Depending on how recent the model is, it can be somewhat tough. Generally it takes a bit of time after a new model appears before there are working drivers for wifi, which quite often is a deal breaker. Sometimes a driver will be working a bit earlier but not be released yet, so you can compile your own kernel with it patched in, but even as a daily Arch user that's more effort than I'm willing to go through on a regular basis. I know there's progress being made on a distro that fully supports the new ARM macbooks, but my understanding is that most distros will not work on it right now. I think "everything works out of the box" is mostly true for most non-Apple laptops nowadays for Linux, but I'm not sure it will ever be the case for macbooks (unless Apple decides to make sure it's the case, which seems fairly unlikely).

> I think "everything works out of the box" is mostly true for most non-Apple laptops nowadays for Linux, but I'm not sure it will ever be the case for macbooks (unless Apple decides to make sure it's the case, which seems fairly unlikely).

My understanding is that "everything works out of the box" is still restricted to very specific products line when it comes to laptops and linux. And that the new Apple Silicon macbooks might actually make this situation a lot better because most of the hardware is Apple's and they seems to keep a more or less stable binary interface between hardware components even across hardware generations (presumably for their own benefit when writing their own firmware). So while the support isn't there yet (well, it's in Alpha), once it is there we might expect Apple laptops to have some of the best linux support going forwards.

I guess I can only speak to my own experience, which is that any non-Apple laptop* I've bought in the past six or so years has had working wifi, trackpad, bluetooth, etc. out of the box when I've installed Linux on it, and this has been without doing any sort of research beforehand to make sure that it would work with Linux. The last time I tried to put Linux on a macbook was with an early 2015 Macbook Pro, which at least through the summer didn't have a working wifi driver by default on Linux. I did find a working driver that was yet to be included by default in Linux around the summer, and by a year or two after the macbook came out (I don't remember the exact amount of time), it was available by default in Linux releases.

* The one exception was when I tried to buy an ARM laptop shortly after all the news about Spectre/Meltdown came out and I was frustrated with Intel's PR response to it. I never did actually figure out how to install Linux on it due to the bootloader being locked down, but that's either my own fault or maybe the manufacturer's and certainly not Linux's.

There is no production-ready Linux distro for recent Macs.

Yes - I made this "discovery" for a three year old Mac I have - it freezes on the first screen of the Ubuntu install :(

True, but asahi Linux for the curious

Only helps for M1 macs. Intel T2 laptops are in a particularly bad spot when it comes to Linux support and things haven't really gotten better. You still need to add drivers to get the keyboard/trackpad working (AFAIK not supported on all kernels either), you can't have audio AND suspend just one of them, WiFi is a pain. I tried on my 2018 just had freezes every five minutes on the 1/3 of times it would boot correctly.