Prisoner says his walled garden is perfect.

I am a little confused by the reasoning here. Is battery life your only consideration at all? Are there any other criteria which influence your choice?

It seems like a shame to jump ship on an entire ecosystem solely because your current machine has disappointing battery life.

I recently got a machine with the new Intel 358H and the B390 iGPU. I haven’t used it a ton yet, but it seems like it gets around 8-10 hours battery life on normal web browsing/productivity tasks in my experience, and while not as powerful as an RTX 4060 (Most benchmarks place the B390 somewhere between a 3050 and 4050), I imagine would be serviceable for editing and coding.

well I could give you a solution, generally with x86_64 architecture they use a lot more wattage than macbooks, m-chip SOC’s (system-on-chip) utilize about 30W of energy whereas just a modern x86_64 CPU utilize 15W. which means you have a 15W overhead for your GPU and memory generally speaking.

So the entire reason your getting less battery life is OS required applications for it to function, and you. So if you minimize the amount of wattage (ideally building a linux system from scratch) you can optimize it to consume less resources.

I did this with my personal laptop, installed arch and mangoWM, didn’t even bother with a display manager or network manager (still use iwctl). on idle it uses about 600 MB, and I’ve beaten the m1. my point is not to compare or benchmark the macbook, but to just show you that you can maximize battery life with a little tinkering. So long as you are comfortable doing it.

I have used pop_os and cosmic DE it should be noted that is a beta version of pop_is, which means there are plenty of bugs, which means there are still a lot of optimizations. the fact you could get 12 hour battery is kinda surprising especially with a nvidia GPU.

ahem

Get whatever the fuck you want.

You can use nixpkgs and brew on macOS.

I have both kernel (GNU/Linux and XNU/darwin(macOS)) and even if there is tons of stuff I don’t like with macOS and their non-repairable hardware I have to admit that battery life, trackpad feeling, monitor, speaker and build quality are very hard to beat.

But unfortunately due to the undocumented arm architecture of Apple Silicon you will have hard time running GNU/Linux on M macs.

My MacBook is my last non-linux based machine as of today and I have difficulties switching it even if I want it very bad, some of my software don’t run well on Linux even through Wine/CrossOver and the battery life and idle power are the main reason why I am still using a lockdown OS on one of my laptop.

ThinkPad and Dell have a bunch of Linux compatible notebooks.

If you are in a European country not being locked into apples ecosystem would be a major argument for me.

Buy whichever suits your needs more.

I have both systems. Linux on desktop, MacOS on my M3 Macbook Pro. I went with the latter because mainly because of battery life and colour accuracy (for graphical work).

That said, with system level AI and all the surveillance bullshit coming to the UK, I will probably start dual booting Asahi if/when it’s released for the M3. MacOS will just be for photo/video editing. A shame, because I’ll be giving up the battery life.

I have an HP victus with linux installed which I use for work. It is heavy and cumbersome to carry always and thus I decided to get a lightweight laptop with good battery life. I was considering to get an M chip macbook and to install linux but later found out that HDMI out function is broken at that time. Instead I opted to get a second hand Thinkpad X1 carbon and it served me well since. My only gripe is that it only has 8 gb of ram that can’t be upgraded. If you prioritize battery life, the M chip macbooks really is your only choice but if you have some time to tinker with linux, you can maybe get around 10 hrs of battery life at least for me with my Thinkpad.

just get a mac that supports linux and dualboot

Running Linux on a Macbook is also an option (what I currently do, you need a supported model though), and it would probably have better battery life than an rtx4060 laptop and you get the nice touchpad/screen/aesthetics. Alternatively, you can consider getting a different less power hungry laptop, and in both cases you can use a charging bank if you have to.

For Mac, go with a Mac Book Neo.

Why do you even want a new laptop? 4060 sounds pretty recent?

Also, do you need that long battery life? If yes, ARM or really new intel processors with energy saving cores seem to be the way to go.

Check how much of the hardware Asahi linux supports. But I would avoid buying Apple hardware for this. It is not repairable and they might refuse to help if you run Linux or something. Luke Rossman can tell you about how shit apples customer support is.

Well, my friend, I understand what you’re saying. I used to be a Windows user until I discovered Linux around 2015, and I bounced around a bunch before settling on Fedora for almost 5 years. And if you asked me to switch to anything, I’d say fuck that!

I used to believe Linux was the best, but then I watched ChrisTechTips. He really opened my eyes to how an operating system is. Whether it’s Windows, Linux, or Mac is actually just a tool, and you can actually use them all. He himself uses Windows to game on Linux for his personal life and Mac for video editing, and you know what? I can’t say no to that. If you have the money, go for whatever works for you.

for example, what works for me is simple: A console for gaming… I’m not a big gamer who needs a Windows gaming monster. A Linux desktop for my deep research and personal home lab. A Mac for traveling and doing some light editing, writing, and maybe watching movies and TV shows on it.

Someone might say, “Well, I cannot afford all of these,” and I agree. But these things came gradually; like I didn’t buy everything at once. It’s just that eventually I got them all, and I think you should focus on what’s a priority for you now and what can help you get things done. And if you think a Mac can do that because of the battery life, you can do what you please.

The good thing is Linux is a good privacy-focused system. Macs can be as good if you know how to harden them.

MacOS + Nix Package Manager with flakes enabled. I haven’t tested it out myself though.