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Comment by agnosticmantis | Hacker News Reader

I haven’t used a Linux laptop in a while. Is there any that’s competitive to MBP M2 in terms of processing power and battery life? I’ve been working on an MBP M1 for ~1 years now and I’ve yet to hear the fan working or feel the heat (to be fair, it’s a work laptop and most development happens in the cloud). If only for this reason I find it hard to buy anything other than MBPs for work, unfortunately.

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> Is there any that’s competitive to MBP M2 in terms of processing power and battery life?

Sadly, nope. And I'm not even on a MBP M2, just a maxed out MBA M1, The best laptop I ever had. Processing power is more than enough for what I develop, and after more than two years I can still easily work my day with a single charge. Meanwhile, coworkers suffer with Dell laptops running different Linux distros: power management problems, battery life is tiny, fans blowing like they're hoovers. Oh... and they all have more expensive laptops than me.

But Apple bad. Not professional. Or so they say.

My work laptop is a MBP M1 Max, all development is local and I've never heard the fan or feel the heat like my previous work MBP Intel (Core i9). That machine sucked, it had the power but I could never be work for more than 2-3h away from a power outlet. The M1 Max lasts 7-10h even when doing Google Meet video calls (the biggest power drain I experience, much more than development running multiple containers with Rancher Desktop).

Nothing compares for battery life except really slow ARM laptops like Samsung makes.

But if 10 hours is enough I think ASUS Zenbooks and the ProArt line are pretty good Linux machines. They have faster GPUs and betters screens (OLED) too.

I got a surface a few months ago and have been impressed with build quality. I’ve actually never had problems with dell or Lenovo laptops either in terms of ruggedness however I don’t know that I’m actually properly testing that attribute. I don’t view any of my computer usage as rugged tbh.

I just like using / writing code on macOS more than windows, not much else to it.

Processing power: plenty. Battery life: not really but who cares? Just plug in. The real question is why you would want a $2,000 laptop to run as a terminal emulator.

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