As Linux laptop user, I'm bemused when the competition gets worse.
Maybe Linux on Apple Silicon will be the best of both worlds in a few years --- I think the dedicated porting effort will more than succeed and will get something more polished than Linux on Intel macs ever was.
I don't share your optimism. If proprietary firmware and dkms blobs remain _de rigueur_, I can't see the situation on linux improving w.r.t. things like graphics cards and wifi chips.
WiFi is literally the only blob Linux will have to deal with as far as we can tell, and I'll make sure our installer pulls it from the system firmware partition (which will always exist on a functional Mac) so nobody will have to worry about it. All the other blobs are loaded by system firmware before Linux even gets to run, so they might as well be invisible to us (UEFI on PCs does much the same thing).
No DKMS, ever. All our drivers are headed to mainline. I'm not even going to bother with DKMS most likely; people who want to use bleeding edge drivers before they're merged can use our kernel trees (and we'll have builds available for those folks).
I wouldn't call it optimism per se, not in absolute terms at least. That will certainly continue to be a problem. But Apple messing up their own software either by accident or on purpose is a nice boon. And a single piece of consumer hardware being so good that that their a patreon for it is also interesting and good.
For the reasons you say, I personally would rather buy e.g. some pine64 thing just might benefit from this porting work. (Probably more in the userland than kernel itself, tbh.)
The one good path I see for hardware is that in the system on chip era, open designs can gain a foothold by saving the companies money, just as no one could compete with free linux for server software 2 decades prior. There was no hope getting a foothold with 1 design = 1 chip, but a world where people can mooch some free IP for their dohicky might do the trick.
Still no where near as bad a Linux on the laptop the last time I tried it. I haven't used Linux on a laptop in a decade because it was so bad I swore it off.
I have Fedora 33-34 with gnome (initially with KDE as a I was a fan back in my Ubuntu\Arch days) and I only keep it to install updates from time to time to see if it is as usable for a general use as macOS.
A lot has changed in the last decade, particularly with TLP and now suspend / hibernate being set up by default on most distributions. You might give it a try again.
It worked in my case. The issues with Catalina and the mac hardware pushed me to switch to Linux for my personal dev machine a few years ago. The transition was tough at first but now I love that machine. It makes me wayyy happier than the MacBook I have to use at work.
How does Linux handle scaled displays? MacOS handles it best, Windows has issues and inconsistencies, and last time I checked Linux support was abysmal.
I run MacOS almost entirely because multidpi running so seamlessly.
Windows support is kinda funny, it works fairly well normally but has all kinds of strange bugs. For example, if you switch in/out of full screen windows will just randomly move between displays. There are quite a few inconsistent scaling bugs.
I haven't played with xrandr multidpi, although I hear a lot of complaints about it. I've tried wayland, but I wasn't keen. I was very frustrated with sway (twm), which advertises itself as a drop in replacement for i3, but does many things differently. The fractional scaling on wayland can be blurry. There are still loads of bugs.
Linux on desktop users shouldn’t be bemused until Linux desktop experience isn’t a pile of UX trash.
Linux on the desktop is still so frustrating, ugly, and only marginally more useful over a Mac for extremely specific use cases, that I would rather use Windows + WSL2.
Whenever I read these comments I really wonder what do you do with your desktop environment. I spend most of the time inside an app, mostly the browser, the terminal or the editor. As long as the desktop env doesn't get in the way it's good. The only annoyance I experience when I switch back and forth from GNOME to MacOS is really the different keyboard shortcuts and that I have to install an additional tool (Rectangle) to get basic window tiling on mac. I can even use Windows these days, as long as WSL is installed
I've become a wsl convert now as I can trust windows to deal with sleep/wakeup and wifi much better than linux. If macosx experiences a developer exodus I think it's likely many will follow suit. Especially with things like WSLg coming out
These past 6 months with WSL2 are the most productive I've been since I've spent 2 years on the Apple ecosystem or 15 years on Linux.
I don't have to debug OS wide breakages or weird Wifi/BT issues or unstable GUIs and it's running Linux, not BSD on a weird kernel and file system with... interesting permissions and security settings.
And I can play games and use Docker at native speed.
> Linux desktop experience isn’t a pile of UX trash.
Desktop Linux is the only bearable desktop UX. Anyone who actually prefers the UX of desktop Windows is mentally deranged and should not be allowed to make user facing software.
Hey, I make no promises as to my level of sanity.
But yes, desktop Linux UX is trash.
Trash being defined by incomprehensible design and inconsistent implementation of proper design lessons learned in the last 20 years.
Maybe Linux on Apple Silicon will be the best of both worlds in a few years --- I think the dedicated porting effort will more than succeed and will get something more polished than Linux on Intel macs ever was.