My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4

20 years ago I bought a G3 iBook because the hardware was lovely and the system was supported perfectly by stock Debian woody. (Hands up if you remember having to bless your laptop with “holy penguin pee”, part of the output of the yaboot bootloader used in PowerPC systems!)

Times changed and the best hardware for me right now is a Dell XPS from the model lines a few years back that looked like an aluminum sandwich with a black plastic filling. These machines are fantastic but (1) no OLED, (2) now high speed refresh rate, and (3) the keyboard isn’t great.

Could this modern Apple hardware bring me back to Free OS on pretty hardware, or is there something else I should try?

I bought one of those iBooks for Debian linux, but I found the resolution was a bit small for X. At the time, I had a thing for non-intel architectures. Prior to that, I had done a lot of work packaging up Debian for Sparc machines. I had access to a wide variety of Sun workstations at my job as a sysadmin at a university.

Asahi (Linux) lags quite far behind the latest Apple hardware release. If you want the Linux experience on Apple hardware, I think the best move is full-screen VM. Performance of that is more than good enough, but it does mean you are running a full non-free software stack to get to your free software VM.