Agreed. On the computer hardware side:

* x86 chips can surpass the M series cpus in multithreaded performance, but are still lagging in singlethreaded performance and power efficiency

* Qualcomm kinda fumbled the Snapdragon X Elite launch with nonexistent Linux support and shoddy Windows stability, but here's to hoping that they "turn over a new leaf" with the X2.

Actually, some Snapdragon X Elite laptops do run Linux now, but performance is not great as there were some weird regressions and anyway newer chips have caught up [1].

On the build quality side, basically all the PCs are still lagging behind Apple, e.g. yesterday's rant post about the Framework laptop [2] touched on a lot of important points. Of course, there are the Thinkpads, which are still built decently but are quite expensive. Some of the Chinese laptops like the Honor MagicBooks could be attractive and some reddit threads confirm getting Linux working on them, but they are hard to get in the US. That said, at least many non-Apple laptops have decent trackpads and really nice screens nowadays.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/review/snapdragon-x-elite-linux-eoy...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46375174

Looking at a Thinkpad 16" P1 Gen 8 with 2X 1TB SSD, 64GB RAM, QHD+ screen, centered keyboard like MBP (i.e. no numpad), integrated Intel GPU, lightweight (4 lbs) for a little under $2.5K USD.

Closest I've found to an MBP 16" replacement.

Have been running Dell Precision laptops for many years on Linux, not sure about Lenovo build quality and battery life, but hoping it will be decent enough.

Would run Asahi if it supported M4 but looks it's a long ways away...

I am giving my MacBook Air M2 15” to my wife and bought a Lenovo E16 with 120hz screen to run Kubuntu last night. She needed a new laptop and I am had enough of macOS and just need some stuff to work that will be easier on an intel and Linux. Also I do bookwork online so bigger screen and dedicated numpad will be nice. It reviews well and seems like good value for money with current holiday sales but I don’t expect the same hardware quality or portability just a little more freedom. I hope I’m not too disappointed. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-E16-G3-Review-...

I never understood why people claim the Macbook is so good.

Bad keyboard, bad aluminium body, soldered ram...

Is it just the Apple Silicon that somehow makes it worth it? It's ARM, most software is still written and optimized for x86.

> I wish there were a Linux machine with the hardware quality of a MacBook

It really depends what you mean by "quality". To me first and foremost quality I look for in a laptop is for it to not break. As I'm a heavy desktop user, my laptop is typically with me on the couch or on vacation. Enter my MacBook Air M1: after 13 months, and sadly no extended warranty, the screen broke for no reason overnight. I literally closed it before going to bed and when I opened the lid the next day: screen broken. Some refer to that phenomenon as the "bendgate".

And every time I see a Mac laptop I can't help but think "slick and good looking but brittle". There's a feeling of brittleness with Mac laptops that you don't have with, say, a Thinkpad.

My absolute best laptop is a MIL-SPEC (I know, I know, there are many different types of military specs) LG Gram. Lighter than a MacBook too. And every single time I demo it to people I take the screen, I bent it left and right. This thing is rock solid.

I happen to have this laptop (not my vid) and look at 34 seconds in the vid:

https://youtu.be/herYV5TJ_m8

The guy literally throws my laptop (well, the same) down concrete stairs and the thing still just works fine.

The friend who sold it to me (I bought it used) one day stepped on it when he woke up. No problemo.

To me that is quality: something you can buy used and that is rock solid.

Where are the vids of someone throwing a MacBook Air down the stairs and the thing keeps working?

I'm trading a retina display any day for a display that doesn't break when it accidentally falls on the ground.

Now I love the look and the incredible speed of the MacBook Air laptops (I still have my M1 but has its screen broke, I turned it into a desktop) but I really wish they were not desk queens: we've got desktops for that.

I don't want a laptop that require exceptional care and mad packaging skills when putting it inside a backpack (and which then requires the backpack to be manipulated with extreme care).

So: bring me the raw power and why not the nice look of a MacBook Air, but make it sturdy (really the most important for me) and have it support Linux. That I'd buy.

Never used MacBooks, but Lenovo Thinkpad laptops with Linux are really good in my experience. Get anything recent with AMD.

We almost had really nice arm laptops, but they got super greedy about it having AI and no one wanted them.

Why? Lots of people more or less use their computer as a glorified web browser, with some zoom calls and document editing thrown in for good measure. 256gb seems overkill. My girlfriend is somehow still rocking a 2011 MacBook Air. She mostly just uses it for internet banking and managing her finances. Why would she want more than 256gb?

To think that they had the audacity to sell 8GB RAM too

Is it possibly because 256GB is the minimum spec of the MacBook Air M2?

Twice my battery was flat. Now I just do a complete shutdown, since Asahi boots in ~30s (M1 Pro).

A new Wayland protocol is in the works that should support screen cutout information out of the box: https://phosh.mobi/posts/xdg-cutouts/ Hopefully this will be extended to include color information whenever applicable, so that "hiding" the screen cutout (by coloring the surrounding area deep black) can also be a standard feature and maybe even be active by default.

You know what OS doesn’t handle the notch? OSX. It happily throws the system tray icons right back there, with an obscure work around to bring them back. Software quality at Apple these days…

Each controller and subcomponent on the motherboard needs a driver that correctly puts it into low power and sleep states to get battery savings.

Most of those components are proprietary and don't use the standard drivers available in Linux kernel.

So someone needs to go and reverse engineer them, upstream the drivers and pray that Apple doesn't change them in next revision (which they did) or the whole process needs to start again.

In other words: get an actually Linux supported laptop for Linux.

Apple does tons of optimizations for every component to improve battery life. Asahi Linux, which is reverse engineered, doesn't have the resources to figure out each of those tricks, especially for undocumented proprietary hardware, so it's a "death by a thousand cuts" as each of the various components is always drawing a couple of milliwatts more than on macOS.

It absolutely is not awful. You are doing something wrong then. It's not as good as on macOS of course but it's still great. I get 8-10 hours.

For optimal battery life you need to tweak the whole OS stack for the hardware. You need to make sure all the peripherals are set up right to go into the right idle states without causing user-visible latency on wake-up. (Note that often just one peripheral being out of tune here can mess up the whole system's power performance. Also the correct settings here depend on your software stack). You need to make sure that cpufreq and cpuidle governors work nicely with the particular foibles of your platform's CPUs. Ditto for the task scheduler. Then, ditto for a bunch of random userspace code (audio + rendering pipeline for example). The list goes on and on. This work gets done in Android and ChromeOS.

Asahi doesn't yet support all the CPU power states etc. This is a known limitation, not sure how easy it is to reverse engineer though.

This is the case with most (all?) laptops running Linux regardless of hardware unfortunately.

AFAIK MPS cannot be used on Asahi, so it has to be done using Vulkan which will definitely be much slower.

Asahi is all reverse engineering. It’s nothing short of a miracle what has already accomplished, despite, not because of, Apple.

That said some of the prominent developers have left the project. As long as Apple keeps hoarding their designs it’s going to be a struggle, even more so now.

If you care about FOSS operating systems or freedom over your own hardware there isn’t a reason to choose Apple.

The new project leadership team has prioritized upstreaming the existing work over reverse engineering on newer systems.

> Our priority is kernel upstreaming. Our downstream Linux tree contains over 1000 patches required for Apple Silicon that are not yet in upstream Linux. The upstream kernel moves fast, requiring us to constantly rebase our changes on top of upstream while battling merge conflicts and regressions. Janne, Neal, and marcan have rebased our tree for years, but it is laborious with so many patches. Before adding more, we need to reduce our patch stack to remain sustainable long-term.

https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/

For instance, in this month's progress report:

> Last time, we announced that the core SMC driver had finally been merged upstream after three long years. Following that success, we have started the process of merging the SMC’s subdevice drivers which integrate all of the SMC’s functionality into the various kernel subsystems. The hwmon driver has already been accepted for 6.19, meaning that the myriad voltage, current, temperature and power sensors controlled by the SMC will be readable using the standard hwmon interfaces. The SMC is also responsible for reading and setting the RTC, and the driver for this function has also been merged for 6.19! The only SMC subdevices left to merge is the driver for the power button and lid switch, which is still on the mailing list, and the battery/power supply management driver, which currently needs some tweaking to deal with changes in the SMC firmware in macOS 26.

Also finally making it upstream are the changes required to support USB3 via the USB-C ports. This too has been a long process, with our approach needing to change significantly from what we had originally developed downstream

https://asahilinux.org/2025/12/progress-report-6-18/

This is a very straightforward problem with a relatively simple solution:

Stop buying Apple laptops to run Linux.

The project is effectively dead

Without official support, the Asahi team needs to RE a lot of stuffs. I’d expect it to lag behind a couple of generations at least.

I blame Apple on pushing out new models every year. I don’t get why it does that. A M1 is perfectly fine after a few years but Apple treats it like an iPhone. I think one new model every 2-3 years is good enough.

I really wanted this to work, and it WAS remarkably good, but palm rejection on the (ginormous) Apple trackpad didn't work at all, rendering the whole thing unusable if you ever typed anything. That was a month ago, this article is a year old. I'd love to be wrong, but I don't think this problem has been solved.

It's a year old article.

I mean for most purposes should be very similar so makes sense the price is similar

Note that librewolf rely on Mozilla tech infra for account synchronization and plugin distribution. If you are truly hostile to this organization, is there another browser you can recommend?

Not that I disagree, but why make that point here?