Not as a comparison to apple. You want osx you buy the hardware they specify. Buy a laptop known to work out of the box with linux and it works out of the box with linux. Try it on any random laptop, ymmv. Not many of them work as badly as non-apple blessed machines with osx. It's pretty rare I can't get something useful out of any old laptop with a linux install. Is hackintosh still even a thing?

I have a hackintosh as my main computer. It works ok. Graphics drivers are sometimes a pain/ buggy. iMessages doesn't work unless you want to do a lot of work.

However it is faster/more expandable than most macs available today.

Hackintosh is still very much a thing. I had a great 10.5 desktop with Kalyway years ago. I recently tried to get Yosemite or something working with a Core-i5 Sandy Bridge PC and it did not go well due to graphics drivers.

> wifi drivers are always an issue

I keep hearing this, but I've never had an issue (Arch, Macbook Air 2013).

On the contrary, I have endless problems in macOS with WiFi where some networks won't work if I don't specify a DNS (I use Google's, but I assume that doesn't make a difference) - and others won't work if I do! (Meanwhile, other devices are fine doing the opposite.)

I have a TP-Link Archer USB 802.11ac Wifi USB stick. It definitely does not work out of the box. You have to get and compile some driver from GitHub using dkms. After some stable Ubuntu updates Wifi just stopped working.

Never had a problem with macOS Wifi since 10.5.x.

You need to check the chipset before you buy. Intel and Atheros have a good reputation for Linux support. Broadcom does not. I heard broadcom is leaving the wifi market soon. If so, this should get better in short order.

The thesis was that Wifi is simply not a problem anymore on Linux, which is false. Wifi is not a problem if you pick the right chipset. However, this has always been true. I was using Wifi without a problem more than a decade ago, when Intersil Prism (Orinico) was very well supported on Linux and BSD.

But it's currently not the case that you can take an arbitrary Windows or Apple machine, install Linux and have a working Wifi. It's very much hit and miss.

The remaining holdout with problems is Broadcom. All other chips (Realtek, Ralink, Atheros, Intel to name a few of the more popular) generally work.

The only trouble you may get is with cutting edge hardware because manufacturers are slow.

FYI: the TP-Link Archer that I mentioned uses a Realtek chipset. It does not work out of the box. You have to get an untrusted driver from GitHub, compile it with DKMS. Breaks with stable Ubuntu updates. The driver also seems to be quite flakey, regularly losing connection to the AP.

How do you expect a normal user to this?

I really don't understand why there isn't a niche company that does nothing but make high quality peripherals that work in Linux. I just bought an atheros wifi card off amazon marked ENGINEERING SAMPLES ONLY, because no one sells the chipset I want standalone.

Intel chipsets are OEM only. Cards are readily available on Amazon, but are all gray-market apparently.

In short, I don't expect normal users to do this, but I'd expect them to be willing to pay triple the normal markup on $20-$50 componens if they "just worked" in Linux.

To be clear, I'm talking about having an ODM run off copies of Intel/Atheros reference boards. The engineering effort is as low as it gets for hardware manufacturing.

The only wifi device I've had trouble with in recent memory is an Edimax EW-7811Un USB dongle. It "works", but the best transfer rates I've ever gotten out of it were in the hundreds of kilobytes/s, paired with up to 5 minutes of uninterrupted connectivity.

There are problem devices out there, but more and more they're the exception, rather than the rule.

Which macOS version is that?

I stay up to date, it's 10.12.2 - I've had the issue for at least a couple of major (marketing) versions.

>but wifi drivers are always an issue

This is not true if you have Intel wifi hardware, which is a lot (a majority?) of laptops.

Its not true these days anyway as you can just use the windows drivers if everything else fails. Which works perfectly except the initial 10 minute setup.

> Its not true these days anyway as you can just use the windows drivers if everything else fails.

Is ndiswrapper still being developed?

It only supports Windows XP drivers and crashed the kernel when I tried to get my TL-WN8200ND (RTL8192CU) working with it on 64 bit Ubuntu 16.04

I am pretty sure i got a win7 driver working without any further issues. I could be wrong tho

Just set up linux on a machine recently with an Intel network chipset. Mint had no driver that supported it so I ended up having to build from source. I can't imagine trying to understand that process if one is not a developer

This is... very strange. What Intel chipset was it that didn't have a driver built into the kernel? That's usually your safest bet.

I think the issue was that I was installing from a Mint 17 bootable USB but I needed the driver to be able to upgrade to 18.

The ethernet controller is an Intel I219-LM (rev 31). The driver source that worked was https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/15817/Intel-Networ...

What I had hoped would happen during install was that the kernel would fall back to some simple driver, kinda like the simple VGA drivers, and then find the correct driver and install that.

Sadly there's no basic compatibility layer for NICs, except in so far as many small manufacturers emulate some specific well known NIC. Intel doesn't really do that, though. But they do tend to update the drivers in linux pretty quickly themselves, which is what makes them attractive for linux use.

FYI mint sucks with these things. Badly. Their driver support seems more random than anything. That said i am pretty sure i remember some kind of bloat kernel in their repos which ships with all the relevant stuff.

There's an official ubuntu mate flavor now which is everything I enjoyed about mint with none of the things I disliked about it, so I'd recommend trying that.

Installed Ubuntu 16.04 yesterday and could not get graphics acceleration to work on Android's emulator. This should be the ideal environment for working with Android...

I cannot understand people that think Ubuntu is on par with OSX and Windows for workstation use.

I've literally never had a sound card that didn't work on Linux since alsa stabilized in the 2.4 days.

WiFi drivers are much less likely to work out-of-the-box; usually you need a firmware file which may require futzing with the windows driver installation package.