I don’t really care about the OS. I want a beefy laptop with a good keyboard and trackpad, long battery life, and a crisp screen. Preferably very silent, bonus points for a clean design. That’s the value proposition of a MacBook.

I also care about my desktop supporting consumer electronics without having to waste an afternoon debugging Bluetooth drivers every two weeks

Thankfully, it has been many years since I had to debug Bluetooth drivers (or anything of that ilk) on Linux.

I get it. I wish there were more great laptop makers. I had a maxed out 16in M2 Max MacBook Pro, now I have an 15in M3 MBA. I also have a maxed out HP G1A Ultra running Fedora. They’re all excellent.

There are many laptops with similar specs that you can run Linux on, and for less money

Not really. The only thing that comes close IMHO are the top shelf Lenovo X1 Carbon, but even those come with several caveats compared to MacBooks, and the M4/M5 chips are ridiculously powerful.

I’m open for suggestions though

HP G1A Ultra?

That’s very much not the same thing though?

It kind of is?

Why would you not want your development environment to be as close to your deployment environment as possible? Even MacOS bash commands have hiccups every so often. In my experience working with Linux developers, they seem to know the internals of the servers much better and can optimize/debug prod fast - and this understanding is only compounded with LLMs.

I'm sure many developers would be equally talented at debugging such issues if we deployed on Windows or MacOS, but virtually no one does that.

I do other things on my computer apart from bash.

Docker was designed for Linux, and on Windows you have to run a VM just to let Docker function.

Desktop and server are two wildly different support surfaces

Fair, but it’s electron. They can just add a new target and recompile the native libraries they’re using for Linux.

It’s really not that hard.

People buy Apple products for the same reason people buy BMWs

To drive fast?