I know several people who traded in 2016/2017 models for 2015 models because it's literally an upgrade; get an older machine and you suddenly have usable ports, a keyboard that works, and an escape key, what a luxury. I also know a fair amount of people getting Thinkpad and even Surfaces.

The things I would do (and pay) for 2010-Apple tier hardware built for CentOS in both laptop and phone form factors...

Isn’t it remarkable this still doesn’t exist? Build quality still does not compare in the PC world.

Yet, I’m on a MBA3,2 (late 2010) and it’s great. Still running Yosemite. It’s got 4gb ram but handles running 10 JVMs with modest heaps for development no problem. Stable and runs for months without issue. I’d love more RAM and more cores but none of these computers seem worth it.

I considered buying a 2015 MPB the other month only to learn that Apple glues the battery to the top case. So to replace the battery you need to replace the whole top case. Insane.

Razer comes close, though I wouldn't buy them because of the compensating-for-something #branding on the machines. The Alienware 13 I can personally vouch for as being better than my last MacBook Pro for sure. And the keyboard is like an old ThinkPad's but not quite so heavy. Still not a fan of the alien logo, but at least it's tiny.

I have the same hardware but unfortunately my experience is the exact opposite. It’s barely usable. I literally can’t browse JavaScript-heavy websites (e.g. Gmail).

I wonder if having kept up with the OS releases has anything to do with it (I’m on High Sierra).

I'll admit some of the really heavy websites are crap, but that's mostly because the websites are crap and wont be smooth on anything than the latest i7. Generally I have no problem with gmail or google maps which are reasonably heavy.

Depending on what version of OS X you are using that might be the culprit, OS X is a pretty heavy OS, especially post 10.6. For me 10.6 was o-k but changing to linux and a tiling window manager freed up a lot of resources, I never end up paging out with web browsing even though it's only 4GiB, additionally I find graphics are faster on linux but that may be GPU and driver specific due to Apple's underclocking tactics. If I hadn't switched I would probably have ditched this hardware by now.

Alternatively the GPU difference between these machines may explain web browsing speed considering how much stuff is hardware accelerated these days.

I think this era of hardware is pretty linux friendly if you wanted to try it, you don't have dual GPU which is the biggest pain for linux too... there is no issue with mac EFI from grub anymore so should be zero configuration install for you, at the most you might have to manually select the proprietary drivers for your GPU for reasonable performance.

Can't blame them. Ultimately, it's productivity that pays the bills.

Librem? https://puri.sm

It's not ideal, but our environment is rock solid for what we need, and newer software that we need still supports us just fine.

You can have my 2015 MBP when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

But yes. We recently sold off a bunch of hardware resulting from workforce reductions; I clued a friend in on this and he was begging me to nab him a 2015 MBP. The obsession is real, it is the last truly great Macbook in a while, in my own opinion.

One of the shops was an open source shop, so all 150+ of us ran some Linux distro (mostly Ubuntu/Debain, some Arch, some Mint .. I was the only Gentoo) except for the graphics people who got Windows or Macs. But I was surprised at the other two shops, there were very few Linux users. There were some here and there around the company, but I'd usually be the only one on my team who ran Linux naively with Windows in a VM.

I know there are reasons this can't happen at large corporations such as security... more to do with contracts and culpability than measurable security improvement AFAIK.

I can't quite imagine _not_ having control over my work environment in this way in a job anymore and do greatly appreciate it. It's not all about familiarity, there are many objective reasons using certain proprietary OS can be a significant drain and inefficient, even more so for development work. This freedom would be a significant factor in considering a new job for me, even over pay because it's a big part of my "happiness" and "sanity" factor in the job.

Hehe

Unhappy people post a LOT more and the internet loves a good pile-on. Apple has had plenty of embarrassing QA lapses but the average developer is fine, and it’s not like everything else is perfect. The Linux users I work with spend more time on sysadmin work than the Mac users by a hefty margin, although there’s a good argument that software compatibility is worth that overhead.

The only developers I know who are replacing their pre-touchbar machines right now with new ones are those making much of their living from iOS / OS X. Many (like me) are kind of hanging on, because it's a pain to change OSs, lose much of the software we love etc. I'm still undecided, but I think my current (ageing) MB Pro is going to be my last.

> The Linux users I work with spend more time on sysadmin work than the Mac users by a hefty margin

Yep. I shifted from Linux to OS X years ago because I was sick of tech fiddling and wanted to have a machine that needed no hand-holding and let me get on with my work.

There seem to be no good options.

This is why I use LTS Ubuntu. I don't do any sysadmin work at all. Every couple of weeks or so a dialog opens up saying there are updates, and I click OK. Everything "just works".

I moved from Windows 7 to Debian 8 a year or so ago and have never looked back (except for the Adobe Suite...)

I use an OSX Macbook Pro for my 9-5 and have been avoiding High Sierra forever - it's just a slap in the face.

At least I know my Debian 8 box will almost always operate as expected - even through a distribution release. I need stability from my system, and there's just no other option anymore.

I would dump it for a linux laptop, but I work remote so every type of video chat/screen share tool needs to work. Most of them don't work on linux. My computer choice is dictated by chat tools, which is kind of sad.

At home, I ran the same setup but I used my gaming/windows laptop for my VNC client and WebEx. I could never get the Linux Cisco VPN client to work, so my work laptop just made an openvpn connection to my flat (fibre connections are nice).

You mean 16, not 8.

So besides the wifi everything is working and iirc someone has been working on a driver for the builtin wifi card and plans on merging it into 12 sometime this year.

But so far I'm loving it, I have ZFS, Dtrace, Sublime3, Firefox57 and xterm, which is an ideal dev environment for me.

  sudo pkg install drm-next-kmod 

The USB wifi dongle is a TP-LINK TL-WN725N. I found it at my local Microcenter.

[1]: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.0R/hardware.html#wlan

We are in 2018, not in 1995. You can easily find good desktop and laptop that run fine under pretty much all major distros.

Especially if you compare to MBP & the like, meaning you have no budget issues...

Plenty of threads on this forum (and others) to choose from when it comes to choosing hardware for Linux. The answers are often similar: Thinkpad T4xx, Dell XPS 13/15, System76. I don't see HP mentioned that often but I have a bunch of (older) HP laptops running here and there which do just fine, just stay away from their consumer products and focus on (used) business hardware. Purism is cropping up here and there as well, mostly due to their active stance against Intel ME.

In other words it is not that hard to find good hardware to run Linux on. Given the state of MacOS these days the experience is likely to be less trouble-prone than that of those staying on (or hopping on) the Apple platform.

What have you tried?

I have a MacBookPro14,1 (2017) and had a bit more of a problem than expected triple-booting Windows, Linux, and High Sierra, but I got it working.

My main issue seemed to be that nvme wasn't supported for many of the Linux installers. I think it was a newer Fedora I finally got working. I may have had to manually mount the drive before running the installer (I cant remember). I haven't used it as my primary OS, but everything seemed to be working (hi-dpi, wifi, trackpad).

I think like any other new hardware, it'll take a couple years before Linux works out of the box.

Handily filters down to 2 companies: Dell and Lenovo. I am unsure about Librem and PogoLinux.

Oddly they come with the disclaimer "IMPORTANT! This document is intended for HP authorized service providers only." which makes you wonder why it's available to download from the support website.