I’m in the market for a new laptop.
I’ve narrowed it down to a Framework Laptop 13 with a Ryzen processor, or a flavor of Macbook.
I’ve unfortunately become trained to only want to use a tiling window manager like i3. Obviously I can slap Linux on the Framework directly, but with the Macbook I’d probably be running Linux in a VM most of the time. The reason the Macbook is in the running at all is because of the hardware quality and the sheer oomph of the M2.
The Framework appeal is the sheer consumer-friendliness of the thing. I’d like to support that.
Would love any thoughts!
Edit: thank everyone so much for all the replies, I read all of them and really appreciate it. I think it’ll come down to how Asahi Linux is doing. I’ll do my research and make a pick. Thank you all once again, Lobsters are awesome :)
If you run a tiling manager a Mac would be utterly wrong choice.
The Mac would quite likely have a better battery life even with a not yet finished Asahi linux installed, so I don’t think that it would be that bad of a choice. If someone want an actual portable machine, the M-series really doesn’t have any real contenders, except their second-hand versions.
I struggle to think how this is possible - Linux is notorious for having worse battery life on comparable hardware than the proprietary OSes, on almost every device I’ve ever seen compared. Now throw in a bunch of alpha/beta drivers or unaccelerated components? Yeah - no way - I’m not buying the “higher battery life” argument, I’m afraid.
I say this even as a nearly lifelong Linux user who owns zero Apple products but several Linux devices on both x86_64 and arm64 archs.
This goes to the core of who cares to optimize for each hardware platform. Most of the Linux battery issues stem from not placing as much of the hardware into low power states. This is because those are often undocumented and only possible with vendor driver blobs that are not effectively supportable for end users on linux. The Mac hardware isn’t necessarily more open than the PC hardware but there’s less of it to optimize drivers for due to the vertical integration Apple is famous for and because of the fully integrated SoC-esque approach Apple has taken. There’s fewer independent power state toggles to adjust and thus fewer potential integrated states for the end user hardware to be in. This makes it more possible to optimize for the hardware with a fairly small dev team. The Asahi team also happens to be much more focused on this issue than the various integrators selling PC laptops with linux support.
Firmware blobs are rarely the issue. TBH a lot of it is lack of care, different priorities, and a huge fear of negative side effects. (Which sometimes are very real, for example AFAIK several generations of Intel GPUs are infamous for Panel Self-Refresh bugs.)
On every “embedded-ish” SoC there are at least as many toggles as there are onboard peripherals, and Apple is no exception. It’s more that there was enough care about this to have drivers that would manage at least the most significant power hogs.
You’re right that there’s still quite a few toggles. What I was trying to focus on is the practical combinations that need to be tested together. With independent components from different vendors there is an issue with who is incentivized to figure out the combinations that use the least power while remaining stable. A lot is left of the table because taking the final steps to reach optimal power efficiency is so difficult for anyone to do. With the Apple hardware a lot of the problem space has been taken care of by Apple. e.g. from Hector:
Top comment here says 10-15 hours of battery life: https://old.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/116jpdk/how_are_the_battery_life_and_the_heat_on_m2_air/
“normal usage (software development” doesn’t say much about whether they are building/testing locally or whether they are mostly using the machine in low power to run $EDITOR.
10-15 doesn’t sound more than macOS gets out of the box on such machines if you turn down brightness.
I don’t think they were claiming that a MacBook would have a better battery life with Asahi Linux than with macOS, but rather that a MacBook with Asahi Linux would have a better battery life than a Framework laptop with Linux.
Ah, you are right - thanks!
The only good portable machine is one that can’t even fully run Linux? What?
Only good? No. Currently the best, in terms of hardware? Yes. Other commenters already expanded on why that is the case.
Of course there is subjectivity here, people value different things. But the performance-battery life combo is usually top priority, that aspect is the one I can vouch for the M-series laptops.
I personally doubt that performance/battery life is more important than choice of OS or cost for most people.
Cost is another factor of course, but Macs are eons better than similarly priced laptops. They really are not expensive for their value anymore.
Maybe, if you don’t value being able to upgrade components or plug in a mouse or ethernet cable or run Linux or Windows natively.
As someone who used dwm for 10+ years, then Windows for 5, and now macOS, I dunno. Having win+1 etc hotkeys to switch between fullscreen apps gets you like 95% of the way and is totally good enough. You get them out of the box on Windows, and hammerspoon can do it on macOS:
Meanwhile the opportunity cost of using Linux as a desktop OS is enormous because all the good parts also exist on Windows (WSL)/macOS (natively), and everything else either doesn’t work or is bad, so you have to waste a lot of time on things that are solved/trivial on other OS. Observationally, Linux people tend to underestimate how much time they lose here, and also (greatly) overestimate how much people do the same on Windows/mac. It doesn’t make sense to chase marginal/imaginary productivity gains from having a better WM when they get more than wiped out by the rest of the OS.
Apple hardware is also extremely better than any other vendor and macOS itself is shockingly practical. The screen is insane and makes me hate my old desktop. The trackpad is insane. The CPU is twice as fast as my 2016 gaming PC, while also being fanless and having 20 hour battery life. It goes to sleep and wakes up so reliably and quickly you can treat it like your phone, like you leave it on 100% of the time and charge it once per day and just open/close the lid when you start/stop using it. If you have an Apple Watch it can unlock itself before you finish opening the lid. You get phone quality maps/contacts/calendar/etc native apps out of the box. You get totally good enough for causal use knockoffs of Word/Excel. Being able to copy paste between your phone/laptop is surprisingly handy.
See also https://lobste.rs/s/lx0t71/new_macos_dropbox_client_moves_files_from, in particular @peter’s comment, which is what motivated me to give macOS a serious try on my old macbook, which then got me to buy an M2.
That’s been my experience as well. My biggest Linux productivity boost did not come from switching to fvwm to Window Maker, wmii or ratpoison (OFF MY LAWN I SAID!), it came from just
sshing into a Linux box/multipass machine.I don’t like macOS. Updates do break things. However, overall, I think all the time I spent troubleshooting post-update breakage has amounted to less than I spent figuring out why PulseAudio switches my output device from my speakers to my monitor’s speakers, and that is absolutely not the only thing I spent a lot of time on with Linux. Listing all the other ones is probably pointless, they’re mostly matters of preferences anyway. YMMV but at least for the things I use, dealing with macOS post-update bugs is an occasional nuisance, whereas dealing with Linux post-update bugs is an uphill battle that you can only avoid by getting into other uphill battles, like running Debian stable in the age of move fast and break things.
As for workflow durability, I got the M1 machine I’m writing this from in 2021, and last time I’d used a Mac before that was when the OS X Tiger -> Leopard transition happened so… 2008? My workflow was practically unchanged, and it’s literally older than i3. We went through like four big iterations of the GTK Find file… dialog in that time and at least two of them were really nerve wracking.
That being said, not only do I not like macOS, I could probably not do my work with macOS alone. Even with all the quirks of a remote dev setup (several remote dev setups, actually) I find the experience of dealing with Linux this way a lot better, but I hope things won’t stay like this forever. I am looking forward to getting back to
Window Makerright forgot about Wayland, well, to getting back to whatever’s gonna be cool then.OP, if you’re reading this: I would not get a Mac to run Linux on it. I think you can get, if not better hardware, at least better-supported hardware with a lot better performance/dollar figures. If you’re not going to run at least some macOS applications, IMHO it’s not worth the money.
Also, if you’re good with a screwdriver, you can get hardware that’s a lot easier and a lot cheaper to fix by yourself. I repaired one of my work laptops five times so far; this one, though, if I drop it, it’s dead, and seeing the repair shop prices I am not paying to have it resurrected.
I mean sure, the hardware is great and I use macbooks as daily rides as well. Just meaning it’s a wrong choice for a a tiling manager, it’ll never be “native” it can be on Linux. My 5 cents as a former stumpwm user.
How long have you been using macOS? In my experience, proprietary OS users underestimate the time they lose adapting to OS updates that they have no control over. With a tiling window manager on Linux, you know your window manager will keep working the way you want it to for decades without having to find workarounds to support a workflow that the OS vendor doesn’t care about.
lmao oh goody
I’ve been using tiling window managers for literally decades (my first was ion2) but in that time I’m not aware of any that have actually lasted the whole span. At a stretch I can imagine some hyper-customised fvwm user has a tiling-like workflow that has been untouched for that period of time.
Well there weren’t that many tiling window managers in 2003. But a DWM from 2006 should still work the same today. FVWM isn’t really tiling but I guess that’s the exception that proves the rule.
I run Arch in dual boot since 2015. Last year the X server (I think, I couldn’t be bothered to fix it) broke after an update. So not even X works for a decade.
true, bugs are always possible especially on a bleeding edge system
I wish my usage was so simple that the only thing I needed was a tiling window manager.
you can get there if you break down your habits intentionally
This is basically true of lots of Linux these days as well. Gnome for instance is known for total rewrites on a fairly regular basis. On MacOS I haven’t had it take that long, and Apple is pretty good about long term updates for even their older OS’s, so you can stay on a particular version for almost as long as a LTS release in Linux.
So I don’t really see this as a noticeable difference. Obviously it has a lot to do with how bleeding edge you want to be and how often you want to do upgrades, but if you want slow and boring changes, macOS and Linux can pretty much both give you that.
Big desktop environments depend on continual upstream support and are often upended by wreckers, but light weight window managers (like what OP wants to use) don’t have that problem.
Exactly.
I agree. You’re going to be fighting the platform, and the platform always wins.
There is a tiling window manager for macOS called yabai. It’s not perfect, but if your setup is not very complex it’s sufficient.
Amethyst, Rectangle, and Magnet are less invasive alternatives that don’t involve dumping shell code into system components. I’ve heard good things about all of them.
I use Magnet. I’ve seen people using tiling window managers, who are serious about it, how GUI windows open into splits and stuff like vim
:vsand:sp, or tmux panes. If you want that kind of experience, Magnet definitely won’t provide it. If you only need hotkeys to snap the current foreground window to a fraction of the screen (e.g. top 1/2, left 1/3, top-right 1/4, etc), Magnet is perfect. Its hotkeys are all customizable.If that kind of tiling is sufficient for @cflewis, I highly recommend giving macOS a chance. If not, then macOS probably isn’t a good choice, and you’ll never be happy with it unless you’re willing to give up the full tiler experience. You can fullscreen a VM and 3-finger swipe between it and the macOS desktop as needed, but I haven’t done it enough to comment on battery life impact or overall UX. Nor have I tried Asahi Linux.
But there are other great things about macOS for terminal-loving users like me. As I’ve mentioned before on Lobsters, the command / ctrl split (⌘ / ^) is wonderful. Emacs-style text movements* work in all GUI text fields, and don’t conflict with GUI commands like cut/copy/paste/undo etc. They even work in tandem with the GUI style keybinds, for instance ctrl+f moves the cursor forward, and pressing ctrl+shift+f moves the cursor forward with highlighting, exactly like shift+rightarrow or shift+click would.
Likewise there is no keybind conflict in the terminal. Copy is ⌘C just like everywhere else, no need for ctrl+shift+c like on Linux. Although to my knowledge there is no equivalent of the X highlight buffer, with middle click to paste whatever was last highlighted.
I’m not going to pretend Homebrew is the greatest package manager in the world, but it works without problems the vast majority of the time, and has nearly everything you need. And you can use it to install GUI apps with the cask system. From Discord to mpv to MacVim, I have literally every third-party app I use installed through brew cask.
* C-f, C-b, C-n, C-p, C-a, C-e, C-k, C-y, C-o, C-h, C-d, and C-t all work as they do in emacs throughout macOS, e.g. this Safari text field I’m typing this comment in.
My related comments:
I’ve seen yabai, and while it looks interesting, the fact that you need to disable SIP to install it is kind of a non-starter for many people, especially people who would like to use it on a work laptop.
I run Yabai without messing around with SIP. It’s fine.
I think you can use most features without disabling SIP
It is weird how badly behind everything is in the laptop market. Macbook laptops, unfortunately, have superior hardware quality, better battery life, and much better-polished hardware.
Every year, I look around for an alternative. I have yet to find good-quality hardware that comes close. Most Linux laptops ship with a 16:9 screen, so, less vertical space for developers. Some even have a numeric keypad making typing asymmetric. Many still don’t use USB-C charging. Many have low-res 1080p screens. Very few have 32GB or more RAM support which IMHO is required for the bloat that’s browser and modern IDE.
I found one Tuxedo Infinitybook Pro that seems to be really good. However, online reviews clearly show that the actual hardware reliability isn’t great. I am looking forward to Framework 16 laptop but I wonder if it would be able to ever compete with M2 processors.
The right line of attack for a laptop company would be to sell
Not sure what “hardware quality” means, they sure look beautiful.
My M1 Max needed the display AND the mainboard replaced after 3 months or so. The replacement took weeks, otherwise service was fine. The replacements didn’t have any trouble since then.
The only other hardware fault that I ran into with any notebook is that I broke off a key in a ThinkPad while cleaning - I think it was somewhat my fault but the keyboard got replaced without cost to me.
Going to give you the benefit of the doubt here because while unibody macbook’s have existed for more than 10 years at this point and their build quality is well tested and documented; it’s possible you weren’t paying attention.
Hardware quality has several factors:
Feeling (rigidity, materials, weight, display to lid ratio etc;)
Longevity (how long the materials last before degrading or becoming non-functional)
Appearance (as mentioned)
Not cutting corners (such as the fact that Macbooks were the only laptops immune to USB-killers when they appeared on the market because Apple didn’t merge data lines with power lanes; or that each USB-C data port delivers a full 40GBps unlike some manufacturers like dell where it can be 10/20 or 40)
Then of course there are later things like the fact that the thing doesn’t heat up, which honestly makes me blame Intel a bit for people being salty at Macbook temperatures for a decade.
I mean, there’s no comparison on the market, and I’m a die-hard linux fanboy; the closest we get is probably the Dell Latitude from a rigidity and longevity perspective, but it’s a lot more bulky and gets a lot warmer, has a lower battery life in real world scenarios and it costs as much anyway.
I do think the ability to upgrade and replace components should factor into longevity. With everything soldered, the degradation of a single component effectively means the degradation of the whole machine. If the motherboard would last 50 years, that doesn’t mean much if it’s so impractical to replace components that only last 10-20 years.
I have the ThinkPad T14s with a modern Ryzen CPU. It is quiet, fast, has a great battery life (especially with the latest kernels and setting up the new AMD pstates), has a 16:10 screen and everything works with NixOS including the fingerprint reader.
The trackpoint is a must for me, the build quality is awesome and the laptop material feels nice if using on top of bare legs compared to the aluminum of MacBook. The keyboard is still very good.
Here’s my config for the laptop:
https://github.com/pimeys/nixos/blob/main/hosts/purrpurr.nix
Thanks for sharing your nixfiles, lots of great stuff in there!
Why is ARM a bonus? There’s a lot of x86 software that isn’t yet compatible with it & if we want to talk about next generation, wouldn’t we be backing RISC-V? Also 4K (almost always a waste on laptop screens) + dGPU directly conflict with your “great battery life” ask.
What are your thoughts on the newer thinkpads?
I have a ThinkPad X1 Carbon (gen… 10? circa 2021) and it’s worked perfectly with Pop_OS. I’ve found that there are too many quirks between OS X and Linux for me to be happy as a developer. Muscle memory and absolutely superior package management for 20 years is hard to break.
I tried to go with OS X for 3 years - it just felt like inertia the entire time. By the end of those 3 years I was able to work quite quickly and sort out any issues I had, but when I switched back to Linux I realized how much energy it took for me to be productive in OS X vs Linux.
And I was ultimately happier - and that’s a hard thing to ignore. :-)
The answer is the Intel P14E, but it can be hard to find a vendor who will sell you just one. It doesn’t meet all of your criteria but it’s much better than a Macbook:
I’d be curious to know what you’re using currently, but based on the given requirements, it seems like the Framework is the obvious choice.
Buying a MacBook for just the hardware would be a bit of a waste and running a Linux VM would just result in a worse experience than running Linux directly on the laptop itself. Additionally, running an x86 build of Linux on an M2 (which I assume most people would do - the support for aarch64-linux isn’t as universal as you’d hope) would result in losing most of the potential performance benefits of the M2 anyway.
Again, this is based on your requirements and wouldn’t be a universal recommendation. Essentially if you went with the MacBook you’d be paying more to get the macOS operating system and a better build quality, but worse just about everything else.
I’d be more inclined to do a comparison between a Thinkpad and the Framework. I don’t have as well thought out of an answer there, but I know when my Thinkpad T14 dies, I will most likely be getting a Framework.
Apple Silicon is a step function upgrade, like when you first switched from a hard disk to an SSD. The combination of speed, low temperature/fan noise, and battery life seems to have no equal today. I do really like the look of the Framework though.
The new M2 machines are pretty amazing. My work desktop was a 10-core W-2155 CPU @ 3.30GHz. My new M2 Max MBP is faster for most things:
The Xeon is Skylake, so it’s a few generations old, but it’s also a desktop with a huge power draw, whereas the laptop barely gets warm (LLaMa and Stable Diffusion make it a bit hot, the pure CPU things are fine).
An hour in a video call (Teams in the app, Google Meet in the browser) uses about 10% of the battery. The Xeon doesn’t have a battery, but my Surface Book 2 drops to under 50% after an hour in Teams.
i bought a framework laptop from the original run. still have the 11th gen mainboard, considering either upgrading to the AMD mainboard or the framework 16 later this year.
the framework is a nice machine. i haven’t had any complaints about battery life, but i also mostly use it plugged in. the build quality overall is very good. the keyboard is very good – i prefer it over my thinkpads.
the trackpad is hot trash. absolutely awful. and, look, i’m not one of these people who thinks that the macbook trackpads are the end-all and be-all of mobile pointing devices. the macbook trackpads are fine. the framework trackpad is not. sensing is good, multitouch is good, but the physical click only works about 50% of the time. framework knows about this. it may have been fixed in a newer hardware revision. i’m not sure.
otherwise, good laptop. i’d buy it again, and i will continue to buy products from framework in spite of the awful trackpad.
Writing it from my 12th gen intel framework 13. The trackpad is fine, no complains. The weak hinges are annoying sometimes (will replace with stronger ones next time I’m ordering anything), and slow battery drain on suspend is still not fully addressed (waiting for next BIOS version).
it’s funny, i have zero problems with the hinges. the first version of the top cover had more flex than i was happy with, but the second version (the CNC’d one) is excellent.
to go into a bit of detail: the trackpad dragging behaviour is what kills me. if i’m doing left-click drags by holding the physical button and then dragging, the physical click has a tendency to either not register or release partway through the drag. it’s worse with right-click and middle-click drags (which i’m also doing with some regularity).
perhaps i need to upgrade my trackpad or input cover. thanks for the heads-up!
Just to clarify: when the screen is not in perfect 90 square angle, it’s not possible to wiggle the laptop slightly without the screen folding/opening. Usually this is not an issue, but when trying to use the laptop in improvised spots (e.g. walking while holding it, or laying on the back in bed, or on a wobbly table) it becomes annoying.
Tried exactly that now and seems perfectly fine here.
Early Framework units had bad trackpads. Clicks failed to register, right/left selection based on area was unreliable, etc.
At one point I think the old ones were considered a warranty replacement. I wanted a new keyboard deck anyway, so I installed one on my first-gen Framework (11th gen CPU) and it fixed the issue w/o any software config or driver changes.
The hinges are bad, though. I hear tell that’s also something they tweaked but TBH I’m probably done tuning this unit until my 16” preorder number comes up and I find out just how painful the upgrade cost is going to be. (Odds are I’ll pay it b/c I love what Framework is doing and the expansion modules look particularly Lego-like in the 16.)
Just another data point: My “framework 13 with intel 12” trackpad works great. Same weak-hinge complaint as dpc_pw, but it’s extremely minor. I feel in love with this thing so bad (despite the tiny screen) that I don’t use my M1 anymore outside of work, and gave away my system76 because the framework made it look awful in comparison. The M1 takes up to 60 seconds to wake from sleep while this thing wakes instantly.
Disclaimer: I’m not a gamer beyond some simple steam games and minecraft. I use my laptop primarily for coding and projects.
Make sure you check the benchmarks for the latest gen (13th Intel and whatever was just released AMD) processors in framework vs M2 pro. The oomph difference there really isn’t that big (and in some cases framework is faster). M1/2 was a revelation 2 years ago, but now it’s mostly winning in power usage, not speed. And even there, AMD is really catching up.
You could also get M1 and run Asahi Linux on it to skip the VM part.
I’m glad you like i3!
The MacBook is a truly fascinating machine in many dimensions, most notably battery life: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2021-11-28-macbook-air-m1/
I’m a fan of the Asahi project and all the great work the team is doing. It’s very inspiring!
But, Asahi Linux just isn’t quite there yet today. Speakers are about to become supported, I think, but connecting external displays isn’t possible (not sure when it will be). Microphone and webcam are not supported, so no video calls unless you connect all peripherals via USB.
Aside from all that, I noticed smaller hangs in the day-to-day UX, like when scrolling around in Google Maps my browser’s GPU process would hang and crash from time to time… Probably not too many people are using it as a daily driver yet.
Also, keep in mind that Asahi prefers Wayland over Xorg, so you wouldn’t run i3 on Asahi Linux, you would run sway. If your workflow is supported by Wayland, that might be a non-issue, or a dealbreaker — definitely check before buying new hardware.
I would recommend buying the framework laptop for now, and maybe check back in every year or so to see if switching to Asahi on a Mac would work (if you’re still interested at that point).
I was an i3 user for years. (Aside: I switched to Bismuth only once Plasma stopped letting me use i3 as the tiler). I’m a very firm believer in tiling.
At the beginning of 2022 I switched jobs and was given an M1. My job was writing CNI plugins and network namespace munging daemons for Linux, and 90% of my development happened in a remote server. Certain parts of my testing would have been far less headache if I could have done them locally, to the point I even begged my boss to let me get an Intel based Thinkpad or something similar so I could run the container and virtualization stacks natively (M1 Macs can’t do nested virtualization, and it’s container story is essentially “secretly use a VM to run your containers” which is less than thrilling). I also secretly wanted to go back to tiling and away from macOS. However, I was consistently denied.
Fast forward to recently this year (~mid 2023) and I switched jobs again, and this time was given a super beefy 13th Gen Intel (i9-13900HX). I’m back to my trusty setup and can run everything natively again.
And then a few weeks ago I bought an M2 Pro for my personal laptop.
Turned out I feel in love with the battery life of the M1. I also got used to doing remote development (and in fact even at my current job I’ve set up a few remove dev boxes because even my beefy 13th Gen Intel laptop can’t compete with a 128 core 512GB RAM server). My current work laptop gets a few hours at most of battery life, while my M2 can literally go days. Meanwhile the M2 is basically the best of both worlds, it can even beat the work laptop in many compile benchmarks. The biggest drawback (and it’s a big one!) is the price. If you need a lot of RAM or disk space you’re going to pay for it. I used that M1 for a year and a half with 16GB of RAM and never really felt too constrained because most of my VM style work was remote. And because the M2 is my personal laptop all my pet projects don’t require a ton of RAM either, so I didn’t splurge for the higher RAM (and I’d like to remain married to my partner as well).
But what about the tiling? macOS still is terrible for tiling. There isn’t much getting around that. Others have mentioned Yabai, but it hasn’t really scratched the itch for me and has its own quirks. Turns out I can do just enough tiling with Rectangle or Amethyst and tmux to make me not lose my mind.
The modern Ryzen beats Intel in battery life, and is very close on the M2. Runs Linux very well, and with the latest kernels doesn’t lose to Windows in battery life, can even be better.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T14s-G3-AMD-laptop-review-Quiet-and-efficient-workhorse-with-Ryzen-power.682906.0.html
I’m a huge fan of AMD. Most of my personal devices (prior to the M2) were/are AMD builds (Ryzen 5850U, TR 2950x, etc). I’ve been waiting for a 7040U (Zen4 15-30W) laptop for quite a while because they’re super impressive CPUs! But at the time I was in the market to replace a personal laptop, the Zen4 U-series isnt shipping yet in anything that interests me.
Also pragmatically speaking, the M2 has an almost double the capacity battery (100Wh) to any of the 7840Us (or even 6850U) currently shipping (51-57Wh). Even with a slightly higher average draw in the M2 it still “feels” like it lasts so much longer than other laptops in the same performance class. I’m sure Apple’s ability to optimize and accelerate basically everything plays a pretty significant role in this too.
If you don’t want the Mac UI and you want to run Linux software then get a non-Apple laptop. I’ve tried repeatedly (I think starting with an iBook G3 about 20 years ago) to run Linux on Apple laptops and get a decent developer experience on macOS (basic stuff like keyboard based window management) and failed. I don’t mind a Mac for music production or web browsing, and if they ever ship a touch screen it’ll be alright for mobile development, but if you want a Linux box, just get a Linux box.
One thought … what are you using it for?
My combination of Common Lisp, Ruby, and Perl programming combined with Emacs for nearly everything works just fine on a second-hand, years old, ThinkPad T470. I just upgraded from an X250 and appreciate the slightly larger screen and faster CPU.
I tend to buy refurbished ex-corporate laptops for myself and the kids, and we can get 1 x T470s and 3 or 4 x X250s for the price of an assembled base model Ryzen Framework.
Interesting combination there. Is that for professional work? If so, what’s your job if I may ask?
It used to be :)
From around 2015 - 2019 I was consulting - initially in Ruby and JavaScript, later moved into leadership & management.
At the time, the consultancy offered a bring your own device (BYOD) policy; you could either use one of their supplied Macbooks, or receive a stipend and you were on your own. I chose the latter, and ran an X220 with FreeBSD:
My X220 setup
These days I use a client-issued MacBook Pro for their work, but still run FreeBSD on a T470s for other things. I don’t code for a living any more, but still maintain a Ruby codebase for a pre-consulting cofounded-startup-days client, and picked up a short term Common Lisp gig back in around ~2020 to try it out in a commercial setting. Perl I use purely for my own hacking when I want really broad platform support.
I have to ask: Why FreeBSD? I am always curious to hear people’s motivations for using, what I consider to be, esoteric operating systems. (Note that I absolutely appreciate the history and philosophy of FreeBSD. I’m just curious).
Several reasons; some accidental, some deliberate.
The initial accident was that I happened to have a colleague who ran FreeBSD on his laptop, and I was intrigued.
Once I’d gotten it running, and dug more into the design and culture of the OS, the more I liked it. Systemd was busy eating the GNU/Linux world at the time, and FreeBSD offered an alternative that was more in line with the distros I’d grown up with as a high-schooler. (Thanks to tireless support from my friends, I was a Slackware user back in, IIRC, 1995 … I still have a set of Walnut Creek CD-ROMs in my workshop somewhere).
I still run a lot of GNU/Linux, mind you. My kids’ laptops and my “gaming” laptop (X250s and W540) are all running Linux Mint. And my brace of Raspberry Pis are all running Raspbian. But my daily driver is FreeBSD, as is my “new” (second hand Xeon motherboard) server that I’m building to replace my ancient Ubuntu-running ProLiant. (Hallway cabinet photo here.).
But my medium-term plan is to switch everything over to FreeBSD, perhaps replacing the individual RPis with virtualised servers running under bhyve. My daily-driver laptop setup is almost completely scripted.
Re. the culture … that manifests in a bunch of subtle ways. The base / ports split, the philosophy of ports, the handbook and other (excellent) documentation. It’s just … more of a happy place for me. Hard to quantify.
Absolutely fascinating. That totally makes sense why you would have stuck to FreeBSD. As with most with things, we end up being a product of our environment.
Oops, too late to edit the original reply, so adding: except the systems for gaming. FreeBSD gaming on proprietary titles like Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program has never been a good (or even possible, in most cases) experience.
Apple doesn’t deserve your money.
How come? I daily-drive asahi linux, and it’s a great experience - there are a few rough edges, but no more so than any other linux-on-laptop experience.
If you want to run a tiler ala i3 (sway here) there’s nothing good/equivalent I’ve found in the MacOS ecosystem. Spectacles gets some of the same feels, but only barely enough for my work hours. I drive a pair of Macs daily, but only for work. The M1 chips are absolutely incredible, but mac-arm64 brings all manner of ABI challenges along with it.
I went with a Lenovo T14g3 over the Framework hardware two months back for my personal machine. Less upgradeable and I’d like to get to Framework hardware eventually but when I looked the specs and pricepoint were more compelling, and it’s a Thinkpad so you’ve got basically the best hardware support available with Linux. I hope that the Framework models become more compelling as time goes on.
I agree.
I’ve heard good things about Yabai, but must say I mostly run stuff in full-screen on Macos ; maybe a bit of Rectangle when I use a larger monitor… Can’t say anything is as nice as i3 in my short experience.
Framework doesn’t ship my way, so I was looking at it recently to replace the macbook. Good to know the Thinkpads are still there, but I worry a bit about Lenovo’s history with spyware.
Doesn’t matter if they ship spyware if the plan is to wipe it and boot a Linux :shrug:
Spyware doesn’t matter on an individual level anyway (for most people). The primary concern should be supporting institutions that ship spyware to everyone else who doesn’t wipe it.
M2 is just needed for running bloatware at reasonable speeds or for some very specific, computing-intensive use cases.
If all the appeal is “it’s faster, it’s better”, just pick a Framework.
EDIT: Sincerely, an i3 user that works with a MacBook because some times I need to compile iOS apps at work.
Apple’s M processors seem to outperform Intel/AMD processors with the equivalent power consumption. I would argue that it’s not only about running a dozen Chrome/Electron apps, but also about using more efficient hardware.
I’d rather get a Framework, or something similar, for my personal use. They’re better if you don’t want/need macs of course, and seem more maintainable in the long term.
Point is that any gains from more efficient hardware can be wiped out by the less efficient software you are forced to use.
As a qtile user who likes linux desktop software… I’ve switched back to Mac after giving qtile on a thinkpad a 6ish year run.
I don’t like rectangle as much as qtile, but it gets me 90% of the way there and other factors turned out to be more important to me when I’m on a laptop.
I don’t do anything very computing-intensive. The most bloated software I run on the daily are various JetBrains tools, Firefox, and Doom Emacs. And sometimes VS Code if I’m working with a PlatformIO thing. All that stuff works just fine on Linux amd64, assuming the computer is plugged into a power outlet.
Although I’ve occasionally been threatened with a hypothetical possibility that I may need to do so, I haven’t had to build anything for iOS since 2017.
The M-series Macs are, by quite some distance, nicer to use on battery than anything else I’ve used. In order to get the same responsiveness out of a Linux amd64 machine when I’m on battery power, I have to adjust the power settings such that my battery life is seriously compromised. To get a full workday worth of battery life, I have to seriously degrade the performance of the system.
I do think the Mac’s screen, keyboard and pointing device are much nicer than anything else modern that I have access to (I used to love ThinkPad keyboards… the chiclet ones are not as good as Apple’s, IMO). But it’s the experience when I’m on battery power that really tips it. I get a lot more done untethered, with a lot less frustration.
As a bonus, the Affinity graphics tools work better on Mac than they do under wine on Linux.
Pretty much the same story as me, even the same tools minus jetbrains :)
didn’t respond to the OP because I haven’t been tiling WM user for 5 or more years now, so switching to macOS wasn’t too hard as emacs and firefox were already there in my nix config
Just wanted to go a bit more mobile again and my old laptop wasn’t bringing it anymore w.r.t. to battery runtime. I had pre-ordered the Framework for a few month already when talking to an owner convinced me of going with an m2 macbook air; my first non-linux desktop since ~2004
I like macOS, but if you don’t, the Framework is probably the best choice.
Do you have a specific reason to need the oomph of the Apple? Any modern processor (or even any from the last 5 years) is capable of way more than most users need, so unless you need to fold proteins in as little time as possible, I’m not sure how much you would actually benefit.
I’m definitely not in the Mac camp, but you will get a better screen. Framework, despite all of it’s customizations, is limited to a ≈100% sRGB (≈75% DCI-P3) IPS display & I’ve read the brightness isn’t very good either. This is not ideal as wide gamut content consumption/creation has gone mainstream & OLED tech long dominating smartphones/TVs has finally permeated non-niche laptops.
For color sensitive work alone, I went for a Lenovo Z13 (Ryzen) that has good Linux support & whose processor had no problems competing with Apple but also has x86 support so games & all sort of software actually just work.
12th gen intel framework 13 user here (for about a year now). It’s the best laptop I’ve ever had. I love the built-in physical mic & cam switches; the aspect ratio (though I wish the screen was matte); that I can open and replace/upgrade anything; that I have all 4 usb-c ports, yet I can swap them if I need to. I love that everything works in Linux, and it has a vibrant Linux-devs userbase. I love that once I upgrade the motherboard, I’ll put the old one in a cheap case and make it do something useful instead of having to throw it away.
I heard the Ryzen version improved the batter life, which is still somewhat a problem of the 12th gen version. Battery life is definitely the weakest aspect comparing it to a Macbook. Not a problem for me at all. Speakers are puny, but I use Bluetooth headphones all the time for mobility anyway.
I am a Rust developer and this machine can definitely handle long & heavy compilation load (thought it does make the fans spin hard). Definitely fast enough for anything I might throw at it.
Physically it looks and feels somewhat like Macs, and people often mistake it for it.
I’m rocking a Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th gen from the start of 2018 (5+ years ago), running i3 on NixOS. I used to get 9-12 hours of battery life while working (read: coding in neovim, some chrome browsers, etc). Now I get maybe 6-8 hours. It’s still very fast, everything is basically instant (largely because of my choice of tools).
Framework is probably going to be my next laptop (though this Thinkpad still has at least a couple more years in it), because I want devices that last 10+ years thanks to the modular upgrades (wouldn’t mind swapping out a fresh battery, and getting a new board with a better iGPU for some casual on-the-road gaming).
From 2010-2018 I was one of those people who got a new Macbook every few years, now that feels silly. It took a ton of effort to extricate myself from the Apple Ecosystem, but I’m glad I did. The Thinkpad keyboard is astronomically better, it has been lifechanging to go back to Thinkpads. The HDR screen option is at least as good as the Apple retina screens. The Linux support has been everything I’d want with Thinkpads, and Frameworks are even better.
I have zero temptation with the M1/M2’s, to be honest. My day to day usage is as fast and instant as it gets, I don’t really care about microbenchmarking compiling C++ or whatever on my ultra portable device. It’s not competitive with a desktop rig anyway, so it’s kind of uncanny valley.
I feel like ultimately it comes down to whether you want to fully commit to being locked into the Apple ecosystem or not? If you are, then get a Macbook.
You can run a tiling window manager on macOS without a Linux VM in a few different ways:
Yabai adds true tiling to the native window manager. My most productive coworkers run this, and it works great without disabling System Integrity Protection. If you look at screenshots it’s hard to tell the difference between Yabai and i3/Sway/AwesomeWM environments. https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai
install Xquartz, i3, and your favorite Linux GUI apps via a ports system like Macports, Gentoo Prefix, or Nix (eg via Determinate installer). i3 can’t manage Cocoa windows, but if you only launch X11 apps it will work just like on Linux. I ran Fluxbox + urxvt + Firefox-x11 for a few years with this setup during college. It was a bit janky to get working, but really no worse than Arch or Gentoo in the 2000s.
Overall I started to prefer running my developer environment in a VM because I wanted features like full system snapshots/rollbacks and cross-host cloning for my developer environment including all my containers and whatnot, so I’m happy with Linux VM option on macOS host.
This caveat in their readme says:
Is that just not a useful thing?
Messing with SIP is a non-starter for me. Yabai looks great, but I’ve been avoiding it due to that note in their docs. I’d rather have what Yabai promises, but I like rectangle and it doesn’t need me to touch SIP.
The following features of yabai require System Integrity Protection to be (partially) disabled:
From https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-Integrity-Protection
If you do go with MacBook, consider getting a refurb. I recently picked up a refurb MacBook Air and as far as I can tell it’s brand new with 3 battery cycles. Perhaps I was lucky but I will go refurb again.
framework. solid ‘official’ support for linux; typing this on a framework running sway for ubuntu 22.04.
I’d go MacBook Pro, Apple Silicon is fast and the battery life is amazing. If you want a tiling window manager for Mac, check out Magnet https://apps.apple.com/app/magnet/id441258766, Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst, and others https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/best-mac-window-management-tools/.
I wish the PowerPC laptop project https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/ would partner with Framework for a ppc variant. They have similar goals, and the ppc laptop project is completely open source and funded by supporters.
For a keyboard-focused environment I’d pick up a Thinkpad over either of those. Much better keyboard, physical trackpad buttons and trackpoint. There is also a better variety of hardware configuration choices so you are more likely to find something that matches your needs.
honestly, I prefer my framework keyboard to my thinkpad keyboard. little more travel, just a better feel overall honestly. i miss the physical trackpad buttons dearly though.
I recently bought the original framework laptop and Im very pleased. I dont have issues with the trackpad and I really like the screen ratio. Also I like it a lot that my laptop is upgradable.
I think the main compelling argument against a mac for me is that any defect will let you stranded, with Framework you have a way to relatively quickly source replacement parts - with Thinkpad you’ll even get on-site-repairs warranty, which is best for something you rely on.