[awill]

For my personal desktop, I use Arch linux, and I'm perfectly happy. However, for a work laptop, I am pretty sure I'd take a new M1 Macbook Pro over a Thinkpad/XPS w/ Arch Linux.

A MBP can get 15+ hours of battery life, supports suspend/resume, and in the case of the Intel models, smooth GPU switching between dedicated and onboard.

Linux does none of that well. On a desktop, none of that matters, but I wouldn't take those tradeoffs on a work laptop.

[diffeomorphism]

Is that true for preinstalled distros as well? You can buy thinkpads/XPS with fedora/ubuntu preinstalled and I expect that the manufacturer took care that everything works well.

On the flipside, if I install MacOS on a thinkpad (somewhat popular), I would expect problems with battery life, suspend/resume and gpu switching. Same with installing windows on chromebooks.

[culopatin]

Idk my Thinkpad works pretty good with Mac. The main pain point is getting the correct wifi card. 35 bucks later and I have an airport card in it that works perfectly. Handoff, airdrop, the whole thing.

Trackpad works as good as in windows, but a Mac one is still better. The touch screen works, and track point works too. Battery life is the same or better than windows because I’m not burning CPU time on background updates unless I chose to.

I haven’t tried a dock, but HDMI out works fine.

[lowbloodsugar]

Yeah, I'm sad we're still seeing comments like this in 2021: "I normally work using an external monitor, so I started looking at my options to configure the external display including the external keyboard and mouse."

Trying to use linux on a laptop is how I ended buying my first Macbook a decade ago.

[TacticalCoder]

People are having lots of issues too with external monitors and Mac laptops. xrandr on Linux ain't complicated and it works well.

I've got a M1 running on OS X and it's a sweet machine. I've got a beefy LG Gram laptop (24 GB of RAM, wider screen, much lighter than the M1) running Linux and it's a very sweet setup too.

The LG Gram running Linux is for the serious stuff, the M1 running OS X is to watch YouTube vids and overall surf from the couch.

Now of course the real work is done on my desktop/workstation (running Linux too but whatever).

[lowbloodsugar]

That is a sweet LG laptop you have. I daily a 2018 i9/32GB Intel MBP for work, with an eGPU and three 27" monitors. "Setup" was just plugging them in.

I've got an M1 Max 64Gb for myself, and at 4.7lbs it's just light enough given its raw power (cpu and graphics). It also handles that many monitors without resorting to the eGPU (which is a good job, since it can't use one!) Had an M1 Air before that and mostly used it with old Thunderbolt 27" display and external keyboard/mouse. But I could (and did) play factorio on it for several hours on the couch on battery.

I've always wanted to try a System76 laptop, on the basis that they'd have all that laptop-linux stuff sorted out, but Apple started making nice laptops again...

It's easy for me now to drop $4k on a laptop. A decade ago, when I switched to a MacBook I was working for myself, and "it just works" was worth it so I could concentrate on making money rather than knob twiddling. It was a stressful time, so maybe I'm still carrying that experience with me.

[awill]

What battery life does the LG get? I'm guessing less than half your Mac

[jchw]

I’m on a Thinkpad T14s for work, running Arch. Sleep/resume isn’t a problem, battery life is fine (haven’t measured but it’s probably around 8 hours) and the GPU is acceptable for the work I am doing.

Funny enough, what actually hit me in the face was an audio driver regression, but after a minor kernel update it’s seemingly back in business. A lot of stuff changes, but man, Linux audio really never changes.

If you really need GPU switching, that one definitely would be a bummer, but I’d really prefer a single GPU that can just handle light and heavy workloads reasonably. I think that’s probably going to be the norm soon.

Another thing oft overlooked is Thunderbolt support: it’s definitely not as good on Linux. I’m currently just using a non-Thunderbolt USB-C dock because my needs are not crazy enough to need more.