Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumballindie | Hacker News Reader

Why not Linux (depending on your line of work). Wider hardware choice, easier to upgrade, and no corporate oversight. Doesn't cover all use cases but it's a good option these days.

View on HN

With computers like framework and system76, the community for hardware support is solid too now. Seriously considering a switch from M1. I feel like macOS is half baked development environment. I only stay because I never bought a Linux supported computer and I got the M1 air very cheap. But I am considering getting a framework as I just damaged a usb-c port and I am not entering apple’s repairability problem.

I've had excellent support from Linux across a variety of machines for 2 decades. Dell, Lenovo and HP.

While Framework and Sys76 are the two major players in the Linux laptop space, if you are looking to save money I would recommend picking up a Dell/Lenovo/HP "business" laptop, those run Linux really well and a good chunk are even certified to run Ubuntu.

In my experience though I stopped buying laptops for personal use and started buying desktops. Easier to upgrade, usually cheaper and better support for Linux just by virtue of not having things like a Wifi or BT card.

Why is Framework considered a player in that space? What does that company actively do to improve Linux support? Do they offer free BIOSes like coreboot? Are any of their peripheral firmwares open-source? What kind of Linux compatibility do they guarantee for their hardware prior to launch?

Afaik they're exactly the same as Lenovo: a Windows PC manufacturer that happens to be popular with Linux users, and which doesn't go out of their way to break things for Linux users. But they've shipped laptops that had broken power management on Linux on launch day, for example. They're not a Linux hardware vendor.

Lenovo Thinkpads have explicit Linux support, but they still tend to have issues with Bluetooth audio at the very least.

That's a welcome development. In the past, every time I've been in the market for a laptop, they had few or no explicitly supported models.

(The Bluetooth thing sucks though.)

The Starfighter also seems quite interesting: https://starlabs.systems/pages/starfighter (Although I love the Framework concept)

As for Linux support for your M1, did you check out Asahi Linux? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zHoZK4FoIo Its development is progressing rapidly, so be sure to check out the latest development status at their site: https://asahilinux.org/

Have a work mate that has just bought a 2nd hand apple lappy with the M2 and has Asahi installed on it.

it is blazingly fast. No kidding around... everything just snaps on when clicked.

If this is the future I may have to start buying apple hardware

The problem with PC hardware is that yes, there's more choice, but it's all mostly bad. Nobody other than Apple manages to put a decent and reliable trackpad on their machines for example, and all PC laptops I've used have at times gotten really loud. If you're okay with non-Windows OSes, hardware choice is the main reason to pick Apple machines.

Also, Linux is coming along rather well on Apple Silicon machines.

FWIW, I find current gen (starting with 8th) HP EliteBooks decent enough. They work perfectly in Linux (actually better than Windows, since for a while some bits weren't recognized...). They're quiet unless I'm compiling something (if I don't use Windows, which for some reasons gets the fan spinning even when it's supposed to be asleep). The trackpad is good, even though it's worse than my 2013 MBP's. The main issue I have with them is the absurdly bad displays. Even the top-of-the-line display is ridiculously bad.

> Even the top-of-the-line display is ridiculously bad.

To me, that’s far from “decent enough”, not even taking into account the other (more minor) differences you name.

The reason I mention it is because some people don't really care about display quality. I know basically none of my colleagues do. They'll see a MBP and go "yeah, it looks better. so?". But they do care if half the things don't work (think borked wifi or no webcam). So, for people like this, I find it's a good data point. And even though I do care about display quality, given my usage pattern, this isn't much of an issue in practice, since 99% of this PC's usage is tethered to a high-quality external screen. If I had a gorgeous MBP, I'd still be looking at the same monitor.

The battery doesn't last as long as an M mac, either. But then again, I rarely use it away from a desk. I could technically use one of those mini pcs that I'd cart around, but for the 1% of the time when I do use while out and about, it's a good compromise.

I daily drive a Gen 9 on Linux, it works fairly well, it even gets BIOS updates through fwupd now! However I cannot state how bad the display is, it's dragging-a-window-leaves-a-visible-trail bad.

Every single LCD display technology right now has serious flaws. I don't understand it.

As far as I remember, the "best" displays on the Elitebooks sport a whopping 72%... NTSC coverage. Some are worse, at around 48% or something.

I don't understand why they cheap out so much on displays. These could be very nice little laptops... My 10 yo MBP's display is running circles around them...

Just to add a data point, the HP ElitBooks have been my replacement for ThinkPads. I find the to be a good replacement. I've been running Redhat on an HP elitebook 840 g6, which Ive had for about a year now, and I've been very happy with it. The trackpad is mostly good, not great, but I'm more of a nub guy and that works perfectly.

> I'm more of a nub guy and that works perfectly

I'd never had a PC with a trackpoint before the hp, but I can't get used to it. How do you configure it? I find it's either uncontrollably quick, or slow as molasses. I like the idea of being able to drive it without moving my hand to the trackpad.

One of the first things I do with a new Fedora install is turn down the speed in the control panel. It takes a little tweaking to get right for my tastes, but I find it a small price to pay. But I've also been using a trackpoint for years, and I don't think I remember how awkward it felt at first. It m8ght not be your thing, but I've found them to be very convenient and intuitive.

> Nobody other than Apple manages to put a decent and reliable trackpad on their machines for example

Not my experience at all. High end Windows laptops have plenty good trackpads nowadays.

When was the last time you used a Mac trackpad?

Not the person you responded to, but I'm in the same boat; I went from grudgingly using it due to being the 'best' in practice, to seeing it as something I need to move away from.

I've used the 'big three' (windows/macos/linux) desktop OSs at work and home in recent years. Here's my ranking:

1) Linux 2) MacOS 3) Windows

Where I have control to use what I want, linux is my choice. At work though, I need to jump through endpoint management and security theater nonsense, so I am stuck choosing between MacOS and Windows.

I do all my deployment to Linux Servers, but I want my main Desktop to just work and plan on sticking to the primary OS the hardware was built for. Don't need broad hardware support, it just needs to support M3 hardware when it comes out. I'm also running macOS software like Pixelmator Pro and Affinity software suite.

I'm already running multiple Docker Linux containers, headless Ubuntu on lima and GUI Ubuntu and Fedora VMs in UTM, so don't feel like I'm missing out on the Desktop Linux experience.

I could definitely do most of my development on Linux given .NET SDK and JetBrains products supports it, but I'll be waiting a few years at least for Asahi Linux to get feature parity before running it natively.

The frustrating thing about shopping for x86 laptops (as you probably will be if you’re wanting to run Linux) is how few models come even a little close to comparing to MacBooks in terms of battery life even with tools like tlp running and CPU throttled down as far as it’ll go, and that’s to say nothing about heat and fan noise.

I’ve been looking around and the only two 12-14” options I can find that match that description are the HP Dragonfly G4 and ASUS Zenbook S OLED (AMD), and those still fall several hours short of the M2 Air, and the M3 Air will likely widen that gap with its SoC being on a smaller process node.

Battery is indeed best on macbooks.

> ASUS Zenbook S OLED (AMD)

I went for the asus proart studio book. high screen resolution, high refresh rate, the oled display is gorgeous (although the touch screen overlay is slightly visible, not an issue once used to it) and it feels more robust than a macbook. also trivially upgrade-able short of cpu and gpu. had to patch my acpi tables for sound support, and no asus dial compat yet. every now and then i get my hands dirty and i might be able to hack something to get it working. thus got a new hobby as well :-)

>Wider hardware choice

You're joking right? Sure, something built in 2002 will probably still work well in Linux, but that's often the case for Windows, and on a Windows system, the hardware AND the proprietary software it came with will probably still work.

Meanwhile, in Linux land, if you don't buy very very very specific hardware you can never hope to have functional sleep.

You're joking right?

Not as much as you.

Windows 11 won't (officially) install on any system lacking a TPM v2.0. The only reason that Windows 11 can be installed without hassle on modern hardware is because every motherboard manufacturer started scrambling to outfit their systems with such a TPM by default. Also, for Windows Vista they completely rewrote their driver model for many devices, which means that no printer/scanner/sound card/graphics card from the year you mention has functioning drivers for any current Windows version.

So no, something built in 2002 will most definitely not run current Windows. Even most systems built in 2018 will not run Windows 11.

Linux is ok nowadays, but why? The Mac hardware is already better, and Apple isn't too annoying. You'll have more random nonsense to deal with on Linux, some of it not their fault.

Mac is more annoying than it seems. I went full Linux around three years ago. The annoyance for me peaked with Mac phoning home file data every time I tried to open a file and apps breaking upon major updates.

My main issue was with the hardware though. I would spend $3,400-$4500 on a nice machine only to have the keyboard break and be told they would replace the entire motherboard, etc. Then to have a screen break due to a poor cable connection and be told I would have to replace everything again.

I said fuck it and bought a decent machine with open hardware and a good-enough screen. It's no mac display, but damn... I haven't had to fight with hardware or software in about three years. The kicker? My machine only cost me $1,100 and battery isn't half bad. I get 9 hours with it.. which I never believed was possible with Linux before.

> Apple isn't too annoying

I find Apple to be too annoying for my tastes. Less annoying than Microsoft, but that doesn't mean much.

It's that vs the annoyance of using Linux. Which is worse? I've been there, diagnosing bluetooth and wifi issues, dealing with free vs non-free drivers, finding out Netflix won't run in 1080p/4K, going down the Flash rabbit hole back then, dealing with sleep issues, having sound not work, jumping ship to whatever DE is best supported, messing with WINE for the plethora of non-Linux-supported apps, it never ends. A "how to do X in Linux" article exists for so many things that you'd never search for on Mac (or even Windows), but Linux users tend to make it sound like everything works out of the box.

As a Linux user, everything does tend to work out of the box for me, and Linux is far less annoying to me than Apple's stuff. YMMV, of course.

I'm thinking that a lot of this depends on what you're doing with your machines. Linux isn't ideal for certain things (that happen to be things that don't matter to me), for certain. Just as other OSes aren't ideal for other things. Your experience, I suspect, largely depends on what your use case is.

I just switched to a 6 year old laptop I had from Mac and installed Linux on it. Everything worked great for my use case. I think this depends so much on the hardware you use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com