I've tried out Linux as a Desktop OS pretty consistently every 2-3 years for about 20 years on various Desktop and Laptop computers. A higher-end Windows laptop or any Mac laptop will require little-to-no tinkering to get things working. cheap netbooks where it's clear the companies didn't spend much time on getting the configuration right). This is no small achievement, and if you're getting a Linux laptop, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them.īut competing with Windows and MacOS, I think this Linux experience is only competitive with the low-end of Windows installations (i.e. In competition with other Linux laptops, including Dell systems which come preinstalled with Linux, System76's laptops win unequivocally in my experience. Everything else has worked out of the box so far.

To System76's credit, this is the absolute best experience I've ever had with a Linux laptop. I had to tinker with settings to get audio to not sound muffled, and connecting to WiFi took more tries than can be attributed to network instability (I'm not sure why it started working, to be honest).

Two months in, I still haven't figured out how to get my webcam working on Zoom calls, and fonts display pixelated despite having a HiDPI screen (equivalent to MacOS Retina). This is the absolute best case scenario for a Linux laptop. Let's take another extreme case: I purchased a System76 Galago Pro, which came shipped with PopOS, a Debian-based Linux distro which is maintained by System76 specifically with the intent of providing better hardware support and quality assurance testing.

It's true that Macbooks are an extreme case, but as far as I can tell, there is not a laptop which runs Linux out of the box where tinkering won't be necessary. Better to treat it as: 'look how much you can bend Linux to work on a proprietary toaster', rather than 'look how hard it is to run Linux on a laptop'. Macbooks are actively breaking other OSes.

How to install linux on old macbook