Ask HN: Is Linux for laptop worth the trouble?
As someone who has been using Arch/Void + XMonad (and now Gnome), and with the price of the MacBook Air (M-series) falling within an affordable range, is it worth continuing to fiddle with Linux?
I’ve come to the conclusion that the MacBook Air’s M-series chip is just amazing. Nothing really compares to the battery life and quietness of this machine. Not to mention, some of the default apps (Notes, Reminders, Shortcuts, passwords, safari, etc.) seem incredibly hard to beat. And if you are into the eco-system you don't have to pay for different services.
I’m curious about other people's thoughts on this. I’d love to hear a Change My View (CMV) on this.
May be things have changed over the last 10 years but HN comments literally convinced me to switch to a macbook a decade ago and it was literally one of the worst experiences with a product of my life. Everyone who says mac is unix and is just as good as linux is a fool and should never be trusted.
If you want, you can search my username with "macbook" and see my rants since 2015. The worst experience I had with it was it glitching out a hour before a national conference presentation that forced me to remake the slides on another person's laptop. I was sitting in the audience sweating bullets remaking those slides over the course of a grueling hour or so. I have never had the desire to buy another apple product since then and I don't miss it.
Linux just works, especially if you have a machine it works well on. Don't believe the naysayers, learn from my exprience.
> Everyone who says mac is unix and is just as good as linux is a fool and should never be trusted.
Seconded.
> Linux just works
While there are instances where this is the case (System76 hardware w/ PopOS for example), This is certainly not true in the general, and this is coming from someone that's been on linux since the dotcom era. It's very very important you get a well supported device or it most certainly does not "just work", and that's goes triple if you're not using some flavor of ubuntu/debian (in the past fedora generally does pretty good too but I've not been keeping up with the fedora sphere since IBM drove me away from the redhat/fedora/centOS ecosphere). Thankfully, there's never been more options or support for linux on laptop, so it's not as near as difficult to achieve as it once was.
Linux does what it's told, which is why I love it, but if you don't know what you're doing, and/or if the autoconfiguration tools/drivers aren't compatible with the hardware in question, you've got a recipe for frustration for anyone that's new to linux/not in the mood to tinker.
Thirded!
I jumped from DOS in the mid 90s to Solaris to Linux in about 2001. BEen on it since. I got my first personal laptop in 2004 or so (IBM thinkpad T42). Then went through 2 X series laptops and am currently on an X1 carbon.
I consulted for a company for 2.5 years where I used a mac.
Maybe it's just me but I found the mac ecosystem very crummy. On Debian, when I wanted postgres, I did an apt-get and got it sort of like Trinity in the matrix asking for helicopter pilot skills. With the mac, I installed it using brew. That didn't work so there was an app for it and that had its own quirks. I put it down to my lack of familiarity with the system. I would have invested time to get familiar with it but, and this is my second point, Linux was did "just work" for 95% of what I wanted. All the annoying things about sound drivers, wifi cards, usb, fonts, video etc. from the 90s were not problems anymore. There were a few things that I needed to get running but they weren't deal killers. Definitely not as rough as what I had with postgres on the mac.
Hardware wise, I agree with the OP, I don't think think anything comes close to Apple's offering at that price point. The reason I stay away from it is because of the software. I much prefer Linux. There are also tangential points like working on the exact OS and machine where I'm going to actually deploy/debug production apps on is useful. This is alleviated to some extent by using a Linux VM on a mac if that's what you do.
I have used MacBooks as my main workstation for about 15 years and still do.
My initial transition from Debian to OS X was painful. Once it settled in, it became comfortable. I like a lot of things about it.
I'll keep my M2 Pro for as long as I can but my next laptop is likely to be an AMD Framework to run Debian.
I’ve used MacBooks since 2008, still do since the company I work for refused to supply PC laptops running anything but Windows.
They can be great if you have a large wallet and simply want a computer that will integrate easily with your iPhone or any other Apple products. I use an iPhone myself because I’ve had bad experiences with Android devices, but every few years I try a new Android phone anyway.
Apple does not care about their end users. The hardware they retail is overprivced and the M chips are over hyped, especially with ARM PC:s now available.
Their OS was great back in 2000-2010 but has since become more and more unstable, while Linux has moved in the opposite direction. Today I would argue Linux is at least as easy to manage.
Some apps integrate better with OS X, and the magnetic charger cable is a plus. Then again, using external monitors is difficult, and if anything breaks in your nice Apple laptop it will be difficult to mend and cost and arm and a leg. All in all, I would stay away from them.
It's a question of preference.
* Recent Macbooks have an incredible battery life, that's for sure.
* macOS is not Linux, and Linux is not macOS.
I personally like Linux a lot more than macOS, therefore I run Linux on my laptop. It's not a pain at all: just make sure you get a laptop that is well supported (seems a lot easier than 20 years ago, I personally run on ThinkPads).
The way you write (e.g. you see running Linux on a laptop as "a trouble"), you sound like you like macOS better but were using Linux because it was cheaper. In that case go for a Macbook if it's now affordable!
One thing I think macos is better is connecting to high resolution monitors without issues. My attempts to connect my thinkpad x1e to 5k (could be the dreaded nvidia which is causing this) causes so much headache.
Just to provide a counterpoint (and to show that there is no 1 true answer) I switched from my linux machine to a mac when my carefully selected hardware kept having a graphics card crash when closing/unclosing the lid. And this was the last straw, it’s an endless sequence of micro cuts (power throttling bugs, scroll being different across apps, issues with crappy hardware at a client)
On the other hand most of these microcuts can be researched, solved or scripted away. With my mac I have far fewer, but the ones you have, you’re often stuck with. Generally these are about flakiness with the automagic stuff. Like the camera feed switching to your iphone for a while (whether you want it or not), then suddenly refusing for weeks even when you do want it.
Also, the mac has no tiling wm that comes within a parsec of i3. I miss i3 daily. So. Much. Especially with multiple screens.
But then again, I enjoy opening the lid of my laptop daily as well. And being able to close the lid and put it in my bag, without first listening if it succesfully went to sleep. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I guess what I’m saying is: pick the annoyances that give you the smallest emotional response at this time in your life.
I think the laptop lid atleast for me hasnt been an issue lately on my thinkpad.
For i3 WM on macOS, what about https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace?
> With my mac I have far fewer, but the ones you have, you’re often stuck with. Generally these are about flakiness with the automagic stuff. Like the camera feed switching to your iphone for a while (whether you want it or not), then suddenly refusing for weeks even when you do want it
This is the kind of thing I could absolutely not stand unless I was getting paid for it. I paid for the laptop. This button does X. When I press this button, it needs to do X. Let me at least fix it so that it does X. If it was a free laptop or I was getting paid to sit around waiting for X to work again, that's absolutely fine. But if I paid for it, it should either work or let me fix it.
With that attitude, you will hate all Apple products. If stuff breaks, you drive to the genius bar and they’ll helpfully exchange your hardware for another one. And if it’s a software bug, your only option is to patiently wait.
> your only option is to patiently wait.
I have a mid-2012 mac book air but I've been running nixos on it since 2016. Hasn't failed me yet.
Buy a used Thinkpad. Their compatibility is superb, as many major Linux vendors develop on them. Better to buy older higher-end models than spend the money on newer models. Buy the highest-end model you can afford.
Don't use an ideologically-motivated distro that omits drivers and firmware because they are not Free enough. Use something fairly mainstream, like Ubuntu or Mint.
Update its firmware before you install.
Shrink the Windows partition but keep it, for things like firmware updates. Nuke the recovery partitions, though; they're junk.
Max out the RAM. Have 2 SSDs if they'll fit. OS on one, data on a physically separate one. Used RAM is cheap. Buy matched memory modules.
Avoid wireless anything if you can. Wired peripherals, wired network, wired audio. Wired stuff just works.
Not just Thinkpads work fine (Latitudes are also awesome), what you describe is wisdom from the 2000s. You can just use fwupd to have regular firmware updates, no need to keep Windows just for that. Wireless also works very nice, especially Intel. What can be tricky are fingerprint readers, but some have binary drivers.
Wireless is a gamble, wired works.
Buy the Mac. If you’re using Arch and Linux feels like “trouble” instead of a breath of fresh air, it may not be for you.
That being said, if you really want to be persuaded, give Linux a little more time, and accept some friendly advice. First of all, make sure you’re running hardware that’s not going to give you trouble. If you have the resources to buy a new Apple laptop, you can afford a refurb from eBay with compatible hardware. Don’t overthink the specs, Linux runs better on 10 year old hardware than windows did when it was brand new on the same machine. Steer well clear of NVidia. Their hardware is nothing but trouble.
Second, XMonad is a weird choice if you’re just starting out. It’s Fun with a capital F, but trouble free it’s not. It (a) still doesn’t support Wayland, which means you’re bound to the increasingly creaky and unsupported XOrg and (b) last I used it, XMonad was configured by recompiling a Haskell program. If you’re not a committed Haskell user, this adds a ton of friction. Just use sway if you want a tiling WM.
Sorry i should have made it clearer in my post, I have been using archlinux and xmonad for more than 10 years but i do reevaluate the choices i make/made. While the power settings has gotten a lot better over the course i was wondering if there is any laptop+os that gives close to macbook battery life.
The issue in most cases is that hardware that also runs windows will only support S5 Sleep so that Windows 11 can download fresh advertisements while your laptop is “sleeping”. In some cases, you can patch the DSDT tables in the firmware to reenable S3. But also many recent laptops will just not fully support deep sleep. And that means the MacBooks are superior on the hardware level and there isn’t really anything that Windows or Linux can do.
My answer has to be differentiated: I use a MacBook Air with M1 at work_1, and Lenovo ThinkPads X1 at work_2 and at home, both running Ubuntu LTS.
The Mac wins regarding battery life (but deltas are shrinking) and - important when on the move - connecting with various WiFi SSDs (this can be quite critical).
The Linux ThinkPads win regarding keyboard quality, and hackability (as UNIX/Linux person, I prefer Linux' directory organization to MacOS', which is a mix of BSD and non-standard /proprietary stuff). I like than on my Linux boxes, any command is just there, whereas on the MacBook, 60% of the time I need a command not from the top-10, it's not there and I need to brew install it first, which sucks (this could be fixed by making a "distribution" of common commands for brew, I haven't even checked whether that exists).
Until recently, the Mac also won regarding weight, but now with the fantastic ThinkPad X1 Nano there's a high-quality high-mobility device with a great internal keyboard, good batteries and the weight of a feather that runs Ubuntu like a breeze.
So in the end, one ends up using the MacBook as an email/presentation machine and the Linux boxes (and, via ssh, servers of course) for technical work.
Ironically, the M1 in my MacBook doesn't get used for the machine learning research I do as that is all done on beefy (Linux) servers and/or GPU clusters. But it does improve the UI responsiveness.
PS: From my budget at work, I also got an iPad Pro (the lightest/smallest), and I was shocked how heavy it is. As a result, it hardly gets used apart from taking photos and scanning documents with its excellent camera. I was hoping to carry it to meetings, but I instead take the MacBook Air or X1 Nano along, both of which seem much lighter, esp. the latter (<970g). (I never use pens because I type faster than I hand-write and prefer my text to stay searchable; I understand results may look different for pen fans.)
> I need a command not from the top-10,it's not there and I need to brew install it first, which sucks (this could be fixed by making a "distribution" of common commands for brew, I haven't even checked whether that exists).
Run 'brew list' to see what you have installed, then write a shell/ansible script to install these.
Save script to your cloud storage/source control and anytime you get a new machine, run the script.
>I also got an iPad Pro (the lightest/smallest), and I was shocked how heavy it is
iPad pro isn't heavy.
Do you have a heavy case on it? As many cases can weigh the same as the iPad itself or more.
In my experience its been nothing but a dream. I had the same mint install on a asus zenbook prime from like 2012 to 2022. Battery went from like 5 hours on windows to 6-8 hours on mint. It was great. I do know that sometimes there are werid problems with some of the new "features" shipped in laptops. BUt I would say that looking up a particular laptop that you might be interested in and seeing what kind of linux support it has fixes that problem.
Or you could go 'built for linux' laptops. Librem, System 76, Framework, ect. Or Thinkpads. Those things are tanks and just work.
One thing to keep in mind is that to move to macOS you need to be willing to do things the Apple way. The people I’ve seen have a lot of trouble with macOS, and Apple’s ecosystem in general, is they are used to doing something one way and they stubbornly want to keep doing in that way on the Mac. This leads to a lot of pain. If you’re this kind of person, you’re going to have a bad time. If you’re open to change and learning how Apple does things, it will likely be OK.
Apple tends to like to deliver solutions, while others tend to deliver a toolbox and that has you cobble your own solution together. If you don’t like the way Apple solves a problem you care about, swimming against it can range from easy to painful, depending on what it is.
I switched to a Mac in 2003, and this is the most common issue I see with people having a hard time. I switched after I was bored with Windows, and Linux wasn’t ready for prime time (especially on laptops), though I made attempts with several distros over the course of many months… and still ran my laptop on Linux after getting a desktop Mac as my first). I was seeking out a change, so doing things a little differently was what I wanted and I enjoyed that process. It was also the early days of OS X, so I got to learn a little more each year over more than 20 years now. Jumping straight in today would probably take me more time than it did back then, as there is a lot more in the OS.
Doable and even pleasant if: you pick mainline hardware, a good distro, and are ruthlessly hygienic about what you install/ how you install it.
Eg: pick corporate model laptops from major vendors like Dell. Something whose hardware has been battle tested by an army of Windows users. I like refurbished models from the Dell Latitude line, others are ThinkPad people. These lines have spare parts and are repairable/upgradeable.
Pick a distro close to the middle. You want something with thousands of users so you wont suffer alone if you hit a problem. I like stock Ubuntu, and I might go as far as Mint. PopOS is beautiful but if it goes wrong, you'll be fiddling and asking for help in a much smaller community, so if that is not your jam, don't do it.
Be consistent and careful with how and what you install. Dont mix flatpaks and tarballs and snaps and god knows what else. Have a consistent, reproducible setup. Use a dir structure that makes it easy to split off your data from the OS (I know that people just have / now, but /home used to be its own partition for a reason, and /opt exists for similar separation.) If the worst happens and you need to blow the OS away, you want that to be a 20 minute operation with all your files instantly available as soon as you can remount.
This last point is a good one. Having /home on a separate partition can make your life much easier if you change your mind on which distro you want to run. If you are having a hard time with Ubuntu snaps, blow it all away and install Fedora.. :)
Any old laptop (especially thinkpad) can run linux well. If you want to use it it's not "trouble" per se because once you really know what you are doing there is no trouble(and you can't get to knowing what you're doing without finding out what is it you did that caused you the trouble).
If you just want to use linux so you can tell someone about it, don't bother using linux and stick to what works for you.
I have Linux as primary OS since 4 laptops. No issue, especially now that all the devices are detected without any problems and works out of the box. My actual setup is a Thinkpad T430 running Debian Bookworm with XFCE as DE.
What I have experienced in my 15 years of using Linux on laptops daily is that the life of a Linux laptop is really long and you don't need to replace it to fight obsolence. My old Sony Vaio lasts for more than 10 years, running Ubuntu and just replacing HDD to SSD.
FWIW, I've been running Asahi Linux on a used M1 Macbook Air for about a year and the ability to have a mobile Linux machine that isn't always tethered to an electric outlet is wonderful! It seems magical.
That said, I do still keep the MacOS on a partition for the usual office apps like zoom and the like and full hardware support for the things like the camera, but that isn't as important to my usage as having a compiler and editor so YMMV.
Unfortunately, Linux support on the Apple Silicon hardware is limited to M1 and M2 only at the time AFAIK.
I will also say that Linux on a Linux supported Thinkpad like the T-Series works well too and I've used those for over a decade. They just didn't have the same kind of battery life, but all the hardware 'just works'.
I've been running Manjaro (Arch derivative) on my System76 Galago Pro (galp5) for 3 years and it runs great. It's 14", light weight, quiet, and has a decent battery. You won't beat Mac's battery life, and if it's Mac's software that you want, Linux cannot provide that. I prefer the Linux ecosystem personally, and cannot stand Mac's interface and window management.
In 2015 I got a Toshiba Satellite Radius convertible laptop with a SSD, touchscreen, USB 3.0... pretty good for the time. I installed Slackware-current and *everything* was supported and recognized. Even the touchscreen under X11.
I'm now using a Dell Inspiron with more updated specs (from 2019), but again, everything is recognized.
*And* I got to upgrade my RAM with a rather simple procedure, zero soldiering required. All of this, running a largely Free (as in freedom) operating system.
Thus I'd answer: yes, a Linux laptop is worth the trouble these days. YMMV of course.
I would love to run Linux on a laptop, but Apple's M-series chips have no equals, Rectangle Pro gives me tiling with keybindings and the OS is UNIXy enough to satisfy my terminal workflow.
I mostly run my apps in Docker anyway, and VZkit is almost bare metal performance with paravirt networking.
That said, I run Linux for my servers at home, and that's been working great!
Do you want to fiddle with Linux?
If not, then maybe try a different distro, like Ubuntu.
If you want something that just works, Ubuntu on either a Dell XPS or Thinkpad is your best bet.
If you want something with nice hardware, I would suggest a Dell XPS. The Dell XPS designs are not perfect, but Ubuntu just works on it aside from maybe the fingerprint reader which I never bothered with.
I would recommend spending some time with a none rolling release/less fiddly distro and see what you think. I haven't had to fiddle with linux since I switched to slackware and settled on a wm ~20 years ago; since then the only time I have had an update affect my workflow was when slackware went PulseAudio which only caused me maybe 2 minutes to deal with. I have config files old enough to vote.
My original reasons for switching to linux was Apple disrupting my workflow on each major upgrade and from what I can tell they have not stopped doing that.
I didn’t have issues with rolling release distro in the beginning, as most updates were security updates. But nowadays, I’m on versionned distro. What you’ve started with is what you’re going to get everytime you turn the conputer on. I have debian 12 on my home server and it never crashes or have any issues, just chugging along.
I have an asus laptop with intel graphics and any distro I have tried has just worked, flawlessly.
I also have a MSI katana laptop with RTX 4070 and that had been a disaster. Every distro I tried had some issue with the graphics card/drivers even after looking up what distros people were having success with.
Finally, installing Bazzite just worked. I don't play any games but Bazzite took my MSI laptop from feeling like a waste of money to absolutely awesome.
I'm one of those Software Freedom nerds and I hated my experience with OSX Yosemite on an iMac back in 2016, so I can't really empathise, but I suppose you could always just give it a try and keep your older machine and if the MacBook doesn't work out for you, you can give it to One Laptop per Child.
Apple has zero to horrible support. There is no community. It's tech is a black box, it may is working 98% of the time but when it isn't you are fully on your own and have no actual way to do anything.
Not to mention that it looks and feels old, which most people likely don't care as it's still more modern than windows ever was since 95.
You will constantly pay the differences. In the 1 year or so I worked with a Mac I bought like 10 <$5 tools for things that would be a single command in Linux.
Depending on your hardware and what you do it will be slower, or slightly faster. If it's faster in anything it will likely run hot enough to cook some eggs on it.
Edit:// maybe just try a stable distro first
I'm not seeing any fairly priced MacBooks in the Apple store. Are you referring to second hand laptops?
IMHO, with your background you are going to hate MacOS ;) But since you are smitten with the M-series just give it a go and keep a close watch on Asahi [1], so that you know when most of your hardware will be supported (last I heard was that microphones are now working).
[1] https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support
You should always have more than one machine (incase one breaks or is lost), so you can have both a Mac and a Linux laptop and switch between them.
I mostly use a Mac, but also use android and Linux devices. It helps me remain vendor neutral as I ensure all applications I use work across all of them.
There will always be reasons to keep asking about / trying out different things, but if your setup works it’s premature optimisation.
Good enough is good enough. Go do whatever it is you want to actually do.
Personally I gave up on Linux laptops due to the amazing battery life m series has and the driver issues. Maybe when we get better arm laptop Linux support it might be a different story
> and the driver issues
Just like with MacOS, you should choose compatible GNU/Linux hardware, and it will work flawlessly. I have no driver issues on my Librem laptop.
Many driver issues can be avoided with proper HW selection, but even if you go with a dedicated GNU/Linux vendor you can still have some. For example on my Slimbook Elemental 15 I have issues with both the keyboard backlight and the 3.5mm jack.
You can find similar examples about Windows vendors.
Apple makes some of the best laptop hardware. Linux is the best OS. Your main choices are:
1) Run an inferior OS on Apple hardware.
2) Run Linux on inferior hardware.
3) Asahi Linux on Apple hardware.
What you choose depends on the trade-offs you want to make.
Sounds like some people in this thread have had success with option 3. I have tried but I have failed. I'm hoping that Asahi continues to improve. I have several laptops, I do a mix of 1 and 2.
I have been using a MacBook with asahi Linux for almost two years. For me it's absolutely worth it. Wouldn't use it with Mac OS. There are some serious limitations like external displays not working of thunderbolt/usb-c. But other than that my experience has been rock solid.
I have a mid-2012 mac book air on which I run nixos - but even if I ever give in and buy a M-series laptop, I'd probably run nixos in a vm for my daily drive. It does what I need and nothing else. It doesn't tell me what I need or how I need it.
what is your goal? what do you expect would be the pros and cons of linux or mac?
personally, i tried macOS 2 years ago and got frustrated by all the restrictions and differences from linux. i remember wanting to uninstall the default "chess" program, searching around and learning that i literally couldn't without turning off the default security mode, just because there was an off chance that the chess program contained essential code.
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Just get a MacBook.
These are so much better than everything else right now that there's no point unless you're looking to support niche companies like Framework.