their trackpad to sell higher end machines.
And even the T14s (gen 1) has a "cheap" trackpad with a plastic foil on top instead of a glass surface. The day before yesterday I did the upgrade from foil to glass on my T14s and it isn't the big leap I was hoping for. Sure, friction went down a bit but precession and gesture detection were good before already. The same upgrade on a T480s was a bigger improvement. Compared to my MacBook Pro (M1 Pro) the trackpads of my ThinkPads are always worse. Overall I'm in the same situation as the author of the article (if you substitute Arch for pop!_os with Cosmic) and totally agree with him.
> the heatless apple silicon
To this day I still dont know why people worship Apple Silicon. Before it was even named and was mostly used by iPhone as A10, A11 and A12, when I stated these CPU are Desktop grade all I got was being laughed at. But then when it was put into usage by Mac using the same chip now known as M1, M2 etc. All of a sudden they are gold.
Apple did at one point has the leadership of PPW ( Performance per Watt ), but since then competitors have catch up. Qualcomm Oryon and ARM Cortex A930, even exceeding Apple if you look at other metrics. ( We will see what A18 has to bring us ).
-> the smoothness of the Apple trackpad
Because no other PC manufacturer is willing in invest into it and pay for it. For example speakers, it wasn't until Laptop reviewers paying attention and start saying how awful all the PC Laptop speakers were when compared to a MacBook before they started to improve. While Speakers were easier as it is low cost item. Trackpad isn't. But it got much better when Microsoft decided to invest into the PC ecosystem and Surface Laptop, so other PC manufacturers can take advantage of it. It still isn't quite as good as the one on MacBook. But Surface Laptop is pretty close, or may be just different as some would argue. Similar to Keyboard where Surface has the old MacBook 2015 scissors keyboard with better Key Stability, I value that as better than every keyboard that is currently with Apple.
What the fuck are you talking about. A current high end laptop CPU is the AMD 9955HX3D, with Geekbench 6 of 3161/19080 geekbench. M4 Pro is 3812/20076.
Why do I worship apple silicon? Because it’s literally the best performing processor for a laptop on the planet. I can use it for a full day of work from the couch on battery, no performance hit, RAM maxed out, containers running, the fans never turn on, and it barely even gets warm. Or yeah, I can plug it in like a desktop and run multiple 4k high refresh rate monitors. And it’s not even that heavy or bulky.
all of that in one package was unheard of in a laptop before Apple silicon.
If you’re saying that desktop processors are still better, ok, but that’s a different story with different requirements. My MacBook is smaller than just the PSU and cooler I need for my nice desktop CPU.
>all of that in one package was unheard of in a laptop before Apple silicon.
My point is, it was available on iPhone. And has always been the case but people brush it off because it was an Smartphone SoC.
And I literally just stated there are ARM CPU Core offering available. You either compare the whole MacBook / Laptop, or you compare the CPU / SoC. The first being there aren't many choice compared to. The latter are there but not being used by laptop manufacturers.
And this is not the first time HN has mixed the two up. And god I missed the old Anandtech where this distinction was clear.
So we shouldn’t be impressed by Apple silicon because it also runs in phones?
And yes, there are ARM laptops ASUs just brought out a laptop running on the Snapdragon X Plus. Geekbench Single Core 2231 versus the M4 at 3678.
I mean, I’m sure it’s fine for a lot of people, but fine for a lot of people isn’t all that impressive in 2025. The other ARM chips are still a long, long way off from getting close to base M series performance and features. When you start looking at the pro, ultra, etc M chips it’s another level again.
>So we shouldn’t be impressed by Apple silicon because it also runs in phones?
My point is HN was not impressed in any shape or form, even when presented with figures, when Apple silicon was used in iPhone, but is impressed with it when it was running inside a MacBook.
And you just basically reiterated my point. People are comparing devices, not CPU. ARM has Core design IP that could rival Apple's M3 design today. i.e from CPU IP Core perspective it isn't five years ahead. It just isn't being used in the current laptop range for different kind of reasons.
So you don't understand how individual people can have an opinion contrary to what 'Hacker News' thought in the past?
I participated in those conversations back then, it was a hotly contested issue, even aside from the weird criticism of individual opinions for not conforming to some imagined collective you don't seem to agree with anyway.
+1, shame people are downvoting this.
The only meaningful difference between my ThinkPad's trackpad and the one in my work Mac is that the Mac has a bigger one. I don't really get why some people seem to be under the impression that Windows laptops come with trackpads from the twenty years ago.
The CPU architecture is great and I hope Qualcomm will soon be able to replicate it in normal laptops. I don't think desktop users care about that as much, though, and macOS has just as many infuriating particularities as any desktop Linux OS. It just comes with better drivers.
Too bad the trackpad software behaves differently on MacOs than the rest of the world - when using tap-to-drag, when you release your finger, the drag doesn't get released until like a second later (and the release delay can't be turned off, it's been like this for decades). So when switching between windows and mac often, there can be a lot of annoying miss dragging.
That's an intentional feature, to avoid unintentional "drops" due to mere involuntary twitches (which are way more common on a touchpad than a physical mouse).
(Another option on some touchpads is to require a second tap for the "drop" action, and otherwise just keep the dragging active. It takes some getting used to, but then it works quite well.)
It's not a "feature" when Apple decided to do it differently than everybody else, and doesn't give you an option to do it the normal way. It's just a constant reminder that Apply wants me to adapt to it, because they decide what's the right way.
For those who keep moving between systems, there will be many more mistakes because objects will be dragged 'again' and involuntarily move where they shouldn't. It's so exhausting trying to deal with the "Apple way" of things, it's a total drag on otherwise pretty decent hardware.
Oh darn, I thought they'd gotten Arch running on an M1 but they actually switched to a ThinkBook.
I somewhat regret my expensive switch from Linux to MacOS. MacOS is just so weird, it doesn't make any sense to me. For the first time in my life I feel like some tech-illiterate grandpa trying to figure out how to make his blasted computer do stuff.
Same, I have a Mac at work and can suffer the horrible window management by just having more physical monitors (3 + the built in screen).
I bought one for home use because I liked the hardware and the idea of running local llms. Long story short I'm still using my 6 year old Thinkpad running arch.
I think it is just us getting old. I used Linux since high school in the 90's, through all the way to the late 00's. I switched to OS X (long before it was macOS) because that's where all the and coming developer tools were, and I got tired of being sysadmin to my own Linux install as things break.
Now I'm the opposite of you. I WANT to run Linux, and I have both a recent Framework and Lenovo laptop at home that I bought for this purpose. But I have some issue with Nvidia drivers, or just stuck down a rabbit hole trying to configure a GUI the way I want, or whatever, and I give up and go back to macOS where everything is familiar and works out of the box. I'm too old and/or busy to deal with that shit, but it probably reflects my age more than it does macOS vs Linux.
I just had PTSD from reading your comment. Laptop + Nvidia drivers + Linux just do NOT work together.
Nvidia drivers almost bricked my laptop once, and I'm glad a random guy in a Discord server could help me out because I couldn't even get to the boot screen.
The biggest issue with Nvidia drivers, the mux chip issue, doesn't seem to be very prominent anymore these days. With modern laptops, you'll probably boot to desktop, though your experience will be terrible and pretty much unaccelerated.
Nvidia remains a problem on Linux, though they're making steps in the right direction. By putting all of their code in the secret and signed firmware, they can actually open source their drivers now, which is a lot better than how things used to be.
Still, I wouldn't buy Nvidia anything with a computer I want to run Linux on, it's not worth the hassle. Sucks that all developments related to AI are using Nvidia APIs though.
For mac try moom: easily best keyboard-based windows management.
As for spaces: just create a few (important), then go to system settings and map alt 1-5 to switch between those
I never have MacOS a chance, I have only used it for some quick safari debugging sessions, but in the last decade+ whenever I see a UI trend that really bothers me, makes things worse and harder to use invariably after some time I discover that they were copying Apple's UI/UX.
So I suspect I would not like using apple devices
Same experience here. I wanted to like it, after all it appears to be exactly what I want. An professional, stable Unix system with enterprise support.
I was and am still surprised that I found nothing of that and even Ubuntu or fedora community look more "enterprise ready" to me these days.
macOS is actively trying to hide everything unix these days and almost all the good features require building an app to access them (or buying one).
It was not super difficult to get Gentoo running on an m1 MacBook with the (unsupported) instructions some of the Asahi folks left around. I guess Arch might be a bit more difficult in some ways, given the weird status of arm64 being a different project from core Arch?
Asahi was originally arch based. Not sure how it is faring now, though
Arch on aarch64 still exists but it is poorly maintained. I switched to Fedora and I've been happy with that choice, although I do miss the AUR at times.
You can actually do that, there is asahi-alarm
Sell it and buy a PC.
Curious, what is it that doesn’t make sense?
I can't figure out how to set a shortcut that moves the current window to my other monitor. Always have to go into the toolbar to do it.
Edit: And oh! Why do I constantly have to (painfully manually) maximize windows. Preview is constantly choosing a different size, for example. Why is this not remembered.
I can't recall the last time an application in linux forgot its size after restarting.
Not at my Mac right now, but I've defined cmd-F[12] to move windows from one monitor to the other.
The trick is to capture the exact words you see in the Window menu, with the exact monitor name, and use those exact words when defining the keyboard shortcut.
A clunky PITA, but once setup, works like a charm.
Agreed that apps forget where they were, or end up on the main screen instead of the attached one.
Rectangle deals with a lot of that with key shortcuts.
I don't love MacOS, but I don't hate it. I have a bunch of extra utilities like Rectangle, BarTender, MonitorControl, Karabiner-Elements, that make things better.
I use MacPorts so when I open a terminal, I get a Unix/Linux environment.
Things I miss from Linux/X-11, primarily middle button copy/paste, and being able to run an X-11 app remotely over LAN/WAN. But a lot of that is configurable with terminals like iTerm2.
You might like https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle
The difficulty in navigating to arbitrary locations in file open/save dialogs.
I wanted to attach a build log to a Teams post (maybe we shouldn't be using Teams on Mac, but it's a corporate decision that's out of my hands), and I could not for the life of me figure how to get the file-selection dialog to look at the relevant folder (which was somewhere under /private/). In the end, I had to use iTerm to copy the file to somewhere the dialog could find.
I would also like a proper address bar in file selection dialogs.
The closest alternative I know of is dragging the target folder from an open Finder window into the dialog. Unlike pretty much any other OS, that doesn’t move the folder, but makes the dialog navigate to it. If you don’t have the folder open in Finder, you can do it with `open .` from a terminal.
It should be more easily discoverable, but command-shift-g lets you type in the path directly, and even has tab completion. If you want to navigate visually, navigate up to the computer or drive where you want to start, then press command-shift-period in order to see all of the directories that are usually hidden.
Both of these approaches work in the open and save dialogs, and not just the Finder.
Thank you for the cmd-shift-g tip. That will save me a lot of grief.
Re your second tip: how do you navigate up? I couldn’t see an obvious way to do that, either.
The title of the current location next to "Where:" is a pop up button which will show you the parent directories. There is also a sidebar that appears if you toggle the small button that is an upside down caret.
This is outside the context the "Open File" dialog from your original question, but here's another tip about "navigating up":
In many application windows you can navigate the hierarchical directory structure that contains the currently open file by right-clicking on the document name/icon in the window's title bar.
E.g. in Preview, Pages, Finder, ..., hover over the file or directory name in the window's title bar. If you right click on it, a pop-out will appear with a vertical hierarchical list of that file's parent folders. Selecting one of the parent folders will open a new Finder window at that location, allowing you to quickly navigate to a file's containing folder.
And some additions to the tips in other comments:
- Dragging a file or directory from finder to the terminal will paste its path onto your shell
- iTerm has Finder integrations. Right click on a folder in Finder, Services -> New iTerm2 Window Here
And you might enjoy some of these Finder tweaks from my "dotfiles" (just run them on the shell):
# Set Documents as the default location for new Finder windows
# For other paths, use `PfLo` and `file:///full/path/here/`
defaults write com.apple.finder NewWindowTarget -string "PfDo"
defaults write com.apple.finder NewWindowTargetPath -string "file://${HOME}/Documents/"
# Finder: show hidden files by default
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true
# Finder: show all filename extensions
defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowAllExtensions -bool true
# Finder: show status bar
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowStatusBar -bool true
# Finder: show path bar
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowPathbar -bool true
# Keep folders on top when sorting by name
defaults write com.apple.finder _FXSortFoldersFirst -bool true
# Enable spring loading for directories
defaults write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.springing.enabled -bool true
# Use list view in all Finder windows by default
# Four-letter codes for the other view modes: `icnv`, `clmv`, `glyv`
defaults write com.apple.finder FXPreferredViewStyle -string "Nlsv"
# Show the ~/Library folder
chflags nohidden ~/Library && xattr -p com.apple.FinderInfo ~/Library 2>/dev/null && xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo ~/Library
# Show the /Volumes folder
sudo chflags nohidden /Volumes
# Expand the following File Info panes:
# “General”, “Open with”, and “Sharing & Permissions”
defaults write com.apple.finder FXInfoPanesExpanded -dict \
General -bool true \
OpenWith -bool true \
Privileges -bool trueCommand+Up
What’s so hard about it?
Considering that macOS is popular among even actual tech-illiterates, it is safe to say that their system is probably pretty logical and easy but since you are a power user on something else you will have to unlearn you previous ways of doing things. At some point it will click and you'll be fine.
Or, alternatively, non-illiterates have different needs.
macOS is quite popular among tech literate people too, it's almost the default OS for most techies.
That's not my experience at all. Some tech companies are macOS shops and their employees will use macOS, but Windows still dominates the market.
Depends on the work I guess, for anything MS Office related Windows in way better.
A lot of those only have surface level knowledge about tech, especially reviewers.
Not really, it's just that macOS is more suitable for a different level of abstraction than linux.
Power management in all aspects is one big thing that I wish was better in all distros. Hibernate/fans/shorter battery life are real usability things. I only use windows when I am at risk of being fired for not using it and macos is 'acceptable' but there are soooo many little things that make me cringe about it (.DS_Store littering every drive I touch is close to the top) but if I knew I could get mac hardware, including MPS backend working well in pytorch and battery life, with a solid distro guaranteed to work I would definitely buy that over all the pc hardware out there.
Linux is more likely to have to deal with something like poor/nonexistent drivers that mean a device consumes extra power compared to Windows. But,
* cpupower is pretty nice for manual control of your clock speeds
* the diversity of window managers allows you to have something like a mostly-black UI, which can help on OLED screens. You can even invert the screen color in X, if your programs insist on rendering black-on-white.
* not randomly cranking up the CPU for some windows whatever scan thing saves some power
Unfortunately, at the behest of Microsoft, manufacturers just came out with s2idle suspend and removed s3 suspend.
And it seems the only Microsoft has working support… so sleep issues continue to plague linux… again… after we just solved them.
It makes me so furious.
I have been on an M1 macbook pro since launch and while I love the hardware, easily my favourite device I have ever owned but MacOS has just always been the thing to be the faustian bargain coming from being a linux person. I spend a lot of time SSHed into more GPU capable linux machines for most of my work and thus get an escape but after driving a friend's linux machine I started looking for a way to daily drive a linux machine. I tried Asahi Linux and also tried to find some non apple machines including with Snapdragon X Elite ones but so far I haven't found anything with good battery life and a decent linux driver support. So far Asahi linux with the reduced battery life seems to be the best bet. I don't mind tinkering. I love tinkering. I am not looking for "just works" but something which I could get to work after putting in the hours. If someone has suggestions please share. Edit: Sorry to go somewhat off topic.
> If someone has suggestions please share.
Stay away from ARM laptops and SoCs, they aren't there yet when it comes to Linux. If you like to tinker, go for it, but expect hardware to just not work, or worse, you'll get stuck on a kernel fork that never gets updated.
If you want a good Linux machine, buy one from a vendor that explicitly sells and supports machines with Linux on them.
IMO you can tinker as much as you want without forcing hardware compatibility issues upon yourself in order to have something to tinker with.
The Thinkpad x13s is more-or-less there. I've been using it as my primary machine (and laptop) for the last month, and it 'just works'. All day battery life, fanless so it's dead silent, and a crisp screen with decent DPI. KDE and Vivaldi run as fast as my i7-13700 desktop.
That seems to be the conclusion I have been avoiding to reach. With graviton and other arm based linux server machines being a good bulk of my work I hoped I wouldn't have to worry about multi architecture docker builds. Ah well.
Any suggestions for something well built but lightweight and that one could figure out how to get 8+ hours of actual daily usage battery life on?
Others have mentioned thinkpads and in my experience the better ones all get 8h+, just stay away from the X1 carbon (my current work machine) with hybrid nvidia graphics. Those have problems of not turning off the external GPU and sucking the battery empty, but that isn't just a Linux problem it seems from lots of forum posts.
I've had a great experience with my Framework 13 (AMD), although I usually get 4-5 hours of battery life, so not quite the full 8 hours you're looking for.
ASUD ProArt P16. I never want another machine. Slender, stiff, machined out of something expensive feeling. Everything works on 6.16, 4k OLED display, wonderful keyboard. Solid RDNA unit, NVIDIA card alongside.
With a clean hyprland setup, light as a feather, battery lasts forever unless you run it hard.
Makes M4 Macs feel bloated and cheap.
How's the screen wobble, though. Every review I've seen of it, the wobble looks dramatic. My Dell XPS, on the other hand is rock solid.
that looks really nice
> If someone has suggestions please share
A recent ThinkPad with one of the latest AMD Ryzen U CPUs should have a very decent battery life. You just need some custom udev rules to set the right power saving states for different devices. Powertop should make this straightforward. IMHO, this is a great compromise, because you stay on x86_64 and Linux, you get within 3/4 of ARM's power efficiency, and hardware support is perfect. I've squeezed more than 11 hours from some models.
One thing that is often discounted is that Safari is marvel of power efficiency, which adds up to the efficiency of Apple M chips. IMHO, there should be dedicated Chromium and Firefox builds with compile flags and options that optimize efficiency. To counter that, running a barebones Linux setup is a good option. Keeping your CPU wakeups/s low lets you cross the 10 hour barrier.
The Framework 13 Linux support is fantastic, and the hardware is pretty great too.
Battery is good enough (5-6hrs) for me on the AMD model (Ryzen AI 5 340) but definitely not Macbook territory in that regard.
I run Fedora and have coworkers who run Ubuntu and Arch as well without issue.
x86 Thinkpads + Fedora work great. Hardware support out the box is almost perfect (I would say perfect because I don’t recall anything not working, but I may be missing something). In fact, Thinkpads used to have Fedora as an OS option, which is why I think the support is so good.
Outside that maybe something like system 76. They advertise 14h for one of their models.
As usual these kind of posts are from people mostly using Apple's hardware as pretty UNIX, and not really as developers into the Apple ecosystem, the Cult of Mac crowd.
The same that fill FOSDEM corridors with MacBooks, despite the main purpose of the whole weekend, or at least how its roots were almost 30 years ago.
> It just works. One thing I noticed lately is that sometimes a shortcut breaks, or something is not working anymore. This is also because Omarchy is just brand new, and I’m inexperienced running Linux as my main OS. But for the last 5 years with the M1, hardware-wise, things just worked.
My experience over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tinkering with to keep running well. MacOS is lower effort. I haven't run Windows in a long time, but compared to Linux, it also doesn't require constant tinkering.
While I also think Linux user experience becomes more and more "it just works", the incentives are such that a commercial experience like macOS is likely to always be a few levels above.
My early Linux experience involved a ton of manual configuration, documentation, and head scratching. But for the past 10 years or so, using Linux has felt like less of a fight than using Windows, and things have tended to "just work" for me.
I run Ubuntu and definitely never been easier. Practically boring.
I used Ubuntu for some time, then Mint. I'm mostly settled on Fedora, and have been for a long time (aside from Raspbian on some Raspberry Pi's). It has a balance of progress and stability that I've been comfortable with.
In my current job, we're using Ubuntu for our development machines. It's a solid system.
> My experience over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tinkering with to keep running well. MacOS is lower effort.
It depends. I've been running Debian since 2020-ish. I picked my hardware to run Linux. Nothing much changed for me between Debian 10 and 13 tbh.
> I haven't run Windows in a long time, but compared to Linux, it also doesn't require constant tinkering.
I would say Windows is a bit worse now. I find I have to use Rufus to enable some magic option to able Local user installation (I am not having a MS account), setup choco, install the stuff via choco and then set a desktop background.
> While I also think Linux user experience becomes more and more "it just works", the incentives are such that a commercial experience like macOS is likely to always be a few levels above
Most stuff just does work. If you are running exotic hardware, then sure. But if you have a bog standard desktop or laptop it will work.
The biggest problem with Linux tbh is that if you aren't using Gnome or KDE, the UI is just bit jank in some places.
I run Opensuse on daily basis for more than 3 years, and no it definitely doesn't require "week-end tinkering". like zero tinkering.
> My experience over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tinkering with to keep running well. MacOS is lower effort.
Is it this or that you have the Linux skills to tinker so just do. Giving Linux laptops to non-techies yields self-sufficiency in people I've not seen with other OS platforms.
I think the ‘out of the box’ Linux desktop experience has improved a lot. To me the difference is in the long tail of software. On Linux the variety of toolkits historically available means depending on what software you’re using you may encounter a lot of inconsistency- I certainly do. On the Mac far less so.
The only tinkering I do on Linux now is to do stuff that I would not be able to do on other systems anyway (or at least def not as easy).
It definitely depends on your distribution. My relatives running Debian don't even know how to tinker with it or open a terminal.
My experience is just the opposite: Linux requires more up-front tinkering, but once you get it into a shape you want, it tends to stay that way and get out of your way. Windows, by contrast, requires much more ongoing active maintenance, and previous releases were prone to simply shitting the bed without explanation or recourse. MacOS is better about this than Windows, but not as good as Linux.
Now if you're talking Arch Linux... sure. The Arch devs love yanking the carpet out from under you and then telling you "you should have read that forum post from a week ago if you didn't want your system to break". But other distros, like Slackware, Debian, and Void, are quite stable across updates.
Public service announcement: those "forum posts" are mailing list announcements. You can subscribe to that mailing list (arch-announce): https://lists.archlinux.org/mailman3/lists/arch-announce.lis...
And it's almost always something you need to do at system upgrade time. It's not like your system doesn't boot all of a sudden.
Has Arch gotten much worse recently or something? When I used it they were pretty good about posting “manual intervention required” when needed on the front page of their site.
Not at all. Also usually when things break you can just Google and fix it within a few minutes.
It's not the hours of debugging why grub suddenly broke or X isn't starting anymore it was long ago.
It hasn’t. I can’t remember a “rug pull” in the last 10 years. People forget arch packages are pretty much as close to upstream as you can get, the arch packagers tend to do as little as possible.
A little warning message or update inside pacman would be a real nice QoL improvement.
I surely love answering *Why I don't want to backup my files and settings to OneDrive" every few months OR Removing things like Edge Game Assist etc from autostarting.
What IMHO is more interesting than the article itself - what is this little cyberdeck-style mini notebook on the left in this picture that is part of the article? Does anyone have a link?
https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/arch-b...
Looks like a MicroJournal Rev 2: https://www.tindie.com/products/unkyulee/micro-journal-rev2-...
It's a distraction free typewriter (https://www.ssp.sh/brain/distract-free-typewriter/). That particular model is a MicroJournal Rev. 2 with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 in it.
Check it out here: https://github.com/unkyulee/micro-journal/blob/main/micro-jo...
Thanks a lot for the hints - the Micro Journal Rev.2 seems to be quite a nice device!
I was thinking about going down that path. I already use Arch (btw) on my gaming desktop, and I was tempted to build another machine exclusively for Arch (btw). But given the prices, I thought it would make more sense to buy a Mac Studio, and that’s what I plan to do soon.
> fan noise.
> battery level not the same.
> touchpad.
The reasons for not using Linux on the laptop remains the same after decades :-(
How confident are people that Omarchy will be well maintained in the future?
I'm considering making that same switch from MacOS to Arch, but I'm not sure if I should have confidence in something like Omarchy which is relatively new.
Why does it need to be maintained? It's just an install script to install common apps on Arch and to install and configure Hyprland. It's not really a distro on its own.
If we look at how involved DHH has been with Rails since its inception, I trust Omarchy will follow the same path. This is his daily driver, and I don't think that will change after what happened with 37Signals vs. Apple.
Adding to this, they are moving all developers at 37Signals over over the next few years, so I figure it will be quite maintained.
The copilot key on every new Windows® laptop, though.
> And most important, instant workspace navigation. The reason why I was upset with Apple: with the latest update, Yabai didn’t work flawlessly anymore
I just wish Apple would let us have instant workspace navigation. It is pretty much the only reason why I wrestle with getting Yabai working on every major OS update. There is “reduced animation” setting but it has a short fade in-and-out animation and it drives me crazy.
Same thing for me. Except that I don't feel comfortable disabling everything that needs to be disabled for Yabai to work. My solution was to use AltTab[1] (switch windows, not apps) and not use the fullscreen options. I keep windows sizes maxed, I don't have the Dock visible. I just need to alt + tab to quickly switch windows.
I recently switched to flashspace on macOS and it fits all my needs.
I would love to try a linux laptop, but I want decent battery and no fan. Arm support for linux desktops is still very very limited and buggy.
The dream: an Arch-friendly laptop that runs as cool as Apple Silicon, with Apple's monitor, Apple's trackpad, Apple's audio. Ask HN: What am I looking for?
Dunno, but my Lenovo with Intel Aura is cool, quiet and runs for a long time. Its speakers are great, too. It’s comparable in those respects to a MacBook Pro (which I also own, M4). I never use the MacBook, though. I can’t stand osx. The Lenovo screen isn’t as good, though. I still prefer my 5-year old 4K oled xps.
macbook + asahi
Has Asahi reached maturity yet?
apart from usb-c video and hdmi audio, works great.
what's the battery life like?
I would like to make the switch but I inherited a 7K Apple Studio monitor when my Dad died two years ago and I fear that I will never get full use of the monitor moving away from macOS. BTW, my favorite Linux machine is an about ten year old MacBook Air running Ubuntu. That slim little laptop is still amazing.
That is the monitor DHH uses with Framework laptop and Beelink miniPC.
I might consider something like this, but I can connect four monitors to my MacBook Pro. How easy is it to find a Linux-friendly laptop which can also do this?
I'm curious. Why do you need four monitors for you workflow? Is it to avoid using Alt-Tab or similar to switch between apps? Do you have to be able to see all four monitors at exactly the same time? Couldn't having two monitors and two app screens on each monitor work?
I'm not questioning you, just curious and wonder if I miss something using only one monitor and Alt-Tabbing my way around.
How? Finding a Mac docking station that works with 2 monitors is already a lottery. 70% of people in my company, me included, ended up plugging the HDMI directly into the mac (and a DP into the docking station), while the same docking station worked flawlessly with 2 monitors on Linux. I haven't tried four monitors, but I have to say that multiple monitors handling is something so far I would list under the downsides on Mac.
I think the biggest takeaway from this blog post is that developers and other professionals should take more note of the tiling window managers available on Linux like Sway and Hyprland - they are insanely fast and customizable to exactly what we need to be more productive.
I'm a Sway user (ironically on Fedora Asahi Remix on a Mac) and I won't have it any other sway... er... I mean way.
I switched from MacOS (from a 12 year old first generation retina MBP) to Arch and started out with hyprland. It was really nice initially while I mostly used terminals, a browser or launched Steam. But when I needed to do some paperwork (taxes, stuff involving wide spreadsheets) I often ran into trouble, e.g. when I needed to read some numbers off a pdf quickly. Rearranging the tiling to have everything in appropriate size was rather slow. I often use overlapping windows in such cases, where I only need to see parts of a document and the floating tiles in hyprland just didn’t work for me (not as easy to arrange and so it felt clumsy). I moved on to KDE and that has been working great for half a year now. Maybe I‘m missing some functionality or just didn’t take the time to get used to it - stuff needed to get done ;)
I got a laptop recently where I installed Arch / Hyprland (not Omarchy) but I know what you mean about overlapping windows. I do this all the time on Windows where I overlap windows and then toggle some of them as "always on top" to optimize whatever workflow I'm doing at the time.
The good news is Hyprland supports this quite nicely. I don't know when you last tried it but it's easy to float windows as needed in a dynamic way. You can assign a keybinding to toggle floating on a specific window and then you can move and resize it while holding either mouse button.
It also has a feature called "pin" to make something always on top which you can assign to a keybinding to toggle this as needed. Floating windows are already pinned by default on top of tiled windows so you only need to deal with this when you have 2+ overlapping floating windows.
Combining floating and pin together lets you overlap things in whatever way works best for you in a config-less way.
Optionally you can also pre-assign specific apps to always float or be pinned in your config file and toggle them with keybinds too.
If you want to have tiling but don’t like windows being automatically resized or having to do any resize at all, try niri. It’s a scrolling tiling window manager based on PaperWM. It is in the Arch repository and a KDE plugin called Karousel also exists on the same PaperWM paradigm.
To me it’s not even the tiling. It’s the ability to switch focus to windows in a directional manner. Like super hjkl or whatever.
I have no idea how people are still using alt tab in 2025.
> I have no idea how people are still using alt tab in 2025.
Everything is full screen almost always. In a week I need windows tiled for maybe 2h.
This sounds like madness to me. At the least, browser + editor to view hot reloading output or docs at the same time. Terminal for tailing output.
There’s a second monitor for those times when it’s an unquestionable benefit. Most of the time having multiple windows open is inefficient use of screen real estate (I either have two or three panes in the IDE - the terminal is also here, a browser with console open, some db query tool with wide tables or corp chat, which I explicitly do not want to see when I’m working on anything of substance.)
This workflow is even easier on a Tiling WM.
These days I use niri which at its core, is just Alt-Tab blown up as your actual desktop.
The point is I don’t need any wm for this workflow. It just works on any box regardless of OS.
Komorebi on windows is the exact same thing
I swapped from Linux to MacOS when the M1s came out, and I love the integration with all the iCloud stuff (particularly Messages). Occasionally I miss being on Linux, as somebody who did so for 20+ years before making the switch. But on Mac, stuff actually does Just Work.
Reading this makes me a little misty-eyed and I miss my solid old Thinkpads from 10-20 years back.
Why I ditched my M1 MacBook for a $1000 ThinkBook running Omarchy, an opinionated Arch Distro.
One thing I couldn't find in your post was the reason behind choosing the ThinkBook. I'm about to make the exact same switch you did (thanks for bringing up Omarchy, I hadn't heard of it before!). I'm considering a ThinkPad P14s. What made you decide on the ThinkBook?
My requirements were: affordable, as i didn't know if I stick to it, 32 GB of RAM, 14'' form factor and good keyboard. AMD for good Linux support. This ThinkBooks popped up, and I liked the look and just tried it. The matt screen was a bonus.
If i wanted a more similar device as macbook, i'd choose frameworker laptop, but they don't ship here where i live
Man, know thy mail forwarder
Shipito is one of many
Does it handle foreign country customs too?
Marketing
I’m waiting for the second hand Arm ThinkPads to drop. Fingers crossed.
Second hand as in used from this generation? Or second generation? I can't wait for windows on arm to finally fully get there.
Used ones, yeah. Companies used to sell off entire fleets when they upgrade, sometimes pretty cheap. I’ve bought a perfectly usable T420 for something like $50 about 10 years ago. (Naturally, it was 4 years old at that point, but still.)
Also curious about Windows on Arm, but my plan is to run Linux mainly (which hopefully gets better support at that point!)
Best thing about Omarchy is that is just a set of config files for Hyprland and Waybar plus bash scripts (even the screensaver is a bash script running in fullscreen )
For over a decade I never heard anything good about Arch. The most common pitch was something like "it's fun to fix when it breaks", so I was completely blindsided when Valve based SteamOS off it. What did they see in it? I was due for a new SSD, so I decided I'd run it for a week or two. The moment it started being a nuisance, I'd wipe the drive.
That was years ago and I'm still on it.
Hardware support in the last years has really improved significantly. I was using arch a lot back around 2016, and it was a nightmare. On every kernel update had to recompile a kernel driver cause my laptops chipset was something bizarre, nvidia drivers were mostly half working and it all just felt like a fragile card house.
Ubuntu was by far the best option to actually use my system rather being constantly distracted by another little piece that fell out the wall
> For over a decade I never heard anything good about Arch.
Probably from people who have never used it.
What do you like better than debian?
I run multiple arch systems and multiple Debian systems in my house.
Debian is great if what you want to do, is something that has been easy for 5 years. You set it up and forget it.
Debian breaks down whenever you try to do something new that requires some new dependency. Oh you want to run a Go program written in 2023? Now you have to download and install the new version yourself because the latest version in apt is 1.19. On arch stuff like that is generally not a problem. It's the best supported distro after the Debian based ones.
Trixie now has go1.24 - including the upstream default GOTOOLCHAIN value to automatically download new compiler versions straight from go.dev if the go.mod wants them.
I was a bit surprised this is not a Debian Policy violation (and any Debian patches for security support may no longer apply), but at least the user experience will "just work". Cross-reference https://bugs.debian.org/1040507 .
That is both neat and surprising.
That said while my specific example perhaps is obsolete, the general class of problem I described is not.
Don't know if you responded to the right person since I didn't mention Debian, but I did try it and the other major distributions a long time ago. Honestly, distros mostly felt the same to me apart from their repositories. Debian soured me by keeping its repo perpetually out of date. It's nice to never get burned by an improperly tested package, but never having the latest features and non-security fixes is less nice.
> It's nice to never get burned by an improperly tested package, but never having the latest features and non-security fixes is less nice.
That’s stable for you, even the ‘less nice’ parts are a feature of the distribution if you’re running a fleet. On desktops people have been running testing or unstable for this reason since forever.
Debian is awesome for servers or systems that you just want to keep running without messing with it. On desktop though it’s nice to have, for example, Neovim is that is not 3 major versions behind.
This is kind of a hard read. I'm no mac fanboy but at some point I decided to replace the frankenstein world of computing by something roughly coherent.
Clearly this person just wants hackability and tweakability, which Arch will give you in spades. All power to them!
I'd say this is a "fine" alternative, but not an upgrade.
+1 for using an ARM processor though. Once you leave x86 and the fan parade, there is no going back. Silence is bliss.
coming from an m1, and given they're awesome as hardware goes, wouldn't asahi be the natural choice? honest question.
The author ditched the M1.
Omarchy never made much sense to me. The biggest benefit of Arch is that it's hackable and you can set it up exactly as you want it.. so why skip the entire process that teaches you how to do that?
Because some of us want that minimalism and a good “power user” default setup to tweak from there. I spent all of the 90s learning Linux deeply and custom tweaking everything and trying everything posted to freshmeat.net. I bootstrapped my own Linux from scratch before LFS was a thing.
Now I just want to get work down on an OS that feels like it belongs to power users and closely matches my deployment targets.
This is why I switched to Omarchy.
In that case it for sure makes sense, but for the user like the writer who is new to linux?
I'm very happy I went through the pain of setting everything up from scratch. It taught me how it all works. I just don't see how I'd get that same knowledge ever with Omarchy
It's just my experience, but it seems like nearly all younger people (<= 20s) don't want to deep dive on stuff like Linux or TCP/IP, they want to know enough to be effective (dangerous?) and move onto chasing basic competency in the next technology.
I can from a time when sysadmins were expected to know C and kernel and TCP/IP internals, but that world is no more. Blame it on education, blame it on the pace of technology, I don't know.
I'm not sure how I feel about that, especially thinking about when all the people who know and can build low-level stuff retire and die off. Maybe AI will save them. Who knows?
Not everyone wants that deep of a knowledge.
Not everyone has a spare machine to tinker with.
With Omarchy you get a working good looking OS with thought out defaults and built in themes. It's ready to use, but can be customized.
Why waste time getting what you want starting from the bad defaults when you can do exactly the same starting with better defaults set up by someone else?
I think people like Arch because it serves the purpose of blank slate pretty well and doesn’t have ancient package problems. It’s easier to build something like Omarchy for Arch than it would be for more opinionated distros.
Meh, I use LazyVim with Neovim. It's the same deal. I like Neovim but don't want to bother configuring it when someone else has a much nicer setup and are sharing it.
Hyprland and desktop ricing is the desktop equivalent of configuring your editor.
> I had to replace my full mainboard as the GPU was broken within the first two weeks, so that might be bad luck. But the quality of MacBooks is just another level. I had 3 or 4 so far since 2010, and each of them held at least 5 years. Crazy good.
Having to replace a board and only lasting 5 years is good?
I had a ThinkPad that lasted almost 10 years, then an Acer Swift which lasted 5 years and was doing great until our home burnt down in a wildfire (!!), and now I have a several years old MSI which is doing fine. Also never needed any repairs for any laptop I've ever bought...
Seeing that quote makes me think Apple quality is shit...
There are two points I feel are worth focusing and I’ve experienced similar:
- Linux is fast. Few years ago I wanted to run Linux and used my MacBook Air 2013 (one of the best machines I’ve had). It was amazing how Ubuntu ran so sleek especially comparing to the MacBook Pro 2018 with macOS.
- x86_64 feels less portable than arm. Since I got MBP from my work I’ve also got another machine for Windows. I’ve went with 13” MSI Perstige with 125H which was the latest back then offering hybrid cores (performance + economy). It’s 1kg is amazing and the OLED is also nice. But in order for the machine to actually compile and be snappy I need to ensure it’s not dropping to 0.4-0.8Ghz and then it easily gets warm and noisy.
The MBP 2021 also shows age. But even with more frequent fans and 80% of original battery it outperform the younger MSI since day one.
TL;DR
* Unless you need specific software, Linux distros are great and fast. Much more joy (imho) than Windows.
* SoC/ARM is still rare but it would be much more interesting comparison to current Macs in terms of portability (fans, battery life)
Common things in all these Pro-Apple threads:
1. Macbook users who have/are using non-Apple laptops that find the average work-issued Intel laptops to be just meh or worse.
2. People that only buy some exclusive Lenovo, Framework laptops (that are not that common out in the real world (e.g: in US)) refuse to acknowledge the positive experience of Macbook owners.
I have had only 3 personal MacbookAir/MBPs since 2006 (and the previous i5 Mba is perfectly functional after a battery replacement and a HDD upgrade - sitting next to me running Mint Linux, that I plan to hand off to my 10yo.)
In the meantime, I've also had 4 other MBPs and 3 windows laptops through work.
In no way and form, the intel laptops were/are better than the macbooks on average.
> I’m surprised with what all worked out of the box, like hibernating, external monitors/keyboards, media keys. Not sure how much is thanks to DHH’s Omarchy, and what’s native Arch Linux support
It's pretty much ALL Omarchy. If you install Arch by itself you get a tty prompt... and that's about it.
Omarchy looks super impressive. Haven't used it myself, but the scripts and dotfiles in the Github repo (https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy) have been inspiring
Sorry, but even as a computer geek, I will never delude myself into thinking crude TUIs are a step up for local applications.
I've been finding myself liking TUIs more and more. I've been using lazygit, lazysql, and lazydocker for over a year now, and not once have I felt the need to use their native GUI counterparts. I'm getting to the point where I wish almost everything was a TUI. I think that as a macOS user, TUIs are simply better if your goal is to rarely leave your keyboard's home row, especially when TUIs implement common vim patterns like slash for search and hjkl for navigation.
> It’s only 2-3 weeks in total that I run it full time.
Oh. Still in the honeymoon phase.
I am still in the market for a laptop that a) has good linux drivers b) has a big battery ~80wh or more c) metal build d) good touchpad, screen, keyboard, e) strictly no dGPU. I genuinely don't care about the CPU, all of them are good enough for me. Although I suppose if I'm going to be spending on a laptop in 2025, I will be looking for one with 24 or 32GB of RAM instead of 16GB.
Macbook Pros satisfy b), c), d) and e). I currently have an HP laptop that satisfies a), c), d), and e). But is just 43Wh (now 36Wh after a few years).
I realize touchpad quality is subjective but is a Framework 13 not an option?
55-60wh battery unfortunately. That cuts off 2.5hrs-ish of usage on linux, compared to 85wh laptops.
Didn't hear great things about the build quality and touchpad although these were just reddit reviews.
I really like the repairability though, so I'll be watching their product line.
“Permanenent?”