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Comment by darrmit | Hacker News Reader

This was true 3-5 years ago, but you can now buy OEM laptops with Linux preinstalled that "just work" the same as a Mac. Granted, in the long run I don't expect many to be able to maintain Linux unless they're pretty technical. But the whole "waste hours" idea just isn't true these days.

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> This was true 3-5 years ago, but you can now buy OEM laptops with Linux preinstalled that "just work" the same as a Mac.

With the trackpad working as good as it does in Mac? And Bluetooth/WiFi? And as good of battery life due to strong hibernate/standby/sleep when you close the lid working? And equal support for external displays?

If Ubuntu is really 1:1 on par with Mac OS X in all categories, I'd be surprised.

Linux != Ubuntu, but yeah, while no one beats Apple's trackpad tech, the rest is there.

The biggest gotcha is still vendor hardware choices that don't follow spec. Appreciating that MacOS doesn't work on any laptops Apple doesn't make, it's pretty amazing how great the baseline for support is with any general Linux distro, even on Macs.

Also, Mac wifi and BT use some proprietary magic that isn't OS dependent. Just to emphasize that the hardware and OS are separate things.

My MBP trackpad feels so silky and sexy gliding around my OpenBSD cwm(1).

I'm currently using a Magic Trackpad 2 with my KDE desktop (5.26). Gesture support is now 1:1 with MacOS, giving you silky-smooth kinetic gestures for changing desktops, going into Overview, etc. If you're using Wayland, it should also have fairly good support on GNOME too. The only thing you're missing is Force Touch, but I didn't even use that on MacOS.

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