Re:Switching from Apple to Lenovo
by SweetestRug on Friday December 25, 2020 @01:25PM
(#25538074)
I agree. In the last ten years I have had Macbooks, a Surface tablet, a Surfacebook, and am now on a XPS 13. I found that Microsoft's surfaces had great build quality, IMHO on par or better than the Apple laptops. Like the author of the article, though, what did them in was Windows. I switched to an XPS developer edition and have not looked back. Don't get me wrong - macos is pretty, but Linux makes coding and data science easy. I also ended up using PopOS, which I found to give an extremely good user experience. Perhaps I am too much of an old school 90's Linux guy, but I still find having a single repo system for 99% of my needed software amazing. I don't think I'll ever get tired of apt-get.
I'm not going claim that the macOS is perfect or bug free. It does indeed have some weird issues. E.g. font smoothing in Big Sur is a train wreck and you have to disable it to not strain your eyes if you're using an external monitor.
My point is: I still can't get anything better. For all it's weirdness and bugs, I don't see an alternative. I am impressed by SuSE Linux running on my old ThinkPad and I could live with it, but it's still worse.
I grew up on old-school 90s Linux, where part of the fun was deciding which program you wanted to compile from source to accomplish a given task. So I may be biased... but I gave my girlfriend, a long time Apple user, an old laptop off of which I'd scraped Windows and put kubuntu on instead. She loves it.
Oh, and as for build quality, ThinkPad > Mac. Recent x86 Macs are glued-together pieces of shit that are optimized for being thin and light at the cost of all other concerns. They do not have adequate cooling, and when heat accumulates it has a tendency to break down the glue holding the system together.
I haven't evaluated the X1 Carbon, but my T450s is still screwed together. It's plenty thicc, but actually quite light in comparison to its size. It can also take a beating.