OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

https://system76.com/laptops-ultraportables https://system76.com/laptops-powerful

The only exception is the Bonobo, but it comes with a discrete GPU, so its battery life + weight are going to suck. Also, its keyboard is off center.

Most of the star labs machines have low resolution displays, but I can find nothing wrong with this one. If you choose AMD, a reasonable config is $2600, which is comparable to Apple. However, they are only building 10,000 units, and taking preorders, so it might be unobtainable:

https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starfighter

The purism offering seems OK except that it is a 10th generation intel, and those were extremely bad, even by recent intel standards. Maybe they'll get an AMD refresh out the door with the same ergonomics.

The HP has an off-centered keyboard and trackpad and a 1080p display.

So, of those four vendors, there's one model that's vaguely competitive, but it's a limited production run pre-order.

There are other issues as well.

For instance, on a PC the security settings are applied per machine and not per partition, so you can't mix an unsigned OS on one partition with full security on another partition.

Also:

> On Wednesday, researchers at security firm ESET presented a deep-dive analysis of the world’s first in-the-wild UEFI bootkit that bypasses Secure Boot on fully updated UEFI systems running fully updated versions of Windows 10 and 11.

Despite Microsoft releasing new patched software, the vulnerable signed binaries have yet to be added to the UEFI revocation list that flags boot files that should no longer be trusted.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/unkil...

Sure, for _niche_ hardware. When was the last time a GPU driver was added by reverse engineering it? The single Nouveau maintainer was burnt out, last I heard, and the project was never a serious alternative to NVIDIA's closed driver. Kudos to whoever found the energy to contribute to it, but these projects usually don't have a bright future.

Now expand that to include maintaining all Apple devices, and it's an insane amount of effort realistically unsustainable for any group of volunteers. But good luck to the Asahi team.

I've run linux on many Dell and Lenovo systems over the last 25 years. Most of those systems were fully unsupported by the manufactures for anything but windows. And yet, random people on the internet contributed to make that hardware (mostly) work. I've not seen any particular improvement in the driver situation since Dell started selling linux certified systems.

Its not really surprising though, Dell is just an integrator. All they do for their systems with linux pre-installed is to pick hardware that already has drivers. They took a little bit of work out of needing to research if a given configuration is likely to work or not with linux (which is good). They don't really deserve much credit beyond that.

Its also a little funny because most drivers from hardware manufacturers suck. I don't know why, but most hardware companies are terrible at writing software. Its easy to list off hardware companies that have a long history of shipping mediocre, buggy linux drivers: nvidia, amd, broadcom, realtek, (maybe i should just list every nic and wireless chipset manufacturer). Some of these companies have gotten better and have learned how to be good kernel contributors, but they were mostly bad for years and years. Thankfully in some of those cases random people on the internet reverse engineered the hardware and contributed from scratch drivers to the kernel. Most of the time I've been happier with the experience of running those from scratch drivers than what hardware manufactures ship.