Comment by krylon

...meh, just limit yourself to the tops of the lines like Thinkpad, XPSs etc., make sure any networking components are branded Intel, pick Intel CPUs' integrated graphics or not-low-end Nvidia, and everything will just work fine out of the box with an LTS Ubuntu or latest Fedora (basically pick whatever's closest to what you use on your servers).

But yeah, if you buy anything that's not part of the "top of the line developer notebook" category, specifically the Intel not AMD ones, then almost nothing will work out of the box :)

I'm pretty sure that I've spent less time maintaining my laptop than my colleagues who are on OS X. That obviously isn't the case for every laptop, but I don't think that your statements generalize well either.

"Sucks" is subjective; you're allowed to think that.

In years past you may have spent hours getting wireless or sound working. These days, if you buy decent, mainstream hardware it just works. Ubuntu does a great job of getting out of the way.

I'm a Fedora guy, myself, but find myself recommending Xubuntu to more and more people for casual computing because 1) it really does just work, and 2) Xfce is lightweight and lets you use your CPU for doing real work vs. holding up a bloated windows manager.

linux desktop does not suck.

Linux on unsupported laptops (which is most of them) sucks big time, but not linux desktop itself. It works great on standard desktop computers (towers)

you should make that distinction, because otherwise you'll just start a flame war.

Just to be clear, if a Macbook works better for you or if you just prefer macOS, by all means, go ahead. Macbooks, from what I hear, must be superb machines, and while I prefer Linux with a Mate or XFCE desktop, I have used a Mac for a while and there are things I do miss. And a lot of software is available for Windows and Mac only; given the choice between Windows and macOS, I wouldn't have to think long.

I hear that argument frequently. On macOS (or even Windows) things just work(tm), while on Linux (or some BSD), there is always something that does not work correctly.

I guess I must be quite lucky. A long time ago, I positively enjoyed spending an entire weekend getting a sound card to work or something. To be honest, these days I consider myself too old for that stuff. I, too, like it when things just work. But really, Linux as a desktop system has come a long way, and for the past couple of years, things have pretty much just worked(tm) for me.

Picking hardware that is supported by Linux takes a little care, so does picking a distro[1], especially with laptops. But I prefer to do a little research before buying a laptop anyway, because I am usually on a budget.

[1] In my experience, the more recent the hardware, the more unlikely Debian is to work. OpenSuse has worked well for me, though.

I put Ubuntu (Mate) on an old Macbook of mine because it was absolutely crawling with MacOs on it. The only driver it needed was a Wifi driver. Everything else worked fine out of the box.

Also, I run an Intel Nuc (laptop hardware, essentially) with Ubuntu as a main development machine. 0 problems. 0% in the way.

OSX is great, don't get me wrong. But, it's been years since I've ran into driver problems with desktop Linux.

> If I had a Linux laptop, an extraordinary amount of my time would be spent trying to make it work. Wireless breaks, sound breaks, upgrades break everything.

At our office, the macOS laptops tend to have the most problems with sound & graphics; the Linux desktops, OTOH, Just Work™. I find that pretty funny, actually, because I would have expected it to be the other way around.

The most problems I ever had with Wifi was a mac machine (rMBP13). In the office, usually during RDP sessions, it often lost the connection and couldn't reconnect until reboot.

I've never had anything similar happen with a PC (we use Thinkpads), whether running Linux or Windows.

My Mac problem was solved using ethernet adapter.

Linux Mint worked perfectly on my T420, and I expect it to work perfectly on the T440 I'm picking up today to replace it.

Sure, not the very newest hardware, but it's not like laptops have gotten significantly more powerful for anything that actually matters, for the last couple of years.

I haven't had any trouble with Linux desktop on mainstream laptops for the past 15 or so years. The days of hand tweaking your Xfree86 configuration files and refresh rates are gone.

Of course there are things that are not working so nicely, and are not meant to. For instance, running RHEL (which is a server OS) on a laptop (which typically has new optimized hardware which is not meant to be server) and then expecting graphics and WiFi work on a kernel that is much older than your hardware and thus has no drivers.

Perhaps you might expect some trouble also when running Windows Server 2012 on a new laptop? I don't know, I haven't tried, but wouldn't be surprised.

You can buy a laptop that ships with Linux, and then you get the same works-out-of-the-box experience as a Mac.

The Dell XPS 13 is a good choice if you want something from a major manufacturer, but there are loads of smaller companies, too.

Well, if you need certain applications that are not available on Linux, all the hardware support in the world does not help you.

That argument trumps pretty much everything else. If my boss came into my office today and told me to switch all of our desktop computers to Linux, as much as I would enjoy that, I would have to tell him that it cannot be done, because we use a lot of software that just is not available for Linux. (And a fair amount of it is not even available for macOS.)

The reason for the confusion is that there are two separate clipboards: one for Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V and one for mouse-select/mouse-middle-click. To use the first clipboard on terminal emulators you need to use Ctrl-Shift-C/Ctrl-Shift-V instead because the Ctrl-* shortcuts have legacy meanings in the terminal. I don't remember ever needing to use Insert for copy pasting (although you can use it if you want).

I don't know what examples you had in mind when you mentioned applications having incompatible keyboards. The only one I know that does that is Vim (which by default uses the internal clipboard when you use its cut, copy and paste commands) but Vim is definitely not your average Linux application...

Well, Terminal.app also has mouse-select/mouse-middle-click, which is a separate clipbard (from Cm-C/Cm-V) as well