I used i3 for a long time. After a while it didn't feel that fast. Yes switching was very quick but often it got in the way. So many applications have little windows that pop up. They didn't play nice with i3.
I also had the issue of a limited keyboard and shortcut keys. I use a Kinesis advantage. I don't have a windows key. So I used alt as a super key. This meant that I often couldn't use application shortcuts. It was a major pain. In hindsight I should have mapped in a windows key and sacrificed one of my thumb buttons for it.
The biggest issues I've had with i3 are graphics related.
The first is drawing at X's borders when having multiple panels connected leads to flickering and graphical artifacts. This means triggering any window/video to go full screen while you have output on more than one monitor. It's not a unique problem to i3, but most other WM's handle window drawing in a different manner.
The other issue I find more annoying. That's tearing while scrolling and playing video unless a compositor like compton is run. This appears to not be a problem for a lot of people, in the way that using frame interpolation on tv's doesn't bother them. For me though, it drives me nuts. Compton by the way hasn't had development in over 3 years.
For me it was remembering what my bindings were for every little thing. I’m a guy who built his own keyboard for extra macro keys. I have 12 extra off the left side. It worked out very nicely, and it was a pretty smooth experience. Until I was using my computer to laze about at 11pm with a slightly foggy mind.
I just don’t want to think about how to move incredibly quickly around the computer. Easy point and click is all the effort I want to muster, sometimes.
> I just don’t want to think about how to move incredibly quickly around the computer. Easy point and click is all the effort I want to muster, sometimes.
Right. This is an important thing to note.
It takes a lot of mental energy to remember all of these things if they are not already imbued into your brain as effortless muscle memory. Sometimes that energy is better off spent solving the problem you're trying to solve. This is why after about a year of using Vim, I still use the mouse once in a while.
I remember once reporting a bug with the Microsoft Terminal (I use WSL 2 on Windows) on Reddit and when I mentioned mouse support didn't work inside of programs like Vim, it was the most down voted comment I ever created on any platform with swarms of folks saying I wasn't using the terminal as it was supposed to and that I must be an idiot for wanting to select text in Vim with a mouse.
Luckily they fixed the bug (it ended up being one of the highest priority bug fixes they had).
Ha, I had a second keyboard for shortcuts at one point. I had little labels stuck to the keys. But I switched programs all the time and maintaining the shortcuts and the labels got old.
Author here. Post is a bit rambling but I just wanted to document somewhere the things I encountered along the way with links to resources, to save someone having to trawl the web for it next time.
About sway, if you don’t mind using Firefox, that works natively under Wayland. On another note though, the reason I don’t use sway, is that I couldn’t figure out how to get inertial scrolling working... Did you manage this, or just not bother with inertial scrolling?
I use the chromium ozone packages from the AUR with sway on Wayland and they work fine.
The real problem with wayland are all the apps that just don't support it. From emacs, to, e.g., all the electron apps built with older versions of chromium, etc. You can use them seamlessly with Xwayland, but then a lot of things work "weirdly", e.g., HiDPI displays blurry Xwayland apps, applications like obs-studio cannot record some apps, etc.
The the Sway ecosystem main drawbacks are the immaturity of the tools (e.g., waybar (i3bar replacement), wofi (rofi replacement), etc.) and the drawbacks of wlroots (e.g. lack of nvidia support in contrast to gnome and kde, etc.).
Many things kind of "just work" under Wayland, but many things also kind of just don't properly work. Using pipewire to, e.g., stream desktop apps via webchat from firefox/chrome works weirdly, streaming one monitor or one sway workspace from firefox/chrome does not work, capturing one workspace from sway using obs studio in another workspace does not work, etc.
WebRTC (firefox and chrome) can (usually) stream individual XWayland windows using the same mechanism that was in place for window sharing under X. Wayland native apps are not shareable (and may not be if/until some protocol changes are introduced).
I hope that fullscreen desktop sharing "just works" now that we've released xdg-desktop-portal-wlr[0]. If you have any trouble with it, hit me up on freenode #sway or raise an issue on this project. We're happy to help and looking for a broader user base to help us test it out.
One of the problems with replicating this with more modern Apple hardware is that Apple have increasingly moved away from the "traditional" PC hardware platform, and their more modern laptops have adopted various design patterns that were traditionally associated with more embedded devices (such as using SPI for their input devices). This is a completely reasonable set of design choices on Apple's part, but it means there's now a pretty long lag between a new generation of Apple devices and it being possible to run native Linux on them in a reasonable way.
They also started to add separate controllers running separate OSes (e.g. T2 chip) which have completely undocumented protocols and are protected by DRM.
Also, just remembered another neat piece of software: flameshot. It’s basically macOS’s screenshot editor but even better IMO. I’m not sure whether you can bind it to macOS keyboard shortcuts though.
How is your Macbook handling VMs running for like 8 hours a day? I use docker (which runs inside a hyperkit VM on OSX) and it absolutely toasts my Macbook. To the point where my screen has started showing black lines on top and bottom due to overheating.
It's been fine, I've noticed a significant different in performance between Virtualbox and VMWare Fusion - I'm not sure what VMWare are doing but their hypervisor makes VMs feel almost native in performance levels it's quite extraordinary.
I'm the guy from the sway github issue mentioning that the chrome autoscaling had been fixed, so maybe you need a more up to date chrome, or maybe there was some kind of regression. (I had some other bug with sway to do with the tray, so haven't been using it).
One other suggestion for an alfred/spotlight alternative is dmenu (or bemenu for a wayland compatible one if you go for sway), there's also rofi as an option which does the same thing iirc.
Thank you for writing this! Whenever I see people using Linux as their main laptop OS, I'm struck by remembering the amount of tinkering needed circa 1999 which was the last time I did it. Having read this -- the custom scripts, the "suspend still doesn't work properly" -- it feels like that's still the case.
It isn’t. But it still has some rough edges for sure. It highly depends on the hardware you are using. MacBooks are not manufactured to make it easy for alternative OSes.
OP is also trying to use the i3 window manager. It’s barebones, labor intensive and meant for tinkerers and advanced users. If you want an easy plug and play experience you should use a desktop environment.
You're seeing an extreme case here. Macbooks are actively breaking other OSes. 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".
Newer generations of macbooks just won't work at all. There's no workaround for recent sound (unless it gets reverse engineered) or wifi (unless you rewrite Linux stack to work around broken firmware) devices, and it's likely to only get worse. Here's a good collection for hardware support: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
On the one hand, yes, Apple is generally extremely hostile towards users tinkering with their platforms, be it iOS or macOS, so it theoretically should be harder.
On the other hand, on the pre-2016 models, the components in use are largely off-the-shelf components, much like other manufacturers.
The major difference between Apple laptops and other vendors laptops is that the variation of components in use is significantly smaller on the Apple range, while 'non-apple brands' encompasses a huge variety of different hardware.
I would suspect that if you bought any random laptop, you'd have high odds of picking one that has various components that are not well supported, with even less online support available for you than if you tried it on Apple hardware. If only because the number of people using Apple hardware is so damn high, and the number of people on your particular component configuration is significantly smaller.
Pre-2016 will start dying though. For new hardware, we're pretty much left with macbook which is definitely broken, or literally anything else, which may be broken, but often isn't. If you're going for brands, most Dell, Thinkpad, HP, etc. (not lowest price) laptops will work just fine with linux. Some even come as certified compatible.
> You're seeing an extreme case here. Macbooks are actively breaking other OSes. 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".
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.
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. This is the absolute best case scenario for a Linux laptop.
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). 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).
To System76's credit, this is the absolute best experience I've ever had with a Linux laptop. Everything else has worked out of the box so far. In competition with other Linux laptops, including Dell systems which come preinstalled with Linux, System76's laptops win unequivocally in my experience. This is no small achievement, and if you're getting a Linux laptop, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them.
But competing with Windows and MacOS, I think this Linux experience is only competitive with the low-end of Windows installations (i.e. cheap netbooks where it's clear the companies didn't spend much time on getting the configuration right). A higher-end Windows laptop or any Mac laptop will require little-to-no tinkering to get things working.
My t460p suffers from battery drain issues due to nvidia graphics and intel wifi. Also, the fingerprint sensor requires tinkering after every os upgrade and cannot enroll new fingerprints in linux.
It’s weird, people report all these issues, but in the past I bought Thinkpads for years & they always "just worked". Took a risk & picked up a Dell XPS 13 a couple of years ago, and that "just worked" too.
It’s like I live in parallel universe of Linux hardware support to some of you.
How does sleep/suspend work? That was always the biggest hangup for me. Although, it's been almost a decade since I last tried. However, a colleague's Dell running Ubuntu was a nightmare. Not sure if it was the model or how he had it set up though.
I have a Dell XPS 13 and have run various flavors of Arch without any problems. I didn't try Ubuntu, however.
Sleep and suspend just work. Battery life is good - typically 5-7 hours. Before this I had no problems with a Thinkpad and even on a MacBook Air (2012).
Maybe I'm just so used to Linux now that I don't notice problems since I've been on it since 1998-ish except for a short stint on OS X.
Dell support is terrible so I can't recommend the XPS. When I had a problem with the battery they wouldn't replace it under warranty since I was not in the country where I bought it, which is total BS.
A lot of these issues are minor, and easily fixed, so I suspect the "parallel universe" effect is indicative of a willingness to overlook small issues. The font issue I found is hardly critical, for example, and I suspect a lot of developers would just live with it.
Once you say something generally works, it's a magnet for "doesn't work for me" responses. "Yeah, just fine for me too" is not really a response worth writing / it's discouraged. Forums are terrible for finding consensus / getting real stats.
I have two Dell Lattitude series laptops, and they've always worked without issues out-of-the-box (at least with Ubuntu Linux).
I do make sure that the hardware is compatible with Linux beforehand. This typically involves buying prior generation hardware (which works out because you can get them for much less), and avoiding Nvidia hardware entirely.
> there is not a laptop which runs Linux out of the box where tinkering won't be necessary.
Hp x360 requires zero fiddling, works out the box.
Dell precision 5570 requires zero fiddling, works out of the box.
Samsung Chronos 7 requires zero fiddling, works out of the box.
Every laptop in the past 6 years worked with Linux straight out the gate. Including acpi sleep, graphics acceleration, and wireless networking. Compare that to spending 8 hours last night trying to get windows 10 to run on a 7 year old system
You're trying to run a generic operating system on a closed platform whose vendor publishes no documentation on anything. Some manual work is to be expected.
I can assure you it is not 1999 anymore and things are a lot smoother today when you're not trying to coax proprietary black-box appliances into doing things they were explicitely designed not to do.
Since you even need to 'maintain' scripts on either upgrades or whenever you want to move to another distro, chances are that those scripts will break upon that migration or upgrade. Then more tweaking, digging, googling and more command line testing to fix that simple annoyance for hours or even days.
I know I don't want to play around with my desktop just get work done and for Macbooks, its either macOS or Windows with WSL2 which the former gets out of the way and "just works" and no need for tweaking.
Very much not true these days. Linux on laptops is (in overwhelming majority) a great experience today. I suggest you just try out one of the live images for Ubuntu or Fedora.
On a tangential note I'm surprised that it's still relatively common on HN to see comments like "Linux on desktop doesn't work" or "Java is slow". That was 20 years ago. The world has moved on.
You wish. There's tons of edge cases that make it into a difficult experience. Recently observed a guy plugging his Linux laptop into an external screen to act as a projector during a meeting. That did not go well. I think primarily due to the external screen being HiDPI.
Linux on the desktop "works" today just like it did twenty years ago -- painfully and with a lot of work to work around the operating system's inability to be a desktop OS.
Same thing with Java. Sure, it's not as slow as it was 20 years ago, but it's still slow and painful in comparison to compiled languages.
I've used Linux actively for 30 years or more, and I've never had a "great experience" once with it. It's a tool that I have to beat into submission to get it to do whatever ridiculous workflow someone dreamed up that can't be done on a real operating system.
Java has been broadly used in HPC and low-latency trading software for years now. That's not only because much more attractive time-to-market but also because in many cases Java is on par with c/cpp when it comes to performance. Sometimes even better.
I'm under the impression that you are not interested in educating yourself on the topic, however if I'm mistaken, have a look at some reasons why Java can be as fast or faster than c/cpp:
- TLAB (thread-local allocation buffer)
- Escape analysis
- Mono- and bi-morphic callsite optimizations
- JIT in general (dead code elimination, implicit null checks, CHA-based optimizations, etc).
Also, you don't have to use Oracle JVMs. There's IBM's J9, OpenJDK-based Zulu, or commercial JVM from Azul (Zing).
This is especially true for "major" distributions (e.g. Fedora, Ubuntu) that tend to have lots of driver support in the distribution on Dell XPS and Lenovo Thinkpad hardware.
By running more-commonly-used software on more-commonly-used hardware, you're more likely to find that someone has built in the driver support you need into the OS.
I've run Ubuntu, Fedora, and Manjaro on various Thinkpads and XPSs and it's always Just Worked. I also have Ubuntu running on an old (2012?) macintosh air and that also Just Works.
Yeah...I have a circa 2008 Thinkpad R500 that I got when I lucked into some WiMax testing/beta thing in my city back then.
It's currently running Mint and lives behind my TV as a basic media player/streaming PC. It's about as fast as you'd imagine given its age, but networking is fine, it can output 1920x1080 and stereo sound out of the HDMI port, and it does just fine with both the bluetooth keyboard and Logitech MX Master mouse (via their proprietary little USB receiver).
None of that stuff needed any weird setup or hoop-jumping. All of the tweaking I did was just UI stuff--finding a balance between performance and making it pretty/intuitive enough for others in the house to use it without headaches.
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. I use Linux on a daily basis as a Security analyst, so while I'm not as good as many, I am far better off than the average computer user (I was offered a gig as an intermediate Linux admin once but passed it up to remain in security).
Every time I try it, I end up fixing a bunch of minor and sometimes major problems that take an amount of effort significantly higher than it would to just get things working on MacOS or Windows.
I have seen notable progress every time I try it though. In fact, my latest attempt is mostly an exception to my experience of all of the other times I've tried it.
I have only been running Linux Mint for about 3 weeks, but so far I only have two issues. One of them is significant, and the other one isn't really that big of a deal.
The significant issue is that my Gigabit Ethernet seems much slower than it was on Window when I attempt to download large files. However, my Wireless AC seems to be fine so its not the end of the world.
The minor issue is that Steam refuses to launch most games on my primary monitor the first time I open them. Even after opening and configuring the games individually, some of them still refuse to run on the correct monitor unless I set the resolution to something lower than the Monitor's native resolution. This happens both for games that are native to Linux and games that are running with Proton.
I think this time around the downsides are outweighed by the benefits of running Linux as a primary OS, so I am planning on sticking with it for a long time, but either of these issues would be a valid deal breaker for any reasonable person.
Your post seems to imply that its a myth that Linux doesn't deliver a near perfect desktop experience. If you haven't had any problems that's great. I'm sure a ton of people have no issues or almost no issues. A great desktop OS should serve all common use cases with virtually no issues that require a non-layman's level of technical knowledge to fix. Based on my experience with MacOS, Windows, and Linux, none of them are perfect, but the latter has the most work to do to meet that standard.
> 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
Well, I have used Linux as a desktop OS consistently since 22 years now. I started with Thinkpads and they did work well for me, and that's what defines my expectations today - that a laptop works without glitch. And the last two laptops I god were supplied by the respective organizations IT department, so they took care that it works.
On the other hand, I am kinda stuck with an Thinkpad X220 because I like the size, the matte display, the great keyboard, and to read my email or work on something in the train, I absolutely do not need more power than it has.
The key for all that is to buy compatible hardware, and research it before spending the money, not after.
I'm not saying its bad or that you can't have a good experience with it, but we should take the "Linux as a Desktop" idea in the proper context. When people bring this idea up again and again, they are usually claiming that Linux is ready to replace Mainstream Desktop OS's for average people. So it usually falls short of that standard because there are only a handful of vendors selling vetted Linux Hardware, only two of them are household names, and the average person cannot be expected to research which GPU Models, NIC Chipsets, etc, are going to work with a Linux install.
The X220 was an amazing machine. I've had a couple of Thinkpad T series over the years and they were my favorite laptops. The keyboards were great.
I'm hoping the trend of more vendors selling Linux laptops will continue. I think there's a good chance that large companies supporting the OS will lead to a more maintenance free / a more stable experience for a wider range of use cases.
I don't dislike Linux. I simply wish it worked better for my purposes. IMO the best OS would have Windows' Mouse drivers and gaming support, MacOS early-mid 2010's Workflow/UI and touchpad drivers, and Linux's everything else. I work with all 3 major OSs on a daily basis and there are things that each of them does better than the others. Interestingly, the thing I find to be poorly implemented on all 3 is Multi-Monitor support.
I think Linux itself is ready to go mainstream, but it's not going to work until enough laptop vendors start selling with Linux pre-installed, and with the issues worked out already.
I mean, I've run into all kinds of issues trying to install Windows as well, including digging through random vendors' websites looking for drivers. But most people's experience is fine, because the laptop vendor provided all of that out-of-the-box.
Honestly I just don't think that's true, every laptop I've had I've tried to put Linux on and it's always been a nightmare. My current one is running Ubuntu but Wifi constantly breaks unless I do a stupid hack with the airplane button, power support is weird and flaky, etc. etc.
Yup. For my main machine, I've never had a Linux laptop last more than six months without a problem that required reinstalling the os (wouldn't boot, wouldn't connect to display etc.). I had a laptop used mostly for web browsing that lasted a bit over a year back around 2006. I try it every few years but it always fails. It's especially a bad idea on Apple hardware. I'll check back in a few years but don't expect much.
> Whenever I see people using Linux as their main laptop OS, I'm struck by remembering the amount of tinkering needed circa 1999 which was the last time I did it.
IDK, I finally broke down and replaced my rickety ~8 year old laptop and everything (aside from the fingerprint reader) worked right out the box -- surprisingly since it is also a fairly new model so I expected some tinkering while the drivers caught up to mainline linux.
Actually...I can't remember the last time (other than Gnome being stupid with defaults) I've had to mess with a basic install and I've been using linux as my primary OS since around '00.
It worked pretty well by then. Somewhere around the year 2000 I had RedHat 7 running on my Dell Latitude CPi, everything worked out of the box.
You'd still have problems on other machines with things like winmodems and integrated graphics, so you'd have to get into downloading driver modules or rebuilding kernels.
> I imagine windows 10 would have similar problems there.
Microsoft allows resellers to use “supported by windows” marketing material on their hardware they sell only if they pass a stringent set of automated tests. So a windows hw provider wouldn’t “have similar problems here” because their consumer hardware would have been designed and tested for windows.
Microsoft set the standard in quality assurance for backwards compatibility
I don't remember the last time I got in a real trouble with Linux on my laptop. Been using it happily for 10 years now.
Just took my 7yr old laptop that wouldn't boot windows in reasonable time and installed a brand new Ubuntu to give away to a non technical person.
Had another machine, a strong one with i7 and dedicated card running windows8. Wanted to upgrade it to windows10. The installer bricked my bios. After people who actually know what they're doing reflashed my bios, the windows installation was theoretically working but it took literally 10 minutes to start up a browser.
Meanwhile Linux was fine booted from pendrive. I gave it to a friend to get the disk replaced. He wiped everything clean and reinstalled and got it working.
I guess I'm biased and that's why I'm getting the opposite experience to what should happen... ;)
Last year I had to use a Dell 7540 (may have the exact model number wrong, but it was one of their enterprise "workstation" laptops) with Ubuntu for work. I was also skeptical for the same reason as you, not having used Linux as a daily driver for a long time.
FWIW these laptops were rock solid and ran Linux just fine. Sleep also seemed to work as well(I'd have tried hibernation if I knew how. That's my preferred mode on Windows to save unnecessary power consumption).
I was quite impressed and while my personal daily needs are fully Windows-based, I would not hesitate to recommend those laptops to anyone who wants to get away from Windows.
You can configure a new Dell XPS or Dell Mobile Precision laptop with Ubuntu for a no-hassle solution.
If you want CentOS or Red Hat, I've had good luck picking any Ubuntu Dell that is also listed as being tested and certified for Red Hat at https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/search/#/ecosystem/Red%2.... The only real hassle has been when I wanted to use an Nvidia driver, which requires a driver reinstall after kernel updates, although I believe you can now avoid this with DKMS. I expect that Fedora would also work without issue on any of these.
Yes, a much easier path would have been to eBay the MacBook and spend the money on a second hand ThinkPad. You would get more bang for your buck and less headaches.
Well, maybe. My Thinkpad experience has been good, but not amazing.
I own two Thinkpads, a 5th generation X1 carbon and a 2nd generation X1 extreme. Both very nice machines, but not perfect.
On the newer machine in particular, the X1 extreme, I've had many annoying issues.
Suspend did not work for over a year after purchase. If the laptop was left with the lid shut it would run out of battery in a couple of hours. It finally started working with Fedora 32. I don't know if it was fixed because of kernel updates or firmware updates. The laptop still uses way too much power when suspended, but at least I can stick it in my laptop bag for a few hours.
Until Fedora shipped with Gnome running under Wayland, the integrated graphics were too slow to acceptably render the desktop at 4K, which is the native resolution of the panel, and the only resolution choice I am presented with in Gnome. I enabled the nvidia GPU with the proprietary driver, but then I'd get less than 2 hours of battery, and the thing could cook an egg. Compared to my 2012 Macbook Pro, which also has integrated graphics, the experience is much worse, even today, with Wayland.
Battery life is not as good as Windows by default. For some reason, every Linux user with a laptop has to install tlp and powertop just to get decent battery life. Kernel development seems to consistently focus on this, and I'm confident than the situation is incrementally improving.
The synaptics touchpad is hot garbage. If you compare it to a Mac's touchpad, it's just a tragedy how bad it is. I've used both the synaptics driver with Xorg and libinput with Wayland. There is noticeable lag when moving the mouse cursor from a resting position. The cursor will stay where it is, and then jump to where it ought to have moved to. This produces a very jarring UX. Interestingly, the nipple mouse does not have this problem. Finally, the scrolling gestures don't always work, depending where on the touchpad you initiate them.
The keyboard would reproducibly lose keystrokes! This was not fixed until last week by a Lenovo firmware update, and it produced a lot of irritating typos when conversing with coworkers.
Not that I care, but the fingerprint reader doesn't work.
The sound is too quiet even at full volume, so you have to tweak the system config to allow you to adjust it past its default max volume.
I use Linux as a workstation operating system because I write software destined to run on Linux. Despite these problems, I would gladly take them over having to virtualize my entire workflow on a Mac, which I find incredibly painful to do. But these quality problems have left me wondering if Lenovo was the right laptop brand to buy. I left a negative review with Lenovo, after they solicited me to write one, and instead of trying to resolve the problems, they simply refused to publish the review.
I agree with your second paragraph and I’m definitely one of those that like to tinker with old hardware. I successfully installed Ubuntu on my Mac without too much fuss however Apple devices and MacBooks especially are already laptops that just work. I’m not a fanboy myself but the amount of time I spend configuring a Linux/Windows PC as compared to a Mac is almost always double.
While that is my answer as well, it isn't a guarantee of success, I have had laptops sold with Ubuntu LTS break on me.
Specially when FOSS gets into the way and a perfectly working driver blob was replaced by WIP FOSS driver, just because it feels good to push it down on the users, for example the way broadcom driver got replaced a couple of years ago.
The list to get macOS working on other laptops is even longer - I thought it would be obvious to all of you that it would be hard to make a machine designed to run a proprietary OS.
Just like you buy an Apple machine to run MacOS well, you can easily buy a machine to run Linux well (Dell, Lenovo, System76 are just a few manufacturers who build MacBoook class hardware with Linux preinstalled).
> Dell, Lenovo, System76 are just a few manufacturers who build MacBoook class hardware with Linux preinstalled
Debatable. I have had an absolutely terrible experience with Linux on a new ThinkPad. System76 doesn’t have as great a build quality AFAIK. Dell is fine, but they don’t have anything with preinstalled Linux anymore.
I won't bother telling you the advantages I got over the other OSs, but I am curious why you are denouncing linux in the first place.
Installing any non-free linux OS will grant you an complete out-of-the-box experience, imo superior to Windows/Mac.
Even Nvidia Optimus powered laptops are fully supported.
Hit me up if you managed to run windows on the same hardware as the OP. Or even running MacOS on any other computer. I am wondering if your documentation would be more concise.
Converting a machine that works well out of the box into a machine that requires custom scripts and constant tinkering to handle simple tasks seems like a waste of time.
That may be your experience, but it's not universal. I wanted to do this, regardless of how many hacks it took, but I'm on the new-and-broken model unfortunately.
I have a 2019 mbp16. It does not "work well". For me, the graphics driver crashes me out of my login session pretty much daily, the network stack occasionally shits itself (reboot) and various internal processes (the... window server?) like to use >50% CPU for no reason at all.
Looking around, I'm not the only one who has issues.
AFAIK the macOS activity manager doesn’t show task usage as you’d expect. It displays resource usage based on total current usage rather than maximum capacity.
Citation needed. That doesn't match my experience at all. When Activity Monitor shows high CPU in the process list, it corresponds to high CPU in the CPU monitor.
The fact that I can point at both colleagues and strangers on the internet with the same issues makes me think it's actually just crap software that doesn't work.
I think if that were the case there would be a lot more people with the issues you’re talking about.
My whole shop uses Macs and nobody has this issue. I’m on one of three different variant MBPs (including one like yours) all day every day - literally around 18 hours a day - and I’ve never seen it.
That’s why I would really suggest opening a ticket on it, especially with a new laptop. I suspect there’s a hardware issue.
I'm running Linux on a 2015 MBP as a server. Rest of the household are Macs only, but I figured it would be useful to have a server and stick it into a closet.
It's rife with issues. Power management is odd, brightness sometimes doesn't work, and most annoyingly, the keyboard and trackpad sometimes stops working after 2-3 weeks of 24/7 operation.
I solved most of the issues by disabling the GUI and just letting it boot to the console. I also set mitigations to off in GRUB and it ran cooler. Not ideal with security in mind, but it's just a home server after all.
Honestly, I run Linux on a 2015 MacBook Pro. It works much better than it did "out of the box".
I get better battery life, because I can turn off things I don't need.
I don't have to restart the audio service before every Zoom call.
I don't have to reboot to get external monitors to work again.
My Yubikey doesn't drain the battery in a few hours.
My system boots to the login screen in the time it takes for the Apple logo to finish showing.
I don't have to fight with the App store to keep software up-to-date.
I don't have to work around a shitty developer experience with homebrew or docker/virtual machines.
I never have to deal with Xcode!
In any case, I probably spent a tenth of the time setting everything up, tweaks and all, than I did unfucking the default install of OS X to be usable.
That sounds horrendous! My experience is fairly opposite though.
> I get better battery life, because I can turn off things I don't need.
I had horrible experiences with Linux and battery life on laptops. Fans on all the time, poor or absent support for sleep and hibernate... Proprietary systems consistently performed better for me in that area.
> I don't have to restart the audio service before every Zoom call.
That's really weird. I wouldn't even know how to restart the audio service on OsX.
> I don't have to reboot to get external monitors to work again.
I have occasional issues in that area, but typically it just takes a bit of "nagging" osx to re-detect the monitor, like bringing up the System Preferences panel related to wallpapers.
> My system boots to the login screen in the time it takes for the Apple logo to finish showing.
One shouldn't need to reboot OsX more than once weekly, or less, but yeah, boot times in OsX have gone to the dogs in the last few years. Windows absolutely smokes it, I guess some Linux distros would too.
> I don't have to fight with the App store to keep software up-to-date.
It's been alright until recently, but I agree that the last few moves to persuade us to move to "Vistalina" have been annoying.
> I probably spent a tenth of the time setting everything up, tweaks and all, than I did unfucking the default install of OS X
That's really the opposite for me. The time I always end up spending on stuff like fonts (!) on the average Linux desktop, is just ridiculous.
Please notice that OP is trying to run the i3 tiling window manager which is very minimal (as all TWMs) and expressly targets tinkerers and advanced users. A beginner friendly distribution with a complete desktop environment usually provides a much easier plug and play experience.
Thanks for the plug, I am the author and I have recently made a few more updates. Speed improvements to the installer, better apple keyboard (added another driver detection for newer keyboards), also improved support for Ubuntu Budgie (probably the most mac like distro out there worth trying besides a couple of others such as Enso OS).
Tried Linux on my MacBook Pro mid-2012, ran into some of the issues described in the post (sleep issues, keyboard layout, ...). Though I went with Ubuntu for a bit more simplicity. I finally had to rollback because it was simply not usable. The laptop was getting too hot, and it seemed that I had to use scripting or workarounds for every little thing. Now I use a virtual machine, and it's already way better. I still want to use Linux as my main OS, just not on the MacBook. I wanted to see if I could make the switch, and it seems that I'm ready.Now I'll wait to buy a new one with more compatible components.
For whatever reason, fan control does not work out of the box (so it gets way too hot), but it worked for me after installing mbpfan: https://github.com/linux-on-mac/mbpfan
Just a hint, Debian's hardware support can be better than Ubuntu. At least that's my experience with my desktop PC, which I didn't get to work well with Ubuntu because of the graphics card, and which worked without problems with Debian. (But, if you have problems with the graphics card and you only have one supported by proprietary drivers, do yourself a favor and buy a fully supported one. Doing otherwise is just not worth the hassle).
The trouble with almost every article that I read of this kind is that the author is either a writer or a coder. So their demands on Linux are relatively minor; a terminal, an IDE, something to mangle text with.
I could probably make the full-time switch to Linux, if that was the bulk of what I did too. And I do a fair bit of writing and coding. But the majority what I do on my [OSX] computers is Art & Design related. So I need Photoshop and Illustrator and there is nothing available for Linux that even comes close. Inkscape and [especially] The Gimp aren't even in the same league. The only semi-decent graphic design app I've come across on Linux is Krita. But even that is quite limited and more a Painter replacement than a Photoshop or Illustrator one.
Ironically, there is actually better quality graphic design software available for Android [with that Linux core] than there is for Linux itself. I can almost replace Photoshop with Ibis Paint on my S-Pen enabled Samsung tablet [although the picture is a lot less rosy with regards to vector graphics].
That said, I have installed Linux on an old MacBook and Mac Mini, which has given them a new lease of life. But the former I just use for hacking about on and the latter runs Kodi as my media centre. I don't actually do any work on them.
Once setup, Linux runs fine on both those machines, for what I want it to do. But, boy, is getting to that stage in the first place a complete pain in the ballsack!
Both machines have Nvidia graphics cards and even now [probably a decade after I first encountered this problem] Ubuntu's, supposedly user friendly GUI software installer will quite happily 'recommend' you to install an Nvidia driver which will brick your Ubuntu installation with a black screen on reboot.
Now, after running into this problem several times, over the years [I fall for it every time, in the vain hope that Ubuntu might have actually fixed this], I know how to repair things. But it involves a lot of swearing and command line delving into the innards of Grub's configuration.
Imagine some non-techie person deciding to give Linux a try. They boot from the live CD... everything looks fine, so they install. They reboot after the install and either:
1: If they selected "download 3rd party drivers" during installation, boot to a black screen
or
2: If they didn't select 3rd party drivers at install time, they boot to a seemingly working installation, which then recommends they install a 3rd party driver, which will subsequently cause booting to a black screen.
And, as I say, this has been going on for over a decade. And this is with Ubuntu which is the most newbie-approachable distro. In all that time, no-one thought it worthwhile adding a simple sanity check so the installer would NOT recommend installing an Nvidia driver which would break Ubuntu if the OS itself had been installed in UEFI mode!
It turns out that a FOSS operating system largely maintained by volunteers does not meet your requirements, and you know what? That’s fine. No ones forcing you to use it. Giving people options is the whole point of Linux. We cannot compel other companies (such as NVIDIA) to support it anyway.
I wish I'd put a couple of quid bet on someone coming along and trotting out the obligatory "Free... Volunteers... Write your own..." reply. The response that someone always comes out with whenever anyone [even someone who likes Linux and uses it] dares to criticise.
And exactly the reason why it will NEVER be the 'Year of Linux on the Desktop'. It's the Linux equivalent of Steve Jobs's infamous "You're holding it wrong". If someone offers a valid criticism then blame the user. It's so much easier than actually addressing the problem, no matter how glaring.
I wasn't criticising some obscure edge case here, where someone hacks about and messes something up. This is the official GUI installer, which will actually recommend you install something that will, to all intents and purposes, brick your computer. How newbie-friendly can you get!
Even Steve Jobs might have thought twice, before blaming the user for that one!
These days I feel as if machines are deliberately phased out even when they are in perfectly working condition.
I have two macbooks (white plastic) one with Tiger installed and another with Leopard an iPad 1 ( They all are in working condition) Its a shame to not be able to use the machines just because it is not supported.
I would assume that they are good enough for a kid to surf websites and help do his/her homework. Listen to songs while browsing pdfs . Lack of support should not mean that perfectly usable hardware is junked.
After covid, there are a lot of kids in Indian villages whoes education is dependent on online education. Maybe these laptops could be made usable for them. ( Not everyone can afford a mobile phone)
Please do let me know if your linux installs will work for my case as well ( your case covers the Macbook Pro instead of just macbooks)
PS: I myself use i3wm on a lenovo machine. ( Not very happy with Lenovo but its ok ok )
> I have two macbooks (white plastic) one with Tiger installed and another with Leopard an iPad 1 ( They all are in working condition) Its a shame to not be able to use the machines just because it is not supported.
That hardware isn't as valuable as you might think it is. The last plastic Macbook was made in 2010. It's value as a productivity tool is very limited today.
That said, e-Waste is a major problem, which is why in recent years, in the west, companies are required to collect a "recycling fee" on purchase of computer equipment to pay for the eventual recycling of the physical devices. Coincidentally, this was in part prompted by images of children in India and other developing countries picking over toxic E-waste from the west.
However, it's not really feasible for a company to support a device as old as your 2010 plastic Macbook from a software perspective, because software evolves too rapidly to run well on hardware that old. These are not desktop workstation towers for which you can swap out every component for newer ones.
> After covid, there are a lot of kids in Indian villages whoes education is dependent on online education. Maybe these laptops could be made usable for them.
The demands of common 2020 computer use-cases will render the hardware/software unusable, even when running a recent Linux distro.
So they will probably not be useful for remote-education. Basic things like watching educational videos will likely be painfully slow - if they work at all - constrained by the hardware's ability to decode and display the video.
If you do get these common use cases working on that old a device (which would be a fun and worthy hacking project by itself), if you give it to someone else to use, you will also have to deal with the problem of supporting it, and then ensuring their responsible disposal (i.e. not in the village organic waste dump) when they do reach the end of their usable lives. None of this is trivial to accomplish.
Off topic maybe, but my Razer Blade 15" has been and absolutely wonderful replacement for my MBP. The build quality feels just as nice, and none of the weird touchbar issues. (Running Ubuntu 19.10 presently, only issue: had to disable the USB-C port to allow it to sleep). The arrow keys are also in a slightly wonky location.
It's been very disruptive to have Apple quality tank, and I'm glad they finally went back to the good keyboard, but at least there's another game in town for developers who want a quality laptop and a real OS.
Also slightly off topic, but I'm glad to hear Linux support for Razer laptops are improving. I had an early Razer Blade Stealth (late 2016 12.5") and the Linux support was _terrible_, as demonstrated in this repository: https://github.com/rolandguelle/razer-blade-stealth-linux. It took a lot of work to get it stable.
ThinkPads are quality machines, but I interpreted the comment to mean more than just the base Linux experience. For better or worse, some people want something more than a black plastic business machine.
I'd say a similar thing about my HP EliteBook x360 830 G6 as a 13-inch running Ubuntu 20.04. I love having a matte screen (that's still a touchscreen if I ever want it) and both USB-C and USB-A ports! HP even lets you custom order with FreeDOS so you can skip the Windows license. iFixit gives it 9/10 on repairability: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/HP+EliteBook+830+x360+G6+Repair...
I have an x360, precision 5570 (dual xeons),and a 2017 MBP. The x360 gets the most use by far. I only use the more powerful systems for gaming or when I’m modeling systems where I need more than 16gb of ram
I purchased a souped-up Eluktronics MAG-15 recently to try out VR and I'm really amazed by how subpar Windows is compared to Linux and MacOS even with top of the line hardware.
I found out that I can update a lot of components of my early 2015 MBP, so I'm going to get a 512GB or 1TB hard drive and see if I can make a Linux partition.
For Firefox rendering being slow, I forced the Ubuntu Firefox to use Wayland the other day (my login session was already wayland but Ubuntu doesn't default to making firefox using it), and the difference is night and day. Everything is so much faster and super smooth.
FYI I popped this in my .pam_environment (I was having issues when just editing the .desktop file in that thunderbird stopped being able to open links in firefox)
I took a stab at putting Linux on a MacBook about 4 years ago or so. I found dealing with the Broadcom wifi and bluetooth more hassle than I bargained for, and switched to a Thinkpad. Has the Broadcom driver situation improved? I was surprised the author had no issues getting wifi working.
And relating to the article, i3 is the sole reason I use Linux. Such a great window manager.
I had zero issues with the Wifi, not tried Bluetooth so can’t comment there.
I’m not sure if the lack of WiFi issues is because Fedora tends to stay pretty up to date kernel wise.
EDIT: to clarify - I had zero issues with having to to anything special to get Wifi working - there are still intermittent issues with the driver that happens maybe once or twice a week
I recently tried Debian 10 on a MacBook Pro from 2014 and it worked surprisingly well. The computer fan(s) would however not start when needed even after installing extra software like mbpfan. Something to watch out for!
> The main reason for the switch was one killer app; the i3 window manager. Keyboard shortcuts, tiled windows, lightning fast to use - it feels like a piece of software designed for people who tinker and use computers a lot.
> The primary function of yabai is tiling window management; automatically modifying your window layout using a binary space partitioning algorithm to allow you to focus on the content of your windows without distractions. Additional features of yabai include focus-follows-mouse, disabling animations for switching spaces, creating spaces past the limit of 16 spaces, and much more.
I'm forced to use a Mac for work, and I use yabai. It's far superior to the default mac experience, which seems to be designed to actively hide windows and make your life more difficult, but it's still a pain to use. It's obviously a hack and that makes itself known in daily usage - dialog boxes are tiled just like regular windows, or alternatively hidden behind the tiled windows where they're inaccessible; suspending and resuming randomly messes up the position of my windows; and the stupid mac detached-titlebar is almost unusable when you drag your mouse over another program and the focus gets yanked away.
Customisation and configuration are also plainly inferior to i3/sway, plus there's the complicated installation process and necessity to disable apple's walled garden features to get full functionality.
At home I have i3/sway, which is a nice polished user experience; there's no comparison really.
I'm surprised about the comment on sway, because afaik the issue mentioned about a blurry chrome was fixed a while ago[0]. Maybe it's caused by something else...
It depends a ton on what distro you are using. Some distros that now ship with wayland native desktops have tons of downstream patching to smooth out the experience. If you run Arch for instance, the default Chromium package is not ozone, and will run with XWayland (although chromium-ozone is available in the AUR). It's possible your distro is doing something differently.
I run arch, and the google-chrome-stable package appears to have sorted out it's hdpi scaling issues.
I could be wrong though, a while back I did a lot of tweaks to beat the concept of hdpi and variable screen resolutions into my computer, so I don't exactly have a "clean" setup, and it could be something else, but the fonts look crisp on both the low res and high res screens.
I can't say whether this is anything to do with whether it's a build with/without ozone, but it appears to work now (sorry don't know much more than that!)
I'd just like to correct my post above, it seems that chrome was running under XWayland, I think I'd just found an incantation of settings that made it look alright on both my high res/low res screens.
I was nearly Mac exclusive for years before switching to Linux. Similarly to the author I mostly use a browser, VS Code and a few small utilities, although mine are mostly simple Qt GUI apps.
My thumbs are well trained to use the keys to the sides of the space bar as the main modifier. My solution to the Command/Control issue is to swap the key positions with xkd so that it's always [Win][Alt][Ctrl][Space][Ctrl][Compose]. (Since Macs and PCs swap Alt and Win/Cmd, you need different xkb options for each type of keyboard.)
As for terminals, if you set VTE-based terminals (such as GNOME Terminal) to use Ctrl+C for copy, it will automatically set Ctrl+Shift+C to send SIGINT. Since I don't use many terminal apps that use modifiers, this works for me, and I set paste to Ctrl+V as well.
I mostly use Alacritty now, so I've set it up to do the same thing for Ctrl+Shift+C. Come to think of it, I still need to do so for VS Code's terminal, for the few times I use it.
> if you set VTE-based terminals (such as GNOME Terminal) to use Ctrl+C for copy, it will automatically set Ctrl+Shift+C to send SIGINT.
I just looked in the preferences for Gnome Terminal and didn't see this option. I think I'm used to the current setup enough that I wouldn't switch anyway, but how do you configure this?
I guess I installed Alacritty right away on this new computer, so I have just found and tested the GNOME Terminal option. You just open Preferences from the hamburger menu, choose Shortcuts on the left, and find "Copy Ctrl+Shift+C". Double-click the Ctrl+Shift+C part and press Ctrl+C.
And I should say I'm not sure if it's sending SIGINT or actually Ctrl+C (or if that's even different). I learned just enough of this to make it work :-) But before, if I started top, I could press Ctrl+C to quit it. Now I can press Ctrl+Shift+C to quit it, and pressing Ctrl+Shift+C on a bash prompt prints "^C" and I get a new line.
The xkb option for PCs is altwin:ctrl_alt_win, I think it's the "Control is mapped to Alt keys, Alt is mapped to Win keys" option if you use GNOME Tweaks, under Alt/Win key behavior. For a Mac keyboard, ctrl:swap_lwin_lctl,ctrl:swap_rwin_rctl, "Swap Left Win key with Left Ctrl key" under Ctrl key position.
I switched to sway, which has very good performances, Firefox under wayland also flies, it's been the fastest browsing experience so far. I can have hundred of tabs open with tree style tabs with no lag whatsoever.
Sway has absolutely zero tearing, for this it is very good.
But, a few issues (mostly wayland and not sway related):
· First you need an AMD card, I don't really have a problem with that as their cards are good now. But if your laptop has nvidia, you are screwed.
· Copy paste still fuzzy
· No global hotkey. Well you have to configure them at the WM level, things like discord push to mute will not work.
· Hard to capture (OBS cannot capture wayland app yet without major tinkering and testing)
· Many popup widgets are positioned on the wrong monitor (like fcitx popup for japanese input)
· Complex X apps are slow or will just crash crash, for example qgis is unusable in X mode and crash in wayland mode, audacity do not update properly…
· Some things require tons of tinkering to get right, like having the proper rendering pipeline, for example using mpv, but when you get it right, you can play 4k movies with 3% cpu usage.
· Tray/notification icons are hard to setup and won't work 100%.
Disclaimer: I use sway on a large desktop workstation, so I cannot comment on issues like power, sleep, external monitors…
I run sway too, but I've kept firefox using X11 instead of native wayland due to the trackpad scrolling in firefox under wayland not being exact (ie: it jumps as if I had a mouse with a clicky scroll wheel instead of exactly following finger motion). In x11, I set `MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1` to get exact trackpad scroll.
OBS can capture wlroots based compositors with the wlrobs[0] plugin. Give it a shot, it's really smooth for me. There's also wl-recorder[1] which is much more light weight if you don't need any of the fancier features. Also, cyanreg is working on txproto[2] which is a much faster/feature rich version of wl-recorder, although I'm not sure it is ready for prime time as it uses a couple bleeding edge libs.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadI also had the issue of a limited keyboard and shortcut keys. I use a Kinesis advantage. I don't have a windows key. So I used alt as a super key. This meant that I often couldn't use application shortcuts. It was a major pain. In hindsight I should have mapped in a windows key and sacrificed one of my thumb buttons for it.
The first is drawing at X's borders when having multiple panels connected leads to flickering and graphical artifacts. This means triggering any window/video to go full screen while you have output on more than one monitor. It's not a unique problem to i3, but most other WM's handle window drawing in a different manner.
The other issue I find more annoying. That's tearing while scrolling and playing video unless a compositor like compton is run. This appears to not be a problem for a lot of people, in the way that using frame interpolation on tv's doesn't bother them. For me though, it drives me nuts. Compton by the way hasn't had development in over 3 years.
https://github.com/yshui/picom
I just don’t want to think about how to move incredibly quickly around the computer. Easy point and click is all the effort I want to muster, sometimes.
Right. This is an important thing to note.
It takes a lot of mental energy to remember all of these things if they are not already imbued into your brain as effortless muscle memory. Sometimes that energy is better off spent solving the problem you're trying to solve. This is why after about a year of using Vim, I still use the mouse once in a while.
I remember once reporting a bug with the Microsoft Terminal (I use WSL 2 on Windows) on Reddit and when I mentioned mouse support didn't work inside of programs like Vim, it was the most down voted comment I ever created on any platform with swarms of folks saying I wasn't using the terminal as it was supposed to and that I must be an idiot for wanting to select text in Vim with a mouse.
Luckily they fixed the bug (it ended up being one of the highest priority bug fixes they had).
The real problem with wayland are all the apps that just don't support it. From emacs, to, e.g., all the electron apps built with older versions of chromium, etc. You can use them seamlessly with Xwayland, but then a lot of things work "weirdly", e.g., HiDPI displays blurry Xwayland apps, applications like obs-studio cannot record some apps, etc.
The the Sway ecosystem main drawbacks are the immaturity of the tools (e.g., waybar (i3bar replacement), wofi (rofi replacement), etc.) and the drawbacks of wlroots (e.g. lack of nvidia support in contrast to gnome and kde, etc.).
Many things kind of "just work" under Wayland, but many things also kind of just don't properly work. Using pipewire to, e.g., stream desktop apps via webchat from firefox/chrome works weirdly, streaming one monitor or one sway workspace from firefox/chrome does not work, capturing one workspace from sway using obs studio in another workspace does not work, etc.
I hope that fullscreen desktop sharing "just works" now that we've released xdg-desktop-portal-wlr[0]. If you have any trouble with it, hit me up on freenode #sway or raise an issue on this project. We're happy to help and looking for a broader user base to help us test it out.
[0] https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
Also, just remembered another neat piece of software: flameshot. It’s basically macOS’s screenshot editor but even better IMO. I’m not sure whether you can bind it to macOS keyboard shortcuts though.
I'm the guy from the sway github issue mentioning that the chrome autoscaling had been fixed, so maybe you need a more up to date chrome, or maybe there was some kind of regression. (I had some other bug with sway to do with the tray, so haven't been using it).
One other suggestion for an alfred/spotlight alternative is dmenu (or bemenu for a wayland compatible one if you go for sway), there's also rofi as an option which does the same thing iirc.
It isn’t. But it still has some rough edges for sure. It highly depends on the hardware you are using. MacBooks are not manufactured to make it easy for alternative OSes.
OP is also trying to use the i3 window manager. It’s barebones, labor intensive and meant for tinkerers and advanced users. If you want an easy plug and play experience you should use a desktop environment.
Newer generations of macbooks just won't work at all. There's no workaround for recent sound (unless it gets reverse engineered) or wifi (unless you rewrite Linux stack to work around broken firmware) devices, and it's likely to only get worse. Here's a good collection for hardware support: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
This is not representative of non-apple brands.
On the other hand, on the pre-2016 models, the components in use are largely off-the-shelf components, much like other manufacturers.
The major difference between Apple laptops and other vendors laptops is that the variation of components in use is significantly smaller on the Apple range, while 'non-apple brands' encompasses a huge variety of different hardware.
I would suspect that if you bought any random laptop, you'd have high odds of picking one that has various components that are not well supported, with even less online support available for you than if you tried it on Apple hardware. If only because the number of people using Apple hardware is so damn high, and the number of people on your particular component configuration is significantly smaller.
[1] https://fedoramagazine.org/coming-soon-fedora-on-lenovo-lapt...
I guess, but my 2007 and 2010 laptops still work OK.
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.
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. This is the absolute best case scenario for a Linux laptop.
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). 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).
To System76's credit, this is the absolute best experience I've ever had with a Linux laptop. Everything else has worked out of the box so far. In competition with other Linux laptops, including Dell systems which come preinstalled with Linux, System76's laptops win unequivocally in my experience. This is no small achievement, and if you're getting a Linux laptop, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them.
But competing with Windows and MacOS, I think this Linux experience is only competitive with the low-end of Windows installations (i.e. cheap netbooks where it's clear the companies didn't spend much time on getting the configuration right). A higher-end Windows laptop or any Mac laptop will require little-to-no tinkering to get things working.
It’s like I live in parallel universe of Linux hardware support to some of you.
Now the Surface Pro on the other hand, was a disastrous time sink.
Sleep and suspend just work. Battery life is good - typically 5-7 hours. Before this I had no problems with a Thinkpad and even on a MacBook Air (2012).
Maybe I'm just so used to Linux now that I don't notice problems since I've been on it since 1998-ish except for a short stint on OS X.
Dell support is terrible so I can't recommend the XPS. When I had a problem with the battery they wouldn't replace it under warranty since I was not in the country where I bought it, which is total BS.
A lot of these issues are minor, and easily fixed, so I suspect the "parallel universe" effect is indicative of a willingness to overlook small issues. The font issue I found is hardly critical, for example, and I suspect a lot of developers would just live with it.
I do make sure that the hardware is compatible with Linux beforehand. This typically involves buying prior generation hardware (which works out because you can get them for much less), and avoiding Nvidia hardware entirely.
Hp x360 requires zero fiddling, works out the box.
Dell precision 5570 requires zero fiddling, works out of the box.
Samsung Chronos 7 requires zero fiddling, works out of the box.
Every laptop in the past 6 years worked with Linux straight out the gate. Including acpi sleep, graphics acceleration, and wireless networking. Compare that to spending 8 hours last night trying to get windows 10 to run on a 7 year old system
I can assure you it is not 1999 anymore and things are a lot smoother today when you're not trying to coax proprietary black-box appliances into doing things they were explicitely designed not to do.
I know I don't want to play around with my desktop just get work done and for Macbooks, its either macOS or Windows with WSL2 which the former gets out of the way and "just works" and no need for tweaking.
Very much not true these days. Linux on laptops is (in overwhelming majority) a great experience today. I suggest you just try out one of the live images for Ubuntu or Fedora.
On a tangential note I'm surprised that it's still relatively common on HN to see comments like "Linux on desktop doesn't work" or "Java is slow". That was 20 years ago. The world has moved on.
Same thing with Java. Sure, it's not as slow as it was 20 years ago, but it's still slow and painful in comparison to compiled languages.
I've used Linux actively for 30 years or more, and I've never had a "great experience" once with it. It's a tool that I have to beat into submission to get it to do whatever ridiculous workflow someone dreamed up that can't be done on a real operating system.
"The Linux kernel was conceived and created in 1991"
Something tells me your opinion about Java is stronger than your experience. Java IS a compiled language. It just happens at runtime. https://www.oracle.com/technical-resources/articles/java/arc...
I see this as yet another example of people here repeating a severely outdated statements about the JVM ecosystem.
I'm under the impression that you are not interested in educating yourself on the topic, however if I'm mistaken, have a look at some reasons why Java can be as fast or faster than c/cpp:
- TLAB (thread-local allocation buffer)
- Escape analysis
- Mono- and bi-morphic callsite optimizations
- JIT in general (dead code elimination, implicit null checks, CHA-based optimizations, etc).
Also, you don't have to use Oracle JVMs. There's IBM's J9, OpenJDK-based Zulu, or commercial JVM from Azul (Zing).
And no, the actual HFT stuff is written in C++.
This is how I know you have no idea what you're talking about.
Source: been working on low-latency HFT Java apps for shops like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS and others for 10+ years.
Not going to reply any more. Not worth it.
Not worth it, indeed.
By running more-commonly-used software on more-commonly-used hardware, you're more likely to find that someone has built in the driver support you need into the OS.
I've run Ubuntu, Fedora, and Manjaro on various Thinkpads and XPSs and it's always Just Worked. I also have Ubuntu running on an old (2012?) macintosh air and that also Just Works.
It's currently running Mint and lives behind my TV as a basic media player/streaming PC. It's about as fast as you'd imagine given its age, but networking is fine, it can output 1920x1080 and stereo sound out of the HDMI port, and it does just fine with both the bluetooth keyboard and Logitech MX Master mouse (via their proprietary little USB receiver).
None of that stuff needed any weird setup or hoop-jumping. All of the tweaking I did was just UI stuff--finding a balance between performance and making it pretty/intuitive enough for others in the house to use it without headaches.
Every time I try it, I end up fixing a bunch of minor and sometimes major problems that take an amount of effort significantly higher than it would to just get things working on MacOS or Windows.
I have seen notable progress every time I try it though. In fact, my latest attempt is mostly an exception to my experience of all of the other times I've tried it.
I have only been running Linux Mint for about 3 weeks, but so far I only have two issues. One of them is significant, and the other one isn't really that big of a deal.
The significant issue is that my Gigabit Ethernet seems much slower than it was on Window when I attempt to download large files. However, my Wireless AC seems to be fine so its not the end of the world.
The minor issue is that Steam refuses to launch most games on my primary monitor the first time I open them. Even after opening and configuring the games individually, some of them still refuse to run on the correct monitor unless I set the resolution to something lower than the Monitor's native resolution. This happens both for games that are native to Linux and games that are running with Proton.
I think this time around the downsides are outweighed by the benefits of running Linux as a primary OS, so I am planning on sticking with it for a long time, but either of these issues would be a valid deal breaker for any reasonable person.
Your post seems to imply that its a myth that Linux doesn't deliver a near perfect desktop experience. If you haven't had any problems that's great. I'm sure a ton of people have no issues or almost no issues. A great desktop OS should serve all common use cases with virtually no issues that require a non-layman's level of technical knowledge to fix. Based on my experience with MacOS, Windows, and Linux, none of them are perfect, but the latter has the most work to do to meet that standard.
Well, I have used Linux as a desktop OS consistently since 22 years now. I started with Thinkpads and they did work well for me, and that's what defines my expectations today - that a laptop works without glitch. And the last two laptops I god were supplied by the respective organizations IT department, so they took care that it works.
On the other hand, I am kinda stuck with an Thinkpad X220 because I like the size, the matte display, the great keyboard, and to read my email or work on something in the train, I absolutely do not need more power than it has.
The key for all that is to buy compatible hardware, and research it before spending the money, not after.
The X220 was an amazing machine. I've had a couple of Thinkpad T series over the years and they were my favorite laptops. The keyboards were great.
I'm hoping the trend of more vendors selling Linux laptops will continue. I think there's a good chance that large companies supporting the OS will lead to a more maintenance free / a more stable experience for a wider range of use cases.
I don't dislike Linux. I simply wish it worked better for my purposes. IMO the best OS would have Windows' Mouse drivers and gaming support, MacOS early-mid 2010's Workflow/UI and touchpad drivers, and Linux's everything else. I work with all 3 major OSs on a daily basis and there are things that each of them does better than the others. Interestingly, the thing I find to be poorly implemented on all 3 is Multi-Monitor support.
I mean, I've run into all kinds of issues trying to install Windows as well, including digging through random vendors' websites looking for drivers. But most people's experience is fine, because the laptop vendor provided all of that out-of-the-box.
IDK, I finally broke down and replaced my rickety ~8 year old laptop and everything (aside from the fingerprint reader) worked right out the box -- surprisingly since it is also a fairly new model so I expected some tinkering while the drivers caught up to mainline linux.
Actually...I can't remember the last time (other than Gnome being stupid with defaults) I've had to mess with a basic install and I've been using linux as my primary OS since around '00.
You'd still have problems on other machines with things like winmodems and integrated graphics, so you'd have to get into downloading driver modules or rebuilding kernels.
In this case, MBP is uncommon HW for Linux users, and things may not work that well. I imagine windows 10 would have similar problems there.
Microsoft allows resellers to use “supported by windows” marketing material on their hardware they sell only if they pass a stringent set of automated tests. So a windows hw provider wouldn’t “have similar problems here” because their consumer hardware would have been designed and tested for windows.
Microsoft set the standard in quality assurance for backwards compatibility
Macbooks have become increasingly difficult for Linux to work on, in some cases it has been made more difficult.
Just took my 7yr old laptop that wouldn't boot windows in reasonable time and installed a brand new Ubuntu to give away to a non technical person.
Had another machine, a strong one with i7 and dedicated card running windows8. Wanted to upgrade it to windows10. The installer bricked my bios. After people who actually know what they're doing reflashed my bios, the windows installation was theoretically working but it took literally 10 minutes to start up a browser. Meanwhile Linux was fine booted from pendrive. I gave it to a friend to get the disk replaced. He wiped everything clean and reinstalled and got it working.
I guess I'm biased and that's why I'm getting the opposite experience to what should happen... ;)
FWIW these laptops were rock solid and ran Linux just fine. Sleep also seemed to work as well(I'd have tried hibernation if I knew how. That's my preferred mode on Windows to save unnecessary power consumption).
I was quite impressed and while my personal daily needs are fully Windows-based, I would not hesitate to recommend those laptops to anyone who wants to get away from Windows.
If you want CentOS or Red Hat, I've had good luck picking any Ubuntu Dell that is also listed as being tested and certified for Red Hat at https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/search/#/ecosystem/Red%2.... The only real hassle has been when I wanted to use an Nvidia driver, which requires a driver reinstall after kernel updates, although I believe you can now avoid this with DKMS. I expect that Fedora would also work without issue on any of these.
But 3 years ago I tried Fedora on an Asus N56VZ and it's been flawless. Well, less issues than Windows anyway. That's my definition of flawless.
I will admit it's a bit of a hardware and distro lottery though.
However it's nice to be able to re-purpose old hardware, even if it's a bit of a hill to climb :)
I own two Thinkpads, a 5th generation X1 carbon and a 2nd generation X1 extreme. Both very nice machines, but not perfect.
On the newer machine in particular, the X1 extreme, I've had many annoying issues.
Suspend did not work for over a year after purchase. If the laptop was left with the lid shut it would run out of battery in a couple of hours. It finally started working with Fedora 32. I don't know if it was fixed because of kernel updates or firmware updates. The laptop still uses way too much power when suspended, but at least I can stick it in my laptop bag for a few hours.
Until Fedora shipped with Gnome running under Wayland, the integrated graphics were too slow to acceptably render the desktop at 4K, which is the native resolution of the panel, and the only resolution choice I am presented with in Gnome. I enabled the nvidia GPU with the proprietary driver, but then I'd get less than 2 hours of battery, and the thing could cook an egg. Compared to my 2012 Macbook Pro, which also has integrated graphics, the experience is much worse, even today, with Wayland.
Battery life is not as good as Windows by default. For some reason, every Linux user with a laptop has to install tlp and powertop just to get decent battery life. Kernel development seems to consistently focus on this, and I'm confident than the situation is incrementally improving.
The synaptics touchpad is hot garbage. If you compare it to a Mac's touchpad, it's just a tragedy how bad it is. I've used both the synaptics driver with Xorg and libinput with Wayland. There is noticeable lag when moving the mouse cursor from a resting position. The cursor will stay where it is, and then jump to where it ought to have moved to. This produces a very jarring UX. Interestingly, the nipple mouse does not have this problem. Finally, the scrolling gestures don't always work, depending where on the touchpad you initiate them.
The keyboard would reproducibly lose keystrokes! This was not fixed until last week by a Lenovo firmware update, and it produced a lot of irritating typos when conversing with coworkers.
Not that I care, but the fingerprint reader doesn't work.
The sound is too quiet even at full volume, so you have to tweak the system config to allow you to adjust it past its default max volume.
I use Linux as a workstation operating system because I write software destined to run on Linux. Despite these problems, I would gladly take them over having to virtualize my entire workflow on a Mac, which I find incredibly painful to do. But these quality problems have left me wondering if Lenovo was the right laptop brand to buy. I left a negative review with Lenovo, after they solicited me to write one, and instead of trying to resolve the problems, they simply refused to publish the review.
Specially when FOSS gets into the way and a perfectly working driver blob was replaced by WIP FOSS driver, just because it feels good to push it down on the users, for example the way broadcom driver got replaced a couple of years ago.
Unless you run it on very customized special built systems like what Apple tends to produce. Same might apply to some other vendors as well.
Just like you buy an Apple machine to run MacOS well, you can easily buy a machine to run Linux well (Dell, Lenovo, System76 are just a few manufacturers who build MacBoook class hardware with Linux preinstalled).
Debatable. I have had an absolutely terrible experience with Linux on a new ThinkPad. System76 doesn’t have as great a build quality AFAIK. Dell is fine, but they don’t have anything with preinstalled Linux anymore.
Installing any non-free linux OS will grant you an complete out-of-the-box experience, imo superior to Windows/Mac. Even Nvidia Optimus powered laptops are fully supported.
Hit me up if you managed to run windows on the same hardware as the OP. Or even running MacOS on any other computer. I am wondering if your documentation would be more concise.
so long..
That may be your experience, but it's not universal. I wanted to do this, regardless of how many hacks it took, but I'm on the new-and-broken model unfortunately.
I have a 2019 mbp16. It does not "work well". For me, the graphics driver crashes me out of my login session pretty much daily, the network stack occasionally shits itself (reboot) and various internal processes (the... window server?) like to use >50% CPU for no reason at all.
Looking around, I'm not the only one who has issues.
Probably yours is broken somehow. Would recommend bringing it in for service while it's in warranty.
My whole shop uses Macs and nobody has this issue. I’m on one of three different variant MBPs (including one like yours) all day every day - literally around 18 hours a day - and I’ve never seen it.
That’s why I would really suggest opening a ticket on it, especially with a new laptop. I suspect there’s a hardware issue.
It's rife with issues. Power management is odd, brightness sometimes doesn't work, and most annoyingly, the keyboard and trackpad sometimes stops working after 2-3 weeks of 24/7 operation.
I solved most of the issues by disabling the GUI and just letting it boot to the console. I also set mitigations to off in GRUB and it ran cooler. Not ideal with security in mind, but it's just a home server after all.
I get better battery life, because I can turn off things I don't need.
I don't have to restart the audio service before every Zoom call.
I don't have to reboot to get external monitors to work again.
My Yubikey doesn't drain the battery in a few hours.
My system boots to the login screen in the time it takes for the Apple logo to finish showing.
I don't have to fight with the App store to keep software up-to-date.
I don't have to work around a shitty developer experience with homebrew or docker/virtual machines.
I never have to deal with Xcode!
In any case, I probably spent a tenth of the time setting everything up, tweaks and all, than I did unfucking the default install of OS X to be usable.
> I get better battery life, because I can turn off things I don't need.
I had horrible experiences with Linux and battery life on laptops. Fans on all the time, poor or absent support for sleep and hibernate... Proprietary systems consistently performed better for me in that area.
> I don't have to restart the audio service before every Zoom call.
That's really weird. I wouldn't even know how to restart the audio service on OsX.
> I don't have to reboot to get external monitors to work again.
I have occasional issues in that area, but typically it just takes a bit of "nagging" osx to re-detect the monitor, like bringing up the System Preferences panel related to wallpapers.
> My system boots to the login screen in the time it takes for the Apple logo to finish showing.
One shouldn't need to reboot OsX more than once weekly, or less, but yeah, boot times in OsX have gone to the dogs in the last few years. Windows absolutely smokes it, I guess some Linux distros would too.
> I don't have to fight with the App store to keep software up-to-date.
It's been alright until recently, but I agree that the last few moves to persuade us to move to "Vistalina" have been annoying.
> I probably spent a tenth of the time setting everything up, tweaks and all, than I did unfucking the default install of OS X
That's really the opposite for me. The time I always end up spending on stuff like fonts (!) on the average Linux desktop, is just ridiculous.
https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie
https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie/wiki
For whatever reason, fan control does not work out of the box (so it gets way too hot), but it worked for me after installing mbpfan: https://github.com/linux-on-mac/mbpfan
I could probably make the full-time switch to Linux, if that was the bulk of what I did too. And I do a fair bit of writing and coding. But the majority what I do on my [OSX] computers is Art & Design related. So I need Photoshop and Illustrator and there is nothing available for Linux that even comes close. Inkscape and [especially] The Gimp aren't even in the same league. The only semi-decent graphic design app I've come across on Linux is Krita. But even that is quite limited and more a Painter replacement than a Photoshop or Illustrator one.
Ironically, there is actually better quality graphic design software available for Android [with that Linux core] than there is for Linux itself. I can almost replace Photoshop with Ibis Paint on my S-Pen enabled Samsung tablet [although the picture is a lot less rosy with regards to vector graphics].
That said, I have installed Linux on an old MacBook and Mac Mini, which has given them a new lease of life. But the former I just use for hacking about on and the latter runs Kodi as my media centre. I don't actually do any work on them.
Once setup, Linux runs fine on both those machines, for what I want it to do. But, boy, is getting to that stage in the first place a complete pain in the ballsack!
Both machines have Nvidia graphics cards and even now [probably a decade after I first encountered this problem] Ubuntu's, supposedly user friendly GUI software installer will quite happily 'recommend' you to install an Nvidia driver which will brick your Ubuntu installation with a black screen on reboot.
Now, after running into this problem several times, over the years [I fall for it every time, in the vain hope that Ubuntu might have actually fixed this], I know how to repair things. But it involves a lot of swearing and command line delving into the innards of Grub's configuration.
Imagine some non-techie person deciding to give Linux a try. They boot from the live CD... everything looks fine, so they install. They reboot after the install and either:
1: If they selected "download 3rd party drivers" during installation, boot to a black screen
or
2: If they didn't select 3rd party drivers at install time, they boot to a seemingly working installation, which then recommends they install a 3rd party driver, which will subsequently cause booting to a black screen.
And, as I say, this has been going on for over a decade. And this is with Ubuntu which is the most newbie-approachable distro. In all that time, no-one thought it worthwhile adding a simple sanity check so the installer would NOT recommend installing an Nvidia driver which would break Ubuntu if the OS itself had been installed in UEFI mode!
> .... Both machines have >>> Nvidia graphics cards<<< ....
Yeah. That's painful. Don't do that.
And exactly the reason why it will NEVER be the 'Year of Linux on the Desktop'. It's the Linux equivalent of Steve Jobs's infamous "You're holding it wrong". If someone offers a valid criticism then blame the user. It's so much easier than actually addressing the problem, no matter how glaring.
I wasn't criticising some obscure edge case here, where someone hacks about and messes something up. This is the official GUI installer, which will actually recommend you install something that will, to all intents and purposes, brick your computer. How newbie-friendly can you get!
Even Steve Jobs might have thought twice, before blaming the user for that one!
I have two macbooks (white plastic) one with Tiger installed and another with Leopard an iPad 1 ( They all are in working condition) Its a shame to not be able to use the machines just because it is not supported.
I would assume that they are good enough for a kid to surf websites and help do his/her homework. Listen to songs while browsing pdfs . Lack of support should not mean that perfectly usable hardware is junked.
After covid, there are a lot of kids in Indian villages whoes education is dependent on online education. Maybe these laptops could be made usable for them. ( Not everyone can afford a mobile phone)
Please do let me know if your linux installs will work for my case as well ( your case covers the Macbook Pro instead of just macbooks)
PS: I myself use i3wm on a lenovo machine. ( Not very happy with Lenovo but its ok ok )
That hardware isn't as valuable as you might think it is. The last plastic Macbook was made in 2010. It's value as a productivity tool is very limited today.
That said, e-Waste is a major problem, which is why in recent years, in the west, companies are required to collect a "recycling fee" on purchase of computer equipment to pay for the eventual recycling of the physical devices. Coincidentally, this was in part prompted by images of children in India and other developing countries picking over toxic E-waste from the west.
However, it's not really feasible for a company to support a device as old as your 2010 plastic Macbook from a software perspective, because software evolves too rapidly to run well on hardware that old. These are not desktop workstation towers for which you can swap out every component for newer ones.
> After covid, there are a lot of kids in Indian villages whoes education is dependent on online education. Maybe these laptops could be made usable for them.
The demands of common 2020 computer use-cases will render the hardware/software unusable, even when running a recent Linux distro.
So they will probably not be useful for remote-education. Basic things like watching educational videos will likely be painfully slow - if they work at all - constrained by the hardware's ability to decode and display the video.
If you do get these common use cases working on that old a device (which would be a fun and worthy hacking project by itself), if you give it to someone else to use, you will also have to deal with the problem of supporting it, and then ensuring their responsible disposal (i.e. not in the village organic waste dump) when they do reach the end of their usable lives. None of this is trivial to accomplish.
Admirable effort by the developers, though.
It's been very disruptive to have Apple quality tank, and I'm glad they finally went back to the good keyboard, but at least there's another game in town for developers who want a quality laptop and a real OS.
I found out that I can update a lot of components of my early 2015 MBP, so I'm going to get a 512GB or 1TB hard drive and see if I can make a Linux partition.
I'll try it again at some point, but disable TreeStyleTabs, that might have been one of the causes for the slowness.
I don't think it's intended to be like this, not sure where to begin troubleshooting.
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND DEFAULT=1
And relating to the article, i3 is the sole reason I use Linux. Such a great window manager.
I’m not sure if the lack of WiFi issues is because Fedora tends to stay pretty up to date kernel wise.
EDIT: to clarify - I had zero issues with having to to anything special to get Wifi working - there are still intermittent issues with the driver that happens maybe once or twice a week
If that's the main reason, how about yabai on Mac? https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai
> The primary function of yabai is tiling window management; automatically modifying your window layout using a binary space partitioning algorithm to allow you to focus on the content of your windows without distractions. Additional features of yabai include focus-follows-mouse, disabling animations for switching spaces, creating spaces past the limit of 16 spaces, and much more.
Customisation and configuration are also plainly inferior to i3/sway, plus there's the complicated installation process and necessity to disable apple's walled garden features to get full functionality.
At home I have i3/sway, which is a nice polished user experience; there's no comparison really.
[0] https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1481#issuecomment-6404...
I could be wrong though, a while back I did a lot of tweaks to beat the concept of hdpi and variable screen resolutions into my computer, so I don't exactly have a "clean" setup, and it could be something else, but the fonts look crisp on both the low res and high res screens.
I can't say whether this is anything to do with whether it's a build with/without ozone, but it appears to work now (sorry don't know much more than that!)
[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...
[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/sway-hidpi-git/
My thumbs are well trained to use the keys to the sides of the space bar as the main modifier. My solution to the Command/Control issue is to swap the key positions with xkd so that it's always [Win][Alt][Ctrl][Space][Ctrl][Compose]. (Since Macs and PCs swap Alt and Win/Cmd, you need different xkb options for each type of keyboard.)
As for terminals, if you set VTE-based terminals (such as GNOME Terminal) to use Ctrl+C for copy, it will automatically set Ctrl+Shift+C to send SIGINT. Since I don't use many terminal apps that use modifiers, this works for me, and I set paste to Ctrl+V as well.
I mostly use Alacritty now, so I've set it up to do the same thing for Ctrl+Shift+C. Come to think of it, I still need to do so for VS Code's terminal, for the few times I use it.
I just looked in the preferences for Gnome Terminal and didn't see this option. I think I'm used to the current setup enough that I wouldn't switch anyway, but how do you configure this?
And I should say I'm not sure if it's sending SIGINT or actually Ctrl+C (or if that's even different). I learned just enough of this to make it work :-) But before, if I started top, I could press Ctrl+C to quit it. Now I can press Ctrl+Shift+C to quit it, and pressing Ctrl+Shift+C on a bash prompt prints "^C" and I get a new line.
For Alacritty, here's what I've changed
The xkb option for PCs is altwin:ctrl_alt_win, I think it's the "Control is mapped to Alt keys, Alt is mapped to Win keys" option if you use GNOME Tweaks, under Alt/Win key behavior. For a Mac keyboard, ctrl:swap_lwin_lctl,ctrl:swap_rwin_rctl, "Swap Left Win key with Left Ctrl key" under Ctrl key position.Sway has absolutely zero tearing, for this it is very good.
But, a few issues (mostly wayland and not sway related):
· First you need an AMD card, I don't really have a problem with that as their cards are good now. But if your laptop has nvidia, you are screwed.
· Copy paste still fuzzy
· No global hotkey. Well you have to configure them at the WM level, things like discord push to mute will not work.
· Hard to capture (OBS cannot capture wayland app yet without major tinkering and testing)
· Many popup widgets are positioned on the wrong monitor (like fcitx popup for japanese input)
· Complex X apps are slow or will just crash crash, for example qgis is unusable in X mode and crash in wayland mode, audacity do not update properly…
· Some things require tons of tinkering to get right, like having the proper rendering pipeline, for example using mpv, but when you get it right, you can play 4k movies with 3% cpu usage.
· Tray/notification icons are hard to setup and won't work 100%.
Disclaimer: I use sway on a large desktop workstation, so I cannot comment on issues like power, sleep, external monitors…
[0] https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs
[1] https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder
[2] https://github.com/cyanreg/txproto