> You're seeing an extreme case here. Macbooks are actively breaking other OSes. Better to treat it as: "look how much you can bend Linux to work on a proprietary toaster", rather than "look how hard it is to run Linux on a laptop".

It's true that Macbooks are an extreme case, but as far as I can tell, there is not a laptop which runs Linux out of the box where tinkering won't be necessary.

Let's take another extreme case: I purchased a System76 Galago Pro, which came shipped with PopOS, a Debian-based Linux distro which is maintained by System76 specifically with the intent of providing better hardware support and quality assurance testing. This is the absolute best case scenario for a Linux laptop.

Two months in, I still haven't figured out how to get my webcam working on Zoom calls, and fonts display pixelated despite having a HiDPI screen (equivalent to MacOS Retina). I had to tinker with settings to get audio to not sound muffled, and connecting to WiFi took more tries than can be attributed to network instability (I'm not sure why it started working, to be honest).

To System76's credit, this is the absolute best experience I've ever had with a Linux laptop. Everything else has worked out of the box so far. In competition with other Linux laptops, including Dell systems which come preinstalled with Linux, System76's laptops win unequivocally in my experience. This is no small achievement, and if you're getting a Linux laptop, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them.

But competing with Windows and MacOS, I think this Linux experience is only competitive with the low-end of Windows installations (i.e. cheap netbooks where it's clear the companies didn't spend much time on getting the configuration right). A higher-end Windows laptop or any Mac laptop will require little-to-no tinkering to get things working.

It’s weird, people report all these issues, but in the past I bought Thinkpads for years & they always "just worked". Took a risk & picked up a Dell XPS 13 a couple of years ago, and that "just worked" too.

It’s like I live in parallel universe of Linux hardware support to some of you.

Same. Never had an issue with Thinkpads nor Dells of all stripes.

Now the Surface Pro on the other hand, was a disastrous time sink.

How does sleep/suspend work? That was always the biggest hangup for me. Although, it's been almost a decade since I last tried. However, a colleague's Dell running Ubuntu was a nightmare. Not sure if it was the model or how he had it set up though.

I have a Dell XPS 13 and have run various flavors of Arch without any problems. I didn't try Ubuntu, however.

Sleep and suspend just work. Battery life is good - typically 5-7 hours. Before this I had no problems with a Thinkpad and even on a MacBook Air (2012).

Maybe I'm just so used to Linux now that I don't notice problems since I've been on it since 1998-ish except for a short stint on OS X.

Dell support is terrible so I can't recommend the XPS. When I had a problem with the battery they wouldn't replace it under warranty since I was not in the country where I bought it, which is total BS.

I've had a Thinkpad too, and had issues.

A lot of these issues are minor, and easily fixed, so I suspect the "parallel universe" effect is indicative of a willingness to overlook small issues. The font issue I found is hardly critical, for example, and I suspect a lot of developers would just live with it.

Once you say something generally works, it's a magnet for "doesn't work for me" responses. "Yeah, just fine for me too" is not really a response worth writing / it's discouraged. Forums are terrible for finding consensus / getting real stats.

You have discovered Apple Marketing. Their security and privacy stances are no different.

My thinkpad runs Linux and everything works exactly as intended.

Seconding - my X1 Carbon 7 runs Ubuntu with no tinkering whatsoever.

My t460p suffers from battery drain issues due to nvidia graphics and intel wifi. Also, the fingerprint sensor requires tinkering after every os upgrade and cannot enroll new fingerprints in linux.

My ThinkPad does not at all.

I have two Dell Lattitude series laptops, and they've always worked without issues out-of-the-box (at least with Ubuntu Linux).

I do make sure that the hardware is compatible with Linux beforehand. This typically involves buying prior generation hardware (which works out because you can get them for much less), and avoiding Nvidia hardware entirely.

> there is not a laptop which runs Linux out of the box where tinkering won't be necessary.

Hp x360 requires zero fiddling, works out the box.

Dell precision 5570 requires zero fiddling, works out of the box.

Samsung Chronos 7 requires zero fiddling, works out of the box.

Every laptop in the past 6 years worked with Linux straight out the gate. Including acpi sleep, graphics acceleration, and wireless networking. Compare that to spending 8 hours last night trying to get windows 10 to run on a 7 year old system

On the one hand, yes, Apple is generally extremely hostile towards users tinkering with their platforms, be it iOS or macOS, so it theoretically should be harder.

On the other hand, on the pre-2016 models, the components in use are largely off-the-shelf components, much like other manufacturers.

The major difference between Apple laptops and other vendors laptops is that the variation of components in use is significantly smaller on the Apple range, while 'non-apple brands' encompasses a huge variety of different hardware.

I would suspect that if you bought any random laptop, you'd have high odds of picking one that has various components that are not well supported, with even less online support available for you than if you tried it on Apple hardware. If only because the number of people using Apple hardware is so damn high, and the number of people on your particular component configuration is significantly smaller.

Pre-2016 will start dying though. For new hardware, we're pretty much left with macbook which is definitely broken, or literally anything else, which may be broken, but often isn't. If you're going for brands, most Dell, Thinkpad, HP, etc. (not lowest price) laptops will work just fine with linux. Some even come as certified compatible.

The Dell XPS 13 and soon some Thinkpads [1] even come pre-installed with Linux.

[1] https://fedoramagazine.org/coming-soon-fedora-on-lenovo-lapt...

> Pre-2016 will start dying though.

I guess, but my 2007 and 2010 laptops still work OK.