OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

It’s great. The battery life is great, it’s quite fast with a lot of cores, when I need to do my genetics runs (plugged in). Build quality isn’t bad, plus affordable and lots of ports. After my initial transition away, not missing my 2015 Mac book pro.

Linux is the way to go. I don’t blame people with apple hardware for wanting it. I just don’t feel the x86 side is as bad as the everyone makes it out to be. We’ve come along way since my first Linux laptop and it’s not so great battery life.

The machine was quite a bit slower than an M1 Air, would have loud fans during video meetings, and on Linux the battery would typically last 3 hours (6-7 on Windows, yes I did all the usual power optimizations). In S3 sleep it would discharge overnight and the next day it would refuse to charge with Lenovo’s included USB-C adapter. When waking up the machine from sleep the track point or trackpad wouldn’t come up 1/3rd of the time on Linux.

I used the laptop for work and the question ‘does the laptop work’ when having a meeting or having to teach became so stressful, that one day after another Linux hardware episode I immediately went to a store after work and picked up an M1 Air and never looked back (well, got an M1 Max after that).

There is no way I am going to touch Linux on laptops within 5 years.

(I use a headless Linux GPU machine daily, first used Linux in 1994, and was paid to work on a Linux distribution in the past.)

I'm assuming you're using Asahi Linux on your Macs (though you said you wouldn't touch it..). The lack of hardware diversity should make comparability easier, even if everything need to be reversed engineered.

I get 6 hours or so on my machine. Its pretty much silent, unless I push it. Its a Ryzen 7 5700u. We do a lot of parallel compute and genetics code tends massively parallel and x86 optimized. Mostly run on cluster though. I haven't done any maintenance and have had not hardware issues.

I don't link I could ever go back to macos, or windows.

The negative experiences with the thinkpad are typical of all the intel laptops I have recently used, preloaded OS (including Windows, and to a lesser extent, Linux and MacOS), or not.

Whenever I look for an AMD laptop, it has a low resolution (1080p) display, and/or an off-center keyboard/trackpad (or has some other obvious fatal flaw).

I'm typing this on an M2 macbook. I do 100% of my work in an "8 core" arm Linux VM that can only use one core for userspace stuff (according to top), but that still kicks the pants off my previous laptop.

I'm strongly considering dual booting into asahi.

>Whenever I look for an AMD laptop, it has a low resolution (1080p) display, and/or an off-center keyboard/trackpad (or has some other obvious fatal flaw).

yup it has both of those. But the screen is only15", and I'm old so it doesn't matter. It not glossy which I really like though.

If you love the mac hardware, give Asahi a try. My understanding its the best linux for the M-series macbooks. Linux is great for developing on and they seem to be making great progress.

Things have changed a bit since then[1]. The new Phoenix chips are quite competitive with the M2 as far as performance and TDP goes. Your other complaints are with Lenovo, not AMD.

I doubt anyone will argue that Apple laptops don't have the best build quality. Apple has the advantage of full vertical integration, so it's very difficult for any other manufacturer to compete on things like battery life and power efficiency.

The Linux glitches you describe is the usual Linux jank. I don't disagree that even the most well-supported Linux laptop will have these. As a Linux user, you choose to deal with these issues because the alternative of relying on a corporation to decide how you're going to use your computer is not an option. I've also heard and experienced my share of issues with macOS and Windows. In the eternal words of a modern philosopher: every OS sucks[2].

[1]: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m2-max-vs-amd-ry...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPRvc2UMeMI

And yes, that sucks. We should have first-class support. It's no wonder macOS gained popularity among developers. But I've been running Linux on laptops for 15+ years now (even on Macs), and I've seen how it's changed from barely-working and having to futz with things at every kernel upgrade, to pretty much seamless (and these days I really have little patience for futzing around with things; I want something that works so I can do useful things on it). But, again: you need to choose your hardware carefully.

For reference, I had a 2016-model Razer Blade Stealth, which had no issues with Linux. Then in early 2019 I bought a 2018-model Dell XPS 13 that worked flawlessly (except for the fingerprint reader, which I knew ahead of time and accepted as ok). For the past yearish I've been using a Framework Laptop, which has had some problems (unrelated to Linux; Windows users have the same problems), but the hardware support on Linux has been solid.

Meanwhile, I'd constantly hear problems from my friends with Macs about how it could never stay connected to a wireless network after a couple hours (requiring a reboot to fix), or would frequently "beachball" under not that much load, or how the yearly major OS update would usually break their development setup. I used macOS on and off between 2005 and 2017 or so, and ran into plenty of issues as well.

While I certainly agree there's some laptop hardware that you just shouldn't run Linux on, the still-kicking Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field somehow causes people to ignore or explain away all the issues macOS has.

Laptop displays are also a common frustration, though this has been improving lately. Still too many models stuck on 16:9 aspect ratio though, which is suboptimal for anything but watching movies due to lack of vertical real estate. By the time you've factored in all the taskbars, titlebars, toolbars, menubars, tab bars, and status bars you've got a keyhole left to peer through. This is less of a problem for those using something like i3 or Sway where half of those bars are hidden but tiling WMs just aren't my thing.

Yes, it was Linux-certified.

I've seen how it's changed from barely-working and having to futz with things at every kernel upgrade, to pretty much seamless (and these days I really have little patience for futzing around with things; I want something that works so I can do useful things on it)

Dig up any post from 5, 10 or 15 years ago and Linux users will say literally the same thing.

And then it needed some fractional scaling factor. Wayland apps worked ok with that scaling (though rendering was perceivably jankier), but some X11 apps would just be blurry. At the time there was no solution for there apps and looking at an extremely blurry CLion all day is no fun. The only solution was to run the whole desktop environment in 1x scaling and use this GNOME option to use larger fonts and widgets. Which worked ok-ish, but many things are sized in a funny way.

I just couldn't tolerate so much brokenness.

(And don't get me started on sharing a screen in Zoom conference calls.)

Now waiting for the Ryzen 7840U configured to 15W to be available with 64GB ram.