My System76 Lemur Pro easily runs a complete business day on a single battery charge, on Pop_OS!. Thanks to its hardware, performance can be throttled (which I barely notice as it’s quite performing with standard settings) so that a single charge can last easily 12 hours.

A complete business day of battery life is "table stakes" now with premium laptops.

- The M1 Macbook Pro get 20 hours of battery.

- The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 gets 20 hours of battery.

- The Dell XPS 13 gets 19 hours of battery

Those are probably the most popular laptop models in use today in the category of premium laptops, which is the category of computer I think the majority of people reading this comment will be using.

Cheaper laptops will not be as good as that, but evenmost of $600-800 laptops will get 8-10 hours of battery life.

I'll add an LG Gram 17 to that list.

19-20 hours of battery, and a nice 16:10 screen. Also, super light.

Everything on default Fedora just works out of the box.

Uhh yeah my i9 MBP can last a 'complete business day' full of long Zoom calls and active churning Electron apps too. That is a pretty low bar imo

I did the same thing. I was a Mac user, then Apple went through that period of time where there were no good laptops. I eventually bought a Lenovo and used it with Linux. Honestly my daily experience was fine most of the time, but you have to constantly worry about battery life to get the most out of it.

I switched back to a Mac with an M1 Mac and the battery lasts for days. I almost never use it plugged in now. I can go many days with normal use, not even compromising to conserve battery. On linux you need to use PowerTop and tweak it to the performance/endurance ratio you want. You are constantly thinking about it. The new M1 Mac doesn't require those compromises or even the need to think about it.

Also i'll add that you can TOTALLY get by on Linux. Linux users are quick to offer solutions like:

- "run that windows program in WINE"

- "there's a Gnome extension that does that"

- "I found a binary on github that will do what you want"

- "all you have to do is make a script and it'll do the same thing"

- "use [FOSS Program] instead of [Evil Corporate Program I really want], it works basically the same"

- "the native version of that program doesn't exist on Linux, but you can use the web version which is basically the same"

But when I switched back to Mac I remembered how I didn't have to make compromises anymore. I could have the programs I wanted, without the weird open source versions that weren't quite as good. Programs just installed, I didn't need to compile them or get the right installers or anything like that. You don't get weird incompatibilities of certain programs and your WM. You didn't worry about battery life or drivers anymore. I didn't need to use web versions. Yes I had to re-purchase some license keys for many apps but this doesn't bother me. I don't mind paying for software that improves my quality of life.

This isn't to shit on Linux. I actually use Linux all day long for work, just ironically I am SSH'd in via my Mac. Linux makes a great server. Its also a Good desktop. But Mac makes a better desktop. Call me a fanboy or a sellout. But I the experience isn't as polished as Mac and in many ways not even as "polished" as Windows (and that was hard for me to type out). Also don't tell me I am too stupid for Linux or didn't give it a chance or didn't learn it enough to enjoy it. I have a RHCA and LPIC-2 certifications. I work in Linux via the terminal 8 hours a day. I know how linux works, but as a graphical system I really would rather have Mac.

However to be fair, I run Red Hat Enterprise Linux on my work computer and that is the closest Linux distro to the Windows/Mac world that you will find. Virtually everything works out of the box and is reliable. It is worth the license fee IMO. You still compromise on app selection, but it does solve many of the annoyances around drivers and compatibility that other distros suffer with. It is far harder to customize, but if you just want something that you can install and start using like you would with Windows, then RHEL is the solution.

I have a similar story. I built a Linux workstation running Mint when apple’s laptops were bad. I love / hate it. The machine (amd x5800) is insanely fast and responsive compared to the laptop it’s replacing. But so many niggles:

- I use an apple trackpad and everything is weird with it. Sensitivity is all wrong and I still get spurious taps and clicks. FF doesn’t have smooth scrolling working by default. Intellij doesn’t support it at all. Driver is buggy too - sometimes after waking from sleep I have to power cycle my keyboard / trackpad for them to work.

- There don’t seem to be any consistency around keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl+C sometimes copies and sometimes sends SIGINT. What’s the shortcut for “move cursor forward one word” or “move cursor to end of line”? On macos those shortcuts are consistent in every app. On Linux? Nope! I can’t even configure intellij to use the shortcuts I’m used to because it doesn’t let you use the meta key as a modifier.

- Hibernate and sleep is buggy. Sometimes the machine just doesn’t come back up.

- I sometimes have a duplicate mouse cursor, just hovering over all my windows for no reason. I can’t get rid of it. Apparently it has something to do with hidpi but who knows what.

And so on. There’s so many little interactions where something is half broken and I roll my eyes and move on with my life. For all its flaws, I didn’t realise how good macos is until I switched to Linux. Linux is definitely better than it was - all my hardware more or less worked out of the box. But I’m still keeping an eye on apple’s rumoured M1X laptops.

Check out Elementary. I won't suggest switching distros entirely, but maybe you can get your hands on the trackpad parts?

I just switched and both the Dell trackpad and Magic Trackpad worked flawlessly at a macOS quality level. Superior to Windows, but really macOS (and now Elementary) is the quality bar.

Just to clarify, are you saying that there is a Linux distro out there which you can install on a 2019+ model MBP which will not ruin the touchpad with multitouch and battery experience?

I didn't realise Apple had started making good laptops again. The last good machine I had from them was a 2015.

They have, finally. The M1 Air is the best machine I’ve ever had.