> I cannot find anything comparable in terms of size/weight/battery and build quality. Especially the trackpad, nothing is remotely close. Otherwise I'd get that and put Arch on it.
I tried for a while, and running it natively really hammered the battery, got nowhere close to the same uptime as when running macOS. Running it in a VM was OK on battery, but of course there's CPU/RAM overhead, and the trackpad _feels_ nice, but it still doesn't quite move in the right way.
The tweaks don't always work without any issues: speakers make static or USB ports get disabled even with wireless mice, for example. Distros don't want to cause problems like this.
Some distros don't offer a laptop-optimized build explicitly. But many times this is because the optimization is performed as an automated step during the installation process.
That said, some popular distros do offer laptop modes during install. Off the top of my head, I think Ubuntu and Gentoo do.
What about the trackpad though? Of course the hardware feel is the same and great, but it doesn't move quite right, like it does with macOS, or you would with a mouse.