Old Macbooks make good linux laptops. This hasn't really been the case for a while now.

Yeah I guess I should have said old there. The touchbar macbooks are definitely not something that fits this case

Things have been spotty since well before the touchbar. I doubt anyone is running Linux reliably on any Macbook built after like 2014. There are still open issues with keyboard, touchpad, display drivers, brightness, sleep, nvme and lots more.

Yep. In 2018 I tried to run Linux on a 2016 MacBook Pro, and it was a pain. The keyboard/touchpad weren't supported without an out-of-tree driver, and audio and suspend-to-RAM didn't work at all. I hear things are better with that model now (I gave up in 2019 and got a Dell XPS13): keyboard/touchpad driver has been upstreamed and I believe there are patches to get audio working, but I don't know about suspend.

I run NixOS on Mac on 2015 Macbook Pro Retina, works like a charm. Everything works on KDE.

Even Windows runs like crap on a MacBook - with similar driver issues

A 2015 mbp works pretty well, are there problems with the newer ones?

Yes. Tons. For a while you couldn't even install Linux on the internal SSD of T2 chip models. Keyboards and Trackpads don't work out of the box. Suspend and sound issues. Touch bar problems.

2015 was the last year they worked well.

Intel CPUs are pretty much the same as 5 years ago...

Yes, true, but Intel's integrated graphics has gotten a lot better in the last 5 years, and many laptops from that era end up with ~8GB of RAM (non-upgradeable in an Apple laptop), which is just not enough for what I do. (My current laptop has 16GB, and my next one will definitely have 32GB minimum.)

I have 2016 and 2018 Intel laptops (non-Apple, but similar in "class"), and it's surprising how much better the graphics is on the 2018 model.

I would love to try a laptop with AMD graphics, but the laptops I find with AMD kit in them generally don't meet my requirements for other reasons. And I'm forever scarred by mid-'00s experiences with Nvidia on Linux, so I refuse to buy Nvidia hardware.

I do some light gaming (not enough to justify a desktop/gaming PC), and even with 2010-era games I can't run them on 2018 Intel graphics with the quality settings above "medium", so I'll take the fastest Intel graphics I can get.

I have nVidia GPU in my current laptop - I agree this is a nightmare. I wanted to use it for some AI stuff, but it's pointless - too unstable so I am on an Intel GPU. For a new laptop I am going to go full AMD, but nothing is in stock. I am most worried about the fact that I start to rationalise getting a Mac Pro with M1. I don't do any gaming, and would use it solely for development. If only Apple was more ethical then that would be a no brainer, but I don't want to fund a company that is anti-right to repair.

I very much experience a difference using Xcode, between my 4 core 2016 MBP and my 8 core 2019 MBP. Since both are base models, I think I disagree with your statement.

Is that true generally? I know my old (2008?) Macbook Pro supported Linux well, but I think that took a few years to get things like good trackpad, bluetooth, and wifi support. I remember getting a new one and it couldn't boot into the installer for most distros and still had driver issues (that might have been resolved).

Macs seem to support Linux a few years after release. They were usually a great choice when modern macOS got too slow for that model.

I also never found a good fit on the Windows side for a Linux laptop. I always ran Linux on a desktop. So maybe I would choose a Mac laptop to run Linux...

Linux support on consumer hardware depends on community contribution generally. So it will take time generally to have good support. However in 2021 it’s no longer necessary to buy a good laptop and struggle to put linux on it. There are some great linux options like the xps developer edition or system76 and i know thinkpads also have a lineup now of linux. These generally should have good linux drivers for hardware (though for certain oems it’s not necessarily the case the drivers will be open source). System76 is probably the go to linux laptop right now.

Yes. Linux core maintainers wrote article on LWN several years ago why the love and use MacBooks.

Don’t equate ARM with Apple silicon. If the M1 was an x86 cpu it’d blow Intel out of the water exactly the same way it did now.

Not quite as fast. M1 has 8 wide decode, which would be difficult to do with x86 because x86 has variable instruction lengths.

> Zen 2 has has 8-wide issue in many places, and Ice Lake moves up to 6-wide.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25258985