Comment by kminehart 6 hours ago
> Finding a laptop that works well is annoying, however.
It doesn't exist at the moment. :\
I would pay 2x the price of a macbook for a linux laptop with the same hardware quality.
The battery life and power/efficiency of my m4 pro is insane. It's so good that it's really hard to justify using anything else right now.
Well limiting to specifically OP's example (M4 Mac), Asahi doesn't support it yet. :(
Is Asahi installed side by side on a mac? You pick it at boot? And how “install and just use” it is?
> 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 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.
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.
Reminder that Thinkpad's makers, Lenovo, has shipped a laptop preloaded with the Superfish malware (https://easytechsolver.com/what-is-the-lenovo-controversy/)
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.
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). YMML if you use other distros...
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.
Try starlabs, best build quality I've ever seen after apple
It's sad that the best Linux laptop right now arguably is a M4 Mac virtualizing Linux.