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Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

What would be a practical reason to switch from MacOS to Linux? Also, what good laptop supports linux out of the box?

Sometimes I use macOS for work and get reminded why I prefer Linux.

- homebrew is slow and brittle, between 10x and 100x slower than pacman in my experience, and the only package manager I've used that breaks at least every year

- homebrew is only a userspace package mananger, many applications have their own update mechanisms. I greatly prefer being able to update my entire system with one command.

- xcode is a fragile 10GiB pig that I don't want, but homebrew needs it

- docker has a significant performance overhead on macOS

- the tiling window managers available on macOS are less reliable and don't have the features I value

- some terminal based software is significantly slower on recent versions of macOS, even on a 2019 macbook. I'm not sure what's causing it but there is noticeable lag that I don't get on much older hardware with linux

- documentation; in my experience searching for error messages on macOS results in something like "paste this command into a terminal, no one knows why, and it will break again on the next OS release" or "plug the charger into the left usbc port not the right". Where as on linux I end up on the arch wiki with a fix that makes sense, and I've learned something I find valuable or interesting

- I don't like how macOS is visually turning into iOS, I like that I have the option to use what looks like a "desktop" on linux

I'm learning nix at the moment, and hopefully that can solve a lot of the problems I have with maxOS/brew.

macOS is good, linux is good, as always it depends on what you need.

I find developing to be easier on linux. When working with things that have weird c/c++ dependencies, they are usually available through my package manager, as an example.

I have a thinkpad and I have been pretty impressed with the linux support. I get firmware updates through my package manager, which makes for a nice experience keeping it up to date.

Basically all those folks that buy Apple hardware, when they actually should have been supporting Linux OEMs, because they don't use anything from Apple other than BSD userspace.

I’ve been very happy with my System76 Linux laptop.

For me personally, I can’t update my laptop (2010 MBP) to the latest MacOS without trickery. It’s simply unsupported.

I plan on moving back to Linux once the core apps cease to operate — iMessage, easy transfer of music/audiobooks to iPhone, FaceTime.

Also, I’m pretty sure Dell and Lenovo have OoB support for Linux. Lenovo especially since RedHat is under the same umbrella.

Why would Linux on your 2010 MBP be better than your current MacOS on your MBP? Or is the real issue that you're looking to upgrade, and don't want to pay the Apple tax on new Macbooks?

It wouldn’t be. But once the native apps stop working as expected I will have no reason to stay on the MacOS platform, ergo, my transition back to Linux.

I am not sure I understand this viewpoint. A 2010 MBP is ~11 years old at this point, which is an eternity given how the past decade of laptops have evolved.

If you buy any modern laptop that's not junk, you're going to be paying hundreds of dollars. I simply don't see why you wouldn't grab an M1 Air at this point.

Is it Big Sur/Monterey...? Like, if you could upgrade, would you?

Yes. I have 0 intentions of purchasing a different laptop and instead will use Linux to prolong its lifespan.

Native containers so no more docker VM eating all you CPU.

Thinkpads have pretty great Linux support. I haven't had any major hardware compat issues in a long time when installing Fedora on a Thinkpad.

My Thinkpad works great. I can't say the same for other machines I own, or other laptops.

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