> The battery life and power/efficiency of my m4 pro is insane.
They're coming. Look for AMD Strix Halo chips. They're in the comparably comfortable efficiency range.
> The battery life and power/efficiency of my m4 pro is insane.
They're coming. Look for AMD Strix Halo chips. They're in the comparably comfortable efficiency range.
> AMD Strix Halo chips
Do you happen to know any laptop that has a) equivalent screen quality (retina resolution), b) keyboard, c) trackpad but with full Linux support where all hardware pheripherals just work?
The ThinkPad X1 series usually have great linux support and you can option them with 2.8k@120Hz OLED panels, which at 14" lands between the Air and the 14" Pro in terms of PPI. I have a couple generations old X1 Yoga and all of the hardware worked out of the box with Manjaro and Debian, including the touchscreen and active stylus.
People usually buy them for the keyboards and trackpoint, but imo the touchpad is still pretty solid. It is a bit small on account of the trackpoint buttons taking up vertical real estate but its pretty responsive and multi-touch gestures work perfectly in my experience. I believe newer ones have larger trackpads than mine, though still not as large as a similarly sized mac.
I have a Gen 12 X1 and I'm very happy with it; huge step up over my previous Dell XPS, and all the hardware works great on the latest kernel.
Reminder that Thinkpad's makers, Lenovo, has shipped a laptop preloaded with the Superfish malware (https://easytechsolver.com/what-is-the-lenovo-controversy/)
This is true. However, Superfish hasn’t been relevant in years and Lenovo walked back on including such malware going forward as far as I can tell.
And furthermore, Superfish didn’t affect ThinkPads. Only lower end Lenovo models.
And surely didn't affect Linux installed on it, which is the topic of the thread.
HP ZBook Ultra G1a? It has Strix Halo, 14" 2880x1800 (242 ppi) 120 Hz VRR OLED, and Ubuntu 24.04 options.
Can't speak for the keyboard, but HP ZBooks/EliteBooks tend to be decent.
I'm typing this post on the 395+ 128gb RAM model. IMO, the keyboard is better than the one in the newest Macbook Pro. Just enough travel, and quiet enough so I don't disturb co-workers when I type.
I use it for development running Fedora Workstation. My job involves spinning up lots of containers and K8S KIND clusters.
I often reach for it instead of my 14" M4 Macbook. However, I will choose the Macbook Pro when I know I'll be away from a charger for a while. The HP, as great as it is, still has bad battery life.
The only downside is that the webcam _does not work_ unless you use Ubuntu 20.04 w/ the OEM kernel package.
The ISP driver which will enable the camera to work is in the process of being up-streamed, though. I believe they're targeting early 2025 for mainline Linux support.
> early 2025
Is that a typo?
There’s barely 4 months left in 2025.
Do you feel a difference between Strix Halo and other x86 machines you could lay your hands on to date? I want one, but with an M2 Max macbook pro and Zen2 desktop it feels very hard to justify.
I have this laptop with this display configuration and it looks amazing. However on Arch with Gnome/Wayland I cannot get color management to work, which is a problem since this display has such a wide gamut. Opening HN on it for the first time I was blinded by the deepest orange nav bar I could imagine.
The HP zbook g1a ultra is as close as you can get with Strix Halo. There are two screen options and the OLED one is high resolution. It's Ubuntu certified as well and can run LLMs nicely. The keyboard, trackpad, etc are all to notch. It's somewhere in between a mac pro and max.
I have one and love it but it's not close to my wife's mac on battery life.
I've yet to understand the point of OLED, if it sits at 400nits. All Apple's devices from iPhone to Studio Display are brighter, some of them are much much brighter even with OLED :/
Contrast and pixel response time. OLED PC monitors still look amazing even with low all-screen brightness.
> retina resolution
That just means 3024x1964. With other laptops you can either go up a step to 4k or down to OLED 2880xsomething.
Unfortunately it also means a software stack that can properly scale everything for such a display. Windows and Linux both have... issues around UI scaling that make this kind of a pain.
Well, the highest resolution MacBook has less than 4K resolution and there's plenty of 4K laptops out there...
Most "business" centric laptops work great with Linux, as long as you use a well supported distro (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, openSuse). YMMV if you use other distros...
I think it’s debatable whether full 4K makes any sense on a 14” or 15” screen.
Regardless, the parent asked and it's a thing...
Razer Blade is my windows laptop. The hardware is great, MacBook nice, but it needs the chip efficiency.
I had a 1440p 14" Lenovo Thinkbook that ran Linux fine. Ryzen 5800u, maybe $400 seconhand IIRC.
Your best option is framework IMO.
The 2.8k panels are overall inferior to Apple's across a number of metrics, but they have a higher pixel density than the Air 13, (and has the S-tier aspect ratio of 3:2).
The FW13 keyboard is objectively pretty decent but not perfect, and is much much better than any keyboard Apple has made in the last decade, could be personal preference but apple has been making some pretty bad keyboards for a while now.
Trackpad on FW13 is OK, no one even comes close to Apple, but it's pretty decent, nothing upsetting if you're comparing it to any non-apple trackpads.
Framework has excellent linux suppport, all hardware bells and whistles generally work out of the box on every Linux distro, but Fedora, Ubuntu, and Bazzite are officially supported by Framework they QA against all three and work with maintainers to resolve issues and you can be totally confident that everything will just work. (At least work as well as it would on Windows!)
The other two downsides relative to a macbook are build quality and support. Although the FW13 is pretty solid in practice, I have dropped mine dozens of times and throw it in my bag and treat it overall rough and it has take on some dings and scratches but everything still works. But the frame is not very rigid, it flexes in lots of places, and it just does not feel as nice and solid as a macbook. And support can be hit-or-miss, like with any small manufacturer.
I think you’re talking about Apple’s butterfly keyboards which were only around for 3-4 years of the last decade you’re talking about. Apple’s keyboards have been great for 5+ years now.
Agreed. Only issue is that they wear down really fast. Your fingers sand them down at a mindblowing pace, and soon enough all of them are smooth, with most used keys having shiny blemishes on them
you’re smoothing your fingers wrong
I assumed that was grease.
... do you moisturise your hands? Because "sandpaper" shouldn't describe your fingertips
The performance seems to rival Apple's Pro / Max chips but the battery life can only do that for light workloads or videos.