[geerlingguy]

The problem I had was “it works sometimes, and in some ways, but not other times”.

And as a developer, inconsistent behavior in any system means chaos and something I can’t depend on to get my work done.

This is not a problem exclusive to Linux on the Pi. While much less of an issue, I have had strange driver problems when I tried working from both Ubuntu and Fedora on my Dell XPS 13.

On the Mac, or on Windows on the PC, at least the random weird behaviors (like random crash if I open this, change that, open this, and then use two different audio interfaces) are consistent, so I can usually adapt my workflow to avoid them.

[alxlu]

Out of curiosity, what driver problems did you run into? I switched my primary laptop to an XPS 13 a few months ago after almost exclusively using MacBook Pros for over a decade and I haven’t run into a single driver issue. Even the usual suspend issues I seem to have with almost every single Linux desktop I build didn’t show up.

If anything, I feel like I ran into less issues overall on the XPS 13 than I did in macOS once I had everything set up properly. That being said I suspect part of it is due to having a very minimal setup. I have no DE, no DM, a lightweight WM (dwm), etc. so there are fewer moving parts that can cause a crash (in addition to a much more responsive feeling UI on cheaper/slower hardware).