Ask HN: Is Linux for laptop worth the trouble?
16 abhixec 15 7/18/2025, 6:32:10 AM
As someone who has been using Arch/Void + XMonad (and now Gnome), and with the price of the MacBook Air (M-series) falling within an affordable range, is it worth continuing to fiddle with Linux?
I’ve come to the conclusion that the MacBook Air’s M-series chip is just amazing. Nothing really compares to the battery life and quietness of this machine. Not to mention, some of the default apps (Notes, Reminders, Shortcuts, passwords, safari, etc.) seem incredibly hard to beat. And if you are into the eco-system you don't have to pay for different services.
I’m curious about other people's thoughts on this. I’d love to hear a Change My View (CMV) on this.
* Recent Macbooks have an incredible battery life, that's for sure.
* macOS is not Linux, and Linux is not macOS.
I personally like Linux a lot more than macOS, therefore I run Linux on my laptop. It's not a pain at all: just make sure you get a laptop that is well supported (seems a lot easier than 20 years ago, I personally run on ThinkPads).
The way you write (e.g. you see running Linux on a laptop as "a trouble"), you sound like you like macOS better but were using Linux because it was cheaper. In that case go for a Macbook if it's now affordable!
They can be great if you have a large wallet and simply want a computer that will integrate easily with your iPhone or any other Apple products. I use an iPhone myself because I’ve had bad experiences with Android devices, but every few years I try a new Android phone anyway.
Apple does not care about their end users. The hardware they retail is overprivced and the M chips are over hyped, especially with ARM PC:s now available.
Their OS was great back in 2000-2010 but has since become more and more unstable, while Linux has moved in the opposite direction. Today I would argue Linux is at least as easy to manage.
Some apps integrate better with OS X, and the magnetic charger cable is a plus. Then again, using external monitors is difficult, and if anything breaks in your nice Apple laptop it will be difficult to mend and cost and arm and a leg. All in all, I would stay away from them.
If you want, you can search my username with "macbook" and see my rants since 2015. The worst experience I had with it was it glitching out a hour before a national conference presentation that forced me to remake the slides on another person's laptop. I was sitting in the audience sweating bullets remaking those slides over the course of a grueling hour or so. I have never had the desire to buy another apple product since then and I don't miss it.
Linux just works, especially if you have a machine it works well on. Don't believe the naysayers, learn from my exprience.
Or you could go 'built for linux' laptops. Librem, System 76, Framework, ect. Or Thinkpads. Those things are tanks and just work.
The Mac wins regarding battery life (but deltas are shrinking) and - important when on the move - connecting with various WiFi SSDs (this can be quite critical).
The Linux ThinkPads win regarding keyboard quality, and hackability (as UNIX/Linux person, I prefer Linux' directory organization to MacOS', which is a mix of BSD and non-standard /proprietary stuff). I like than on my Linux boxes, any command is just there, whereas on the MacBook, 60% of the time I need a command not from the top-10, it's not there and I need to brew install it first, which sucks (this could be fixed by making a "distribution" of common commands for brew, I haven't even checked whether that exists).
Until recently, the Mac also won regarding weight, but now with the fantastic ThinkPad X1 Nano there's a high-quality high-mobility device with a great internal keyboard, good batteries and the weight of a feather that runs Ubuntu like a breeze.
So in the end, one ends up using the MacBook as an email/presentation machine and the Linux boxes (and, via ssh, servers of course) for technical work.
Ironically, the M1 in my MacBook doesn't get used for the machine learning research I do as that is all done on beefy (Linux) servers and/or GPU clusters. But it does improve the UI responsiveness.
PS: From my budget at work, I also got an iPad Pro (the lightest/smallest), and I was shocked how heavy it is. As a result, it hardly gets used apart from taking photos and scanning documents with its excellent camera. I was hoping to carry it to meetings, but I instead take the MacBook Air or X1 Nano along, both of which seem much lighter, esp. the latter (<970g). (I never use pens because I type faster than I hand-write and prefer my text to stay searchable; I understand results may look different for pen fans.)
Run 'brew list' to see what you have installed, then write a shell/ansible script to install these.
Save script to your cloud storage/source control and anytime you get a new machine, run the script.
iPad pro isn't heavy.
Do you have a heavy case on it? As many cases can weigh the same as the iPad itself or more.
I mostly use a Mac, but also use android and Linux devices. It helps me remain vendor neutral as I ensure all applications I use work across all of them.
Good enough is good enough. Go do whatever it is you want to actually do.
My original reasons for switching to linux was Apple disrupting my workflow on each major upgrade and from what I can tell they have not stopped doing that.
[1] https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support
Just like with MacOS, you should choose compatible GNU/Linux hardware, and it will work flawlessly. I have no driver issues on my Librem laptop.
Not to mention that it looks and feels old, which most people likely don't care as it's still more modern than windows ever was since 95.
You will constantly pay the differences. In the 1 year or so I worked with a Mac I bought like 10 <$5 tools for things that would be a single command in Linux.
Depending on your hardware and what you do it will be slower, or slightly faster. If it's faster in anything it will likely run hot enough to cook some eggs on it.
Edit:// maybe just try a stable distro first