[electrograv]

I’ve considered trying an ultralight PC laptop with a superior screen. But the sad state of reality is that:

(1) Windows these days feels like a constant battle against forcibly installed adware / malware.

(2) Linux would be great, but getting basic laptop essentials like reliable sleep/wake and power management to work even remotely well in Linux continues to be a painful losing battle.

(3) Apple’s M series chips’ performance and efficiency is still generations ahead of anyone else in the context of portable battery-powered fanless work; nobody else has yet come close to matching apple here, though there is hope Qualcomm will deliver more competition soon (if the silicon’s raw potential is not squandered by Microsoft).

Just because Apple’s competition has been complacent and lagging for many years, doesn’t render irrelevant any feedback to Apple regarding what professional laptop users would like.

[sotix]

> (2) Linux would be great, but getting basic laptop essentials like reliable sleep/wake and power management to work even remotely well in Linux continues to be a painful losing battle.

This comment shows up in every single thread about Linux laptops, but my Thinkpd X1 Nano gen 1 with an intel i5 running arch Linux KDE Plasma had this issue solved out of the box when I purchased it in 2021. The only thing that didn’t work was the 5G modem, but I believe that has been implemented now. Surely 4 years later we can agree that the complaint is outdated right?

[olyjohn]

You don't buy a PC and try to run MacOS on it do you? Then why do people keep buying random laptops and then complaining when Linux doesn't run on it? You buy a laptop from a vendor who designs them to run Linux out of the box.

Also, Apple's power management isn't flawless either. It used to be fantastic, but I've never, ever seen a laptop that has to charge for 15 minutes before you can even boot it from a flat battery. This seems to happen if I leave my laptop powered off for more than a few days. Like, turned completely off, not sleeping with the lid shut.

[electrograv]

> Then why do people keep buying random laptops and then complaining when Linux doesn't run on it? You buy a laptop from a vendor who designs them to run Linux out of the box.

Because:

(1) Laptop models designed to run Linux out of the box are very scarce, with very few options to choose from.

(2) Of the few that do exist, I’ve never seen any even remotely close to being competitive with Apple’s laptops (in terms of hardware quality, and good performance with excellent power efficiency / fanless / thermals / battery life).

Part of that is due to Apple’s monopoly on the superiority of their M series chips. But the rest I assume comes from less R&D investment generally in the Linux laptop space due to it being such a small niche, unfortunately.

[saagarjha]

The whole point of Linux is that it works on random laptops