The main thing it’d take me to start considering switching to Linux is a laptop vendor taking battery life, power states, and sleep under Linux as seriously as Valve has with the Steam Deck. Once you’ve had real life 15h+ battery life, zero performance drop when unplugging, sleep that works correctly without “vampire” power drain, and cooling that’s effective and inaudible 80-90% of the time it’s hard to go back.
I already have a ThinkPad X series running Linux as a secondary machine, so I can see what that side of the fence is like and it’s going to take either a colossal screwup on Apple’s part or a massive improvement on the x86 laptop industry’s part of switching to be possibility.
> it’s going to take either a colossal screwup on Apple’s part
How hot does the water have to be before the frogs admit it's boiling? I feel like everyone forgot the macOS OCSP outage where your desktop apps wouldn't launch because of broken DRM. Or Ron Wyden's Push Notification whistleblowing. Or that gold statue Tim Cook gave out a few months ago - were those not real mistakes, yet?
I'm not opposed to a good Linux ARM laptop. I just can't tolerate Asahi-level driver support, nor can I live with macOS while running my workflow in UTM. The main thing stopping me from dailying Apple Silicon is Apple's complete neglect of macOS as a computing platform. macOS isn't just "bad like Windows" anymore, it's not even certain if Apple will support it in 10 years.
> How hot does the water have to be before the frogs admit it's boiling?
It's on its way, but it's not there yet. The extent to which other laptop manufacturers have been dropping the ball on building laptops that are excellent at being laptops cannot be understated, and that's without holding them to the standard that Apple has achieved where their laptops accomplish that while also blurring the lines between laptop and desktop in terms of power. Add in issues relating to build quality, Linux compatibility, etc and you're left with a tiny handful of machines that still aren't true peers to their counterpart MacBooks. Frankly, it's absurd.
Even formerly good manufacturers have been goofing around, like Lenovo's attempt to frog-boil its ThinkPad buyers until they're convinced that features like trackpoints and quality keyboards can be excluded or Dell faceplanting into the exact same follies that Apple did with the Touch Bar MacBooks.
Honestly, the XPS I bought second hand works close enough with kubuntu that I might not mind.
So far I get enough unplugged gas for a worrylesss morning/evening session, with lid movement causing instant sleep/wake and night battery drain of ~6%. Fans stay silent 90% of time, there is sometimes a weird sound on usage like a hdd read but it’s very subtle.
As a plus beyond the software, I get a touchscreen 4k display, larger storage, and disks/battery that can be replaced if it shits the bed. Considering that the device cost me less than one third of the price it’s not a bad deal at all.
Important to say, I tried 5 distros and only Ubuntu managed this. Fedora put fans on full blast, couldn’t wake from lid down and refused to talk to my external monitor, arch had weird scaling issues and popos desktop was working weirdly.
> Important to say, I tried 5 distros and only Ubuntu managed this. Fedora put fans on full blast, couldn’t wake from lid down and refused to talk to my external monitor, arch had weird scaling issues and popos desktop was working weirdly.
That is one of the offputting aspects of the experience, in my opinion. Some machines work better out of the box with Ubuntu (or derivatives), some work better with Fedora, some with Arch, etc. Of course it's possible to isolate what the distro that works best for a machine is doing that makes it that way so it can be applied to your preferred distro, but frankly who has the time for that?
yup. Honestly, I disliked the idea of ubuntu because it seemed they are borderline building their own walled garden, but after learning that my device had a 'developer edition' with manufacturer's support for that distro, I shrugged and went that way.
For the moment I'm trying to avoid an all-or-nothing approach, if I can get to a workflow I enjoy in such a cheap device it's already a great success. It means that I don't have to say yes to apple no matter the deal, and I'm having a daily 'outgarden' experience so that when the time comes that apple's no longer the best option, I'll notice it naturally.
I'd have loved to see the asahi team achieving full support of at least one device, but it doesn't seem to be on the table for the near future.