[gryf]

There is no such thing as a macbook replacement at the moment IMHO. There is literally nothing with the same quality, battery life, thermals, audio, display, keyboard and reliability on the market. Not even the most expensive machines can get anywhere near even an M1 MacBook Air on this front. The M1 MBP destroys everything else.

I develop software on it no problems at all. We are way past targeting one platform. Linux can be the destination for sure but like hell I'm going to do the dev work on it. Years of attempting to run Linux on a laptop or desktop have left a very unpleasant flavour in my mouth. It might work today but it probably won't tomorrow and I'm getting too old to waste my time futzing. It has to work right now, properly, today with no risks.

Note: I have a mandated Dell Precision 7670 for some work, one of the most ridiculously stupid computers ever made and far more expensive in this config than a high end MBP M1 Max and it's absolutely a pile of shit from a hardware and software perspective. If you ran Linux on it, it'd be worse than if it ran windows on it, which is already terrible.

[smoldesu]

Macbook hardware is great, but you could not pay me any amount to daily-drive a recent version of MacOS. Big Sur was like the Windows 8 moment for MacOS, and it just compounded on the limitations that Apple had been building up to. Even if I couldn't have my "nice things" in Linux like KDE and VS Code, I'd still be using it simply on the basis that it behaves how I expect.

Apple has burned me too many times for me to feel comfortable paying them again. I much prefer choosing my hardware and software as opposed to suffering through whatever Apple says is right for me. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.

[gryf]

What particularly did you get screwed by with Big Sur?

The only problem I had was with a Qt app that would not run on it and that turned out to be a problem with Qt rather than macOS.

[thefz]

Same for me, I can't imagine myself doing any meaningful work on MacOS. It gets too much in the way and the user interface is distracting and slow.

[marto1]

> Macbook hardware is great

Then install Linux on the Macbook? Two setups ago I was running this config and it was pretty great.

[triyambakam]

So you ignored everything the post had to say and instead rehashed your own bitter experiences.

[sshine]

I have both a gaming laptop running Linux and a 2021 M1 MBP.

I prefer developing on the Linux gaming laptop, but anything outside of web browsing and raw development (listening to music, Bluetooth, share audio on video conference, gaming, accounting / office work, etc.) is horrible compared to MBP.

The gaming laptop has an RTX 2080, but I play games on the MBP, because Steam works better. I enjoy Steam better on Linux than on Windows, but not enough to waste hours just to relax.

[Grimburger]

> reliability

It was released 2 years ago.

> It has to work right now, properly, today with no risks.

There's still lots of desktop software that doesn't support AArch64, optimising for "just works" it seems a strange choice. Perhaps "just works (with a limited subset of programs)" seems more apt?

https://isapplesiliconready.com/for/unsupported

[zimpenfish]

Weird that Wine is listed since I've got Wine on my M1 and it works fine running, e.g., Mineways. Maybe it's just some specific Code Weavers version? But Wine itself works fine on Apple Silicon.

[hunterloftis]

I have had similar experiences to you in the past, which is why I posted about the different experience I had with the latest Thinkpad X1 Carbon that comes with Fedora Linux out of the box.

[ldjkfkdsjnv]

I completely agree. There is literally no comparison, I cannot ever imagine going back to a windows.

[acidburnNSA]

Linux laptops for development work are pretty fantastic, imho.

[acidburnNSA]

Have you tried a System 76 linux laptop like the lemur pro? Pretty fancy. I've had one since 2020 and love it.

https://system76.com/laptops/lemur

[gryf]

No they don’t exist my side of the pond.

[vim-guru]

This could have been my reply. I even have the same stupid PC

[qumpis]

You say, talking about Linux: "It might work today but it probably won't tomorrow". Can you elaborate?

[gryf]

I've had 20 years of anxiety about closing the lid, hibernating, sleeping. Numerous working configurations became non working configurations after kernel updates and distribution upgrades.

And that doesn't include some of the problems with the desktop software I've had.

On the server, zero hassle.

[athrun]

Not OP, but I found there's a sort of bell curve with Linux support on laptops.

Initially your hardware is likely very new, so some things won't quite work out of the box.

Then, assuming you bought a popular piece of hardware, things get progressively better for you: improved driver support land in the kernel, distros get better at auto-configuring for your hardware, etc.

Finally, 3 years out, upstream development has moved on, your specific hardware configuration is no longer actively tested, and things start to break left and right.

All in all, you have a small window of optimal Linux support for your hardware.

[xtracto]

There are plenty of online accounts of "new Linux kernel versions" affecting working software. The last one I remember seeing is Linux in a MacBookPro hardware (I think MBP 2011) that started waking up immediately after sleeping due to some USB issues. Apparently the only known way to fix that was to "downgrade the Kernel" to some other version.

I am actually using Linux (Mint flavor) and use it for development. My main reason is that I hate Docker in Mac: The emulation layer uses a lot of RAM and high CPU, by necessity. While having Docker in Linux is transparent and requires pretty low resources.

I like Linux in general, but yeah, it still has A LOT of rough edges. The one that just bit me is the lack of Hibernate out of the box (it's 2022 ... come on!). And the process to enable hibernate is so fucking long: * create large swap, * edit some random files, * restart some random service. are they kidding me?

[wildrhythms]

When the 'fisher price' laptop is light years better battery, better trackpad, better power management, better build quality, better screen than the $2k+ PC laptop competitors, what does that say about the state of PC laptops?