As someone who'd been in the Mac ecosystem and paid the price in time and expense of leaving for a PC a few years back, I'm starting to lean back toward the Mac side. The amount of fiddling and headaches I'm dealing with on Windows is just a huge waste of time. Had to reinstall all my programs after a recent Windows update ruined the OS.

Have mac book air from 2013. Went through all OS upgrades with no reinstalls. Even upgraded SSD from 128 to 512 with flawless backup from timecapsule. Can't even image this happening on windows...

I recently had a hard drive failure on my primary HD in my mac pro (desktop, the old shape). The machine wouldn't boot into the OS at all.

I bought a new HD and ran the recovery tool which gave me an option to clone from another drive. I figured I might as well give it a try even though the old HD seemed completely dead.

After a couple of hours the machine rebooted using the new HD. The amazing part is not only were are my files perfectly intact, but the exact same applications I had open when the old HD died opened up automatically on the new HD.

Time Capsule is interesting, it's been consistent since its release in 2008 and has worked flawlessly for me. Compare that to Windows backup which changes to a new incompatible product with every new version of Windows and is so riddled with flaws its unusable.

I'm on the whole pretty happy with Windows, but I've never understood how they can consistently fail to deliver a working easy to use backup solution out of the box for decades. Mere incompetence shouldn't be able to deliver such terrible implementations, it's almost like they're actively trying to fuck it up.

this is what's keeping me from switching. every time I try spending a day on Windows I remember just how much macOS "just works", even if it has warts all over the place.

See, I've always used both and I just don't understand this whole "I have to spend a day on Windows making X work". I haven't experienced this in at least a decade. Windows 10 "just works" with every device and software I've thrown at it.

That's the thing about anecdotes, one person's experience is completely opposite of anothers. I got a laptop with Windows 10 on it and immediately experienced the "100% disk utilization problem", which makes it basically unusable. I Googled around and found hundreds of posts about the problem and many dozens of suggested fixes of which zero worked (for me). So it's sitting on a shelf until I get around to installing Ubuntu on it, which has always just worked for me (which is the opposite of some other people's experiences).

it's also very dependent on what you want to use your computer for. as a frontend dev I want a mix of Adobe CS and a bunch of primarily posix compatible tools, and then Windows is seriously suboptimal.

but even beyond that the sheer number of popups and shit I need to close when starting from a clean install on Windows makes me want to punch the computer, and naturally that is a very subjective experience. and stuff like apps stealing focus in general. if a mac app makes itself the key window in a non-standard way I immediately consider uninstalling it, on win that just seems to be what all apps do when opening new windows.

> as a frontend dev I want a mix of Adobe CS and a bunch of primarily posix compatible tools, and then Windows is seriously suboptimal.

Not sure why it's suboptimal, WSL is amazing. I am primary a frontend dev as well and do most of my building / start-up / testing of my work inside of a terminal. It's great and Adobe works great as well with the added bonus of the better Windows dropdowns (Mac OS dropdowns drive me nuts but for Windows you can give one focus and scroll through all the options with the keyboard).

> but even beyond that the sheer number of popups and shit I need to close when starting from a clean install on Windows makes me want to punch the computer, and naturally that is a very subjective experience.

When I first started up I had like 2 notifications to use Edge and something else and that was it. When I enrolled in the Windows beta I received a few more for requests for feedback, which it warned me about ahead of time. Not sure why you had so many pop-ups and I've had basically none.

It's always so weird to me how my experience with Windows machines differs from those who prefer Macs. I own and use both and they both seem pretty great to me. The only big thing is I make sure to only buy Windows hardware from Microsoft to get their "genuine experience" because HP and everyone else likes to ruin it with their bullshit.

Not to retort, but Mac also has keyboard navigation for the menus, but the default setting for focusing the menu is ^F2 which is quite bad.

Not to counter your point, but I had that new remarkably stupid ":( Oops something went wrong" error popping up the morning I had to give a presentation. I have Windows 10 Home and it forced the updates, failed after an hour, and fucked up the boot partition, removing grub. So just before the presentation, I had to setup grub again and boot into Linux because windows was still stuck with updates. Thankfully my slides were on google drive.

On my office laptop though, Win 10 Pro has been pretty stable.

To get back to the main point, I usually have to spend a day with both Windows and Linux to install everything right from VLC to compilers. IMO setting up needs to be done on every machine, independently of the OS.

It has been the opposite for me since about Windows 7.

Work MacBook - have to restart it to get USB ports to work, screen flickers when you plug in an external monitor like X windows on an Unix terminal from '99 with a bad conf file... Comeon.

sound like you've got one of the super common duds, apple will probably replace it if you ask them.

They're all software issues. I think all the MBP's in our office do this stuff. For instance, the external monitor and such works fine. It's just it is very un-elegant how it does the switch over.

Windows is truly a pain like never before. Going Linux can be very easy these days, depending what you do on the machine.

Working with Unix-Servers every day i still would struggle with a Linux Machine. Tried it in the past and getting things to work wasn't a problem at all.

But 1) i have to admit that i like all this full aluminum fuckery (shame on me) 2) MacOS is for me more "batteries included" then any Unix-Flavor. Yes there a often alternatives on Linux, still i really like to get my shit done quick and easy with tools like preview for example. 3) Better Tools on MacOS: There is some great stuff out there which help me in every way. Alfred, MailMate, MoneyMoney, Postico, Royal TSX, Paw, ... good looking, functional tools. And still i can use all the great command line tools out of the linux world (vim/emacs, bash/zsh, compiler tools, ranger for filenavigation, ...).

I just hope Apple gets their shit together.

The XPS line has a similar build than the MBP.

In regards to tools, you can usually find a distro that is "batteries included", try KDE as your DE - There's great tools like Okular, Dolphin... Insomnia is a pretty looking Paw alternative etc, however I think the advantage with Linux is that you can often build it how you want, without the junk that is there and you don't even know what it does, but it consumes CPU cycles. Moreover, with distros like Arch Linux, you get practically all the available tools, always up to date, never have to reinstall, updates take a minute as opposed to half an hour and you can mange everything, (not just brew packages), with an awesome package manager.

Yes, i know.

I really don't want to say "MacOS > Unix" because of any reasons i mentioned. I also had ArchLinux as main OS on my Desktop, and also tried a new KDE Flavor.

But for me personally it was never as good as MacOS. Maybe i wasn't trying hard enough, or don't want to loose any spent $ on MacOS only software. Dunno. Anyway i just hope for myself that i can get a great MacBook again ;)

(What i missed the most on MacOS was always a fast and keyboard focused window manager like 2bwm. In the end i was able to recreate this behavior with hammerspoon and some custom lua scripts in combination with alfred. MacOS just looks sometimes a bit bloated with all these rounded egdes, drop shadows etc.)

Hopefully Systemd won’t mount your firmware on a rw partition and brick the laptop in an unfortunate update?

(Sarcasm aside... I’d flip in a heartbeat but despite macOS’s lapses, every single time I had to deal with a Linux desktop I regretted it.)

> Hopefully Systemd won’t mount your firmware on a rw partition and brick the laptop in an unfortunate update?

That's the hardware's fault.

Mounting a seldom-modified and highly sensitive and critical filesystem r/w by default, when the existence of buggy implementations is known, is a deeply irresponsible decision. Blaming the rest of the world for the fallout from their crappy design decisions is a pattern of behaviour among some systemd developers.

Fortunately you don't have to use systemd. I'm happily running Void Linux.

On the subject of what is known:

It displays some ignorance of this subject to blame it on systemd, when Matthew Garrett told people that it was really his fault.

* https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/693494314941288448

The people who relate the tale as if it were a systemd thing or something that the systemd people did are ill-informed. It was entirely a kernel thing. This was even stated outright at the time by the creator of that particular kernel mechanism.

To learn the real story, go and read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11152880 where Matthew Garrett xyrself can be found participating in the discussion.

Well frankly I don’t really care who won the bickering contest on this one or any other. Simply put, I don’t have time for all the things I need to do or desire to, let alone “tighten all screws” to my machine every single day.

I remember a guy at Uni who’d come to the study room, update the various spyware, malware sigs and let the Win machine purge itself for half an hour, while he had coffe and cigarettes.

Since several years, my biggest hassle has been to plug a TM backup and choose “restore from backup” when I bought a new Mac.

Drivers, power management, tweaking this-and-that... nope, my life demands those minutes back. I’m actively worried when I see Apple fuck up and potentially ruin this status quo because “innovation”.

Fair enough. It seems the issue is more subtle than I'd thought.

The day after the keyboard program was announced, I had an appointment at the Apple Store Stanford to get my MBP keyboard fixed.

The Apple Genius confirmed that the replacement parts that there’re using now are tweaked versions of the originals, not identical.

Of course, even if this makes the keyboards somewhat more resilient, I will still find it very uncomfortable to type on...

System 76 (the small linux-only hardware manufacturer) just refreshed their Oryx Pro last month, which looks pretty capable and looks from afar to be really good build quality. https://system76.com/laptops/oryx

I haven't found many/any reviews of it since the refresh -- does anyone on HN have one who can attest?

I have a new Oryx Pro. I'm not an expert on laptop build quality but to me the Oryx Pro looks and feels great. It is in fact a Clevo P955ER, which I know I could get for cheaper, but personally I want to support System 76's selling and supporting Linux laptops. I'd actually be interested to see if a straight-up Clevo P955ER with Pop!_OS installed is any more or less stable than an Oryx Pro.

Anyways here are my thoughts:

Good things: - Keyboard is pleasant to use (for me) - Trackpad feels good (not as good as Apple's trackpads but much better than most non-Apple ones) - Desktop-level performance - No Linux jankiness -- everything has just worked for me so far on Pop!_OS - Battery life is not as terrible as I thought it'd be on Intel graphics (~5 hours depending on what you're doing. I haven't tested this too thoroughly)

Complaints: - Need to reboot to switch between Nvidia and Intel graphics - Fans are always audible on Nvidia graphics no matter what you're doing - Nvidia graphics are required in order to use any external displays - Battery life is horrible on Nvidia graphics, so you basically have to switch graphics then shut down before unplugging from an external monitor if you plan on using it on-the-go

No _need_ to reboot. Restarting the Xorg/Wayland server, maybe. You might be able to fool it into thinking you just hot-plugged the GPU, at least as far as the screen layout is concerned.

Remember: the only reason you need to reboot linux is to get a new kernel, or because the kernel FUBAR'd and corrupted data.

I hear you, and I've restarted the display server plenty of times on my computers instead of restarting them, especially on my main desktop where I have lots more stuff running independent of the display (daemons, etc). But, I feel like particularly on a laptop, if you're restarting the display server, it's not much different than just restarting the whole machine. Certainly that's the case for the large majority of users. Anyway, I think the point is that it's a hassle, which it is, not that you literally "need to reboot".

Would it be possible to start a second display server like we used to, one on ctrl-alt-F8 and one on ctrl-alt-F7? So when you want to do some gaming you start up your gaming workspace and switch to it, and when you want to turn off the nvidia graphics you destroy the gaming workspace, but your document workspace that was using the intel graphics is still there? That feels like it could be somewhat usable.

Should be. Windows is actually not crashing the desktop when the driver balks, so you can AFAIK run a Windows VM on a Linux and switch the PCIe GPU (yes, i915 counts from Haswell on) via KVM/QUEMU/IO-MMU between host and VM, with the latter not caring much, but the former crashing Xorg.

I prefer to keep things up/running, i.e. demon-based software, file transfers, mounts (including LUKS password unlocking), music players, etc. Even SSH sessions.

I am still looking for a way to restart Xorg without having to restart the software on it, but so far I have not found a solution.

That makes sense. Pop_OS! has a button for switching graphics that prompts you to reboot. I bet that could be updated to only restart X11 or something https://github.com/pop-os/gnome-shell-extension-system76-pow...

I switched to a System76 Lumur last year after 5-6 years of MacBook Pro. The biggest adjustment for me was the battery life, it’s not terrible, but I remember I never had to think about charging my Mac. Aside from the flimsy hardware I can’t complain about anything else, I certainly don’t miss macOS and I’d take Linux over it any day. The price is a factor as well, I got a maxed out system for half the price, in another year I can buy a brand new System76 and I would have spent the same amount a MacBook Pro costs. Having said all this, I do miss the MacBook hardware quite a lot.

The hardware seems to be the killer for many of us: battery, fit and finish, and most importantly the trackpad/keyboard.

My mbp is having the common keyboard issues and while looking at replacements I can’t find anything remotely close that balances what I need. :/

Note no mention of battery life. Look at the internals and you'll see why - the battery is absolutely tiny, and the logic board, disk, and fans are comparatively massive. The parts are definitely not power-friendly either. Seems very optimized for staying plugged in, with only a quick unplug to go into a meeting. My guess is it'll do ~3hrs w that 55Wh battery at most. This competes with gaming laptops and not MBPs, though it does look nice.

I think System76 is using Clevo/Sager chassis still. You can buy these setups from a place like xotic and load up linux yourself for a bit less than System76 stuff costs.

Yeah, I don't get system 76's draw. If they were doing something meaningful with their systems like developing coreboot for them, that would make it a selling point at least. They have recently started using me_cleaner, which is a good start I guess. Other than that, I think they are developing their own distro, which seems like an utter waste.

I have a System 76 laptop from a few years back (not Oryx Pro), and while it's still my main home comouter, it's definitely a lot flimsier and heavier than any macbook. Battery life was never great, and by now it's shot far enough that I only use it while plugged in. That being said, it's remained a reliable system and I wouldn't mind upgrading to a newer model.

Consider asking for a new Battery next gift-giving holiday (Christmas?). If it's not that much, it's likely worth it unless it'd be of no use.

If it were only the battery, I'd replace it, but getting a new system will also scratch the itch to upgrade hardware specs. There's also some piece rattling around inside the case which must have broken off early on... (to my point about fragility compared to macbooks)

Consider (used) thinkpads. There are places that refurbish them, also selling you devices that just got out of their lease, due to the owner bailing out after only a few months. They are frequently available for half-price in good-as-new with still some warranty on them, which you don't need on the T and X series (not the carbon though). They need one screwdriver, for full disassembly.

You can't be serious? The thing doesn't even have a centred trackpad.

This irks me as well. Even if it has a numpad, I’d still prefer the trackpad be in the middle.

It has anumeric keypad so the touchpad is in the correct place.

It's the number pad that's in the wrong place. It should not be on the laptop.

I've got a HP with a number pad because no 15" model doesn't have one. I never use it (the number pad) but I have to shift the whole machine to the right to have the touchpad and the "real" keyboard in front of me. So most of the vern is on the right of my eyes. Great design!

Different users different requirements.

I bought Lenovo Thinkpad P50 instead of Dell XPS because the Thinkpad has a full keyboard.

Agreed about the requirements, but do you also shift the laptop right or bend your arms and shoulders?

I'd sell the numberpad as an external device. People that need it will buy it and place it to the right of the laptop (or maybe to the left for left handers, who knows?)

There is another design problem: it could shield the ports on the side where it is placed.

Another solution: engineer the screen so that it can be shifted 1/3 to the left when the laptop is open. That will align it with the spacebar and the touchpad.

About the XPS, I didn't buy it back in 2014 because the then current model had some thermal problem and because I like 3 physical buttons on the touchpad. HP ZBooks do have them.

I’ve read some reviews about System76 and a lot of people seem to hate build quality to the extend or returning them.

Then there’s https://lambdal.com/products/tensorbook that focus on ML workloads.

> System 76 (the small linux-only hardware manufacturer)

Nitpick: IIRC they purchase hardware from some other OEM vendor (Clevo Google suggests).

So what do they do, exactly? Install Linux and then resell?

Only thing I'm considering is a thinkpad x1 carbon. But the last time I tried putting linux on a laptop I had a few issues submitted to the linux kernel and still didn't have the laptop working perfectly (Asus zenbook) within a week I returned it and bought a MacBook pro. Might be time for another go.

I believe Thinkpads are famously easy to make work with Linux. I had one in college (a decade ago) and an x1 carbon when I was at Google (several years ago) and both of them were excellent (though the latter obviously would've had any kinks ironed out by the Goobuntu team).

My last couple laptops had better hardware (for my needs) than ThinkPads or Macbooks, but the occasional compatibility issue is enough that I'm thinking about switching back to Thinkpads.

I run Debian on my work-issued X1 Carbon and it works well enough that my next personal laptop is probably going to be an X1.

Consider it's brothers, the 3-digit X and T models, which, especially in form of premature leasing returns, have excellent price for the value. And due to the stagnation with CPU power, all from Haswell should be well within usable.

The old, IBM-made Thinkpads were. AIUI it's not really so true of the modern Lenovo ones.

All the ones I've had (and all the references I've read about their compatibility) have been during the Lenovo period, I believe.

RedHat people famously also use lots of ThinkPads.

Just get a Dell XPS developer edition. It is what an MBP is supposed to be but actually delivers for roughly the same price or less depending on configuration.

The click pad and keyboard are far superior too.

Except for the nostril cam, and the greasy palm rest... and coil whine...

Fwiw the coil whine is apparently fixed in newer generations.

Oddly enough it has gone completely away on my 2017 model. I can only guess a firmware upgrade fixed it, which is probably unlikely. Or getting jossled around in my backpack got it aligned?

Ubuntu has worked perfectly on my last two thinkpads, an X220 and X1 Carbon (4th gen). That's almost 7 years now. I think only the only real caveat is that the fingerprint reader isn't supported. I can't speak for other laptop brands, but just get a thinkpad (or a dell xps).

I recommend the X1C. I had a first-edition. It was wonderful, and lasted me for five years. Last year I upgraded to X1C5. It is far lighter still, the keyboard is good, it is just a joy to interact with. (debian stable)

I'm about to get a new laptop. I had an MBP for 4 years now. I just ordered the Razer Blade 15. DELL's XPS 15 is also a very good choice, although the blade has a bit more recent hardware. Both are upgradable. You can add RAM or SSD if you want. Both run linux just fine.

They both have loud fans, along with every other pc laptop in that league it seems. MacBooks are virtually quiet most of the time.

A bit too quiet sometimes, to the point of melting my lap. There's even an app to set the fan speed and prevent overheating.

Yeah, quiet but goes to 100C constantly. Once I get the razer I'll check what's the temps/loudness there. But with the MBP, I turn the fans up all the time, to avoid burning my fingers when I type :/

The difference is that the antenna & bending issues were grossly exaggerated by clickbait reporting and lawyers angling for a class action win. As the wikipedia articles note, neither affected a significant number of users – the iPhone 4's antenna was still more sensitive than the 3GS it replaced – whereas the keyboard issues affect a lot of people. It's not the urban legend-style “my third cousin has a friend who held his phone hard enough to drop a call” reports which characterized those earlier flaps but real named people who are directly affected and getting hardware replacements because Apple techs agreed with the problem.

PixelBook seems great... It has a beta linux mode.