Comment by worldsavior

I miss the M-series silicon, but plain old Ubuntu runs like a charm on Thinkpads. I much prefer the Ubuntu UX and native Linux environment.

Battery life is slightly worse, driver support is perfect - every peripheral I've tried is perfect, performance and security are top-notch.

My two complaints are battery life and compiling Rust code taking a bit longer. But everything else is better on Thinkpad.

I use a Thinkpad and MacBook Pro interchangeably.

Note: I use an X1 Carbon, so that's more like a MacBook Air. They're not 1:1 and my complaints are partly due to my choice.

I have a personal T470 with linux and a Macbook for work. Battery life is worse on the Thinkpad, and I have a 5 year older CPU so performance is lower. Everything else is better. I feel like I did something really bad in my last life to be cursed to work with the MacOS UI everyday.

I use a ThinkPad with Linux as my daily driver and a MBP at work. I love my ThinkPad dearly-but it goes 0/4 up against the MBP.

The best thing I've done for my in practice battery life on Linux is enable aggressive suspend to hibernate, but it still doesn't compare to the all day use I get out of the MBP.

Driver support is really good, everything works, but it obviously can't compete with the 'perfect' driver support you get with macOS.

Performance is again really good but it's not M* performance, nothing is, but I'm happy with it. The OS is perfectly snappy and responsive.

Security is also quite good, Linux has fantastic TPM support now so you get passwordless full disk encryption. Fingerprint reader works and is well integrated into popular DEs. But it's not TouchID or Apple's secure coprocessor, SIP level extra. And just in general the Linux security model without SELinux or Flatpak sandboxing is user-based so you don't get protection against software you run behaving naughtily. The antivirus story is also not as good / nonexistent, but I've never really cared about those so nothing lost for me.

The advantage of the Thinkpad is you get to run Linux, it's about half the cost of the MBP, it's more than good enough as a daily driver, and you get all the full sized ports with no adapter.

Cheapish (~$1000) thinkpad E14 gen7 (AMD) variant has battery life of >24h (reading/typing in vim). At least according to power meter, not that I'd read or type that long.

And everything works on it on Linux, even obscure things like fingerprint sensor, various bizarro Fn key combos, all the various HW accelerations (video encode/decode via vaapi), etc. I didn't find anything that would not work.

Absolutely nothing beats the integration of Apple software and hardware. As it should be because they don't give you another option! You can't run Apple software on anything else (without hacks), and you can't run anything else on Apple hardware (without significant effort and sacrifice in functionality). This is Apple's whole design philosophy and value prop, and they are essentially unbeatable at systems integration.

This deep software/hardware integration means Apple absolutely destroys everyone at battery life. No contest. If you want to optimize for battery life, Apple is the choice.

The deep integration also makes Apple's security quite good. Obnoxiously so as they make even common operations like downloading software off the web take extra steps.

That being said as soon as you stray outside of a pure Apple ecosystem, Linux wins in my experience. Plugging a Logitech mouse into my MacBook prompted me to install Logitech keyboard drivers... Not only was the device type wrong but drivers?! ...for a simple input device?! I haven't had to worry about printer, mouse, keyboard, webcam, usb mic, drawing pad, etc drivers in years. Simple devices almost universally Just Work in Linux without having to install or configure anything. It's mind boggling when I touch Windows or macOS and am greeted with proprietary drivers for something like a basic laser printer.

But there's plenty of counter-examples: Nvidia requires their proprietary driver to fully utilize their hardware, but the driver is much better than it used to be. My understanding is that no one on Windows really enjoys dealing with Nvidia drivers either, so it's probably a similar scenario.

At the end of the day I use both Linux and macOS regularly and prefer Linux overall. My Macbook Air's battery life and lack of fans does make it unbeatable for actual lap-top computing, and when I want to look and sound good on a Zoom call I can always count on its builtin camera and mic. So I basically use my Macbook as a laptop form factor iPhone or iPad, which I think is Apple's intent and fills a niche for sure.