21–30 of 75 posts
If you just want to use linux so you can tell someone about it, don't bother using linux and stick to what works for you.
Don't use an ideologically-motivated distro that omits drivers and firmware because they are not Free enough. Use something fairly mainstream, like Ubuntu or Mint.
Update its firmware before you install.
Shrink the Windows partition but keep it, for things like firmware updates. Nuke the recovery partitions, though; they're junk.
Max out the RAM. Have 2 SSDs if they'll fit. OS on one, data on a physically separate one. Used RAM is cheap. Buy matched memory modules.
Avoid wireless anything if you can. Wired peripherals, wired network, wired audio. Wired stuff just works.
I also have a MSI katana laptop with RTX 4070 and that had been a disaster. Every distro I tried had some issue with the graphics card/drivers even after looking up what distros people were having success with.
Finally, installing Bazzite just worked. I don't play any games but Bazzite took my MSI laptop from feeling like a waste of money to absolutely awesome.
May be things have changed over the last 10 years but HN comments literally convinced me to switch to a macbook a decade ago and it was literally one of the worst experiences with a product of my life. Everyone who says mac is unix and is just as good as linux is a fool and should never be trusted. If you want, you can search my username with "macbook" and see my rants since 2015. The worst experience I had with it w…
> Everyone who says mac is unix and is just as good as linux is a fool and should never be trusted. Seconded. > Linux just works While there are instances where this is the case (System76 hardware w/ PopOS for example), This is certainly not true in the general, and this is coming from someone that's been on linux since the dotcom era. It's very very important you get a well supported device or it most certainly does…
I jumped from DOS in the mid 90s to Solaris to Linux in about 2001. BEen on it since. I got my first personal laptop in 2004 or so (IBM thinkpad T42). Then went through 2 X series laptops and am currently on an X1 carbon.
I consulted for a company for 2.5 years where I used a mac.
Maybe it's just me but I found the mac ecosystem very crummy. On Debian, when I wanted postgres, I did an apt-get and got it sort of like Trinity in the matrix asking for helicopter pilot skills. With the mac, I installed it using brew. That didn't work so there was an app for it and that had its own quirks. I put it down to my lack of familiarity with the system. I would have invested time to get familiar with it but, and this is my second point, Linux was did "just work" for 95% of what I wanted. All the annoying things about sound drivers, wifi cards, usb, fonts, video etc. from the 90s were not problems anymore. There were a few things that I needed to get running but they weren't deal killers. Definitely not as rough as what I had with postgres on the mac.
Hardware wise, I agree with the OP, I don't think think anything comes close to Apple's offering at that price point. The reason I stay away from it is because of the software. I much prefer Linux. There are also tangential points like working on the exact OS and machine where I'm going to actually deploy/debug production apps on is useful. This is alleviated to some extent by using a Linux VM on a mac if that's what you do.
May be things have changed over the last 10 years but HN comments literally convinced me to switch to a macbook a decade ago and it was literally one of the worst experiences with a product of my life. Everyone who says mac is unix and is just as good as linux is a fool and should never be trusted. If you want, you can search my username with "macbook" and see my rants since 2015. The worst experience I had with it w…
My initial transition from Debian to OS X was painful. Once it settled in, it became comfortable. I like a lot of things about it.
I'll keep my M2 Pro for as long as I can but my next laptop is likely to be an AMD Framework to run Debian.
Buy a used Thinkpad. Their compatibility is superb, as many major Linux vendors develop on them. Better to buy older higher-end models than spend the money on newer models. Buy the highest-end model you can afford. Don't use an ideologically-motivated distro that omits drivers and firmware because they are not Free enough. Use something fairly mainstream, like Ubuntu or Mint. Update its firmware before you install. S…
May be things have changed over the last 10 years but HN comments literally convinced me to switch to a macbook a decade ago and it was literally one of the worst experiences with a product of my life. Everyone who says mac is unix and is just as good as linux is a fool and should never be trusted. If you want, you can search my username with "macbook" and see my rants since 2015. The worst experience I had with it w…
That said, I do still keep the MacOS on a partition for the usual office apps like zoom and the like and full hardware support for the things like the camera, but that isn't as important to my usage as having a compiler and editor so YMMV.
Unfortunately, Linux support on the Apple Silicon hardware is limited to M1 and M2 only at the time AFAIK.
I will also say that Linux on a Linux supported Thinkpad like the T-Series works well too and I've used those for over a decade. They just didn't have the same kind of battery life, but all the hardware 'just works'.
Eg: pick corporate model laptops from major vendors like Dell. Something whose hardware has been battle tested by an army of Windows users. I like refurbished models from the Dell Latitude line, others are ThinkPad people. These lines have spare parts and are repairable/upgradeable.
Pick a distro close to the middle. You want something with thousands of users so you wont suffer alone if you hit a problem. I like stock Ubuntu, and I might go as far as Mint. PopOS is beautiful but if it goes wrong, you'll be fiddling and asking for help in a much smaller community, so if that is not your jam, don't do it.
Be consistent and careful with how and what you install. Dont mix flatpaks and tarballs and snaps and god knows what else. Have a consistent, reproducible setup. Use a dir structure that makes it easy to split off your data from the OS (I know that people just have / now, but /home used to be its own partition for a reason, and /opt exists for similar separation.) If the worst happens and you need to blow the OS away, you want that to be a 20 minute operation with all your files instantly available as soon as you can remount.