Acid

And that is exactly why I bought an M2 Air this year, price vs performance nothing beats the MacBooks at the moment.

When my m2 air is eventually supported by linuxbproperly the debian installation will happen.

lack of easy access to advanced utilities

Me and you have very different experiences to this, at work I’ve found MacOS the easiest of the three to sort out.

I’ll give you a recent windows example, A PC comes in for repair with a b450 MSI board no audio on the Front panel or the rear I/O. Naturally we install all the drivers off the MSI web page except windows won’t even detect the sound card. Throw on a Linux USB live environment instantly detected.

Naturally we’re like no worries let’s use the inbuilt Windows tool to reset the PC with a cloud download, nope that doesn’t fix it. Required a complete reinstall from a USB. This was windows 10 22h2 iirc.

At work I see Windows/Mac/Linux daily and Windows, gives me the most trouble on a daily basis. With Mac/Linux most things you can fix from the terminal pretty quickly, or with Mac just use the inbuilt reset tool no matter how much a customer fucks up their machine.

I haven’t needed to tech support on any of my Apple stuff in the entire time I’ve owned them, I have at home both a Linux server and a Mac mini running as a headless server. Guess how many times I’ve had to fix the Mac mini 0.

My iPhone I’ve had 0 issues with and my M2 Air which I use for work has had 0 issues.

I don’t really see a situation where the sorting out a mac would be troublesome it’s pretty much all simple as hell.

Oh and fun fact, I have done tech support for apple stuff on a daily basis as part of my job as a store manager of a retail tech store and I’m constantly thrown problems from Android/iOS Devcies as well as MacOS, Linux & Windows Devices and guess which ones give me the most problems.

Sure and with that trade off I have a rock solid experience with no issues at all.

Sometimes you get tired of android and the jank and want shit that just works so you can get on with your day and just focus on other things.

Cause I use an Apple TV and an iPhone?

For YouTube premium I just did the whole vpn to turkey and pay for a year upfront which was like £12 for the year

Well there’s the fact that it’s somewhat true as for example if you use a chromium based browser on Linux hardware acceleration isn’t enabled by default and borderline doesn’t work a lot of the time.

Doesn’t sound so bad till you realise what it does to battery life on a laptop.

I love Linux and we are so close but it’s small things like that, which prevent me getting friends and family to use it consistently.

You know that’s not a Manjaro problem that’s a user problem, you’re specifically warned that AUR compatibility is not guaranteed with Manjaro https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository

But people often ignore this and then complain that Manjaro isn’t stable.

And yes Manjaro is fully rolling just because they delay packages a week doesn’t stop it being rolling, that’s like calling tumbleweed not a rolling release?

I’m not arguing that Manjaro is better or worse than Arch just that if you use it as intended it functions correctly and is a good way to learn Linux and Arch.

I think only endeavour and Manjaro still hold any use of the arch based distros.

Endeavour generally has nice tools and is pretty much what you’d do with the install script so it just saves a few steps.

Manjaro because it’s a gateway into learning arch for better or worse.

But other than those two I don’t see the point of any other arch distros other than to be made for the sake of it.

(I forgot steam os 3, but that’s a different topic)

I refused to buy Apple products for 15 years. Recently I grabbed a whole set of them and honestly, there’s only one thing I can say. It just fucking works.

I’ve been using Linux/Windows for the better part of two decades and I’m just at a point where I don’t care to tinker anymore unless I have to, I just wanna have stuff that works especially when it’s related to work stuff. Apple stuff is just reliable in that sense, oh my Android phone decided to crash on itself? Yeah my iPhone has had 0 crashes all year I’ve owned it. My M2 Macbook Air has superior battery life and portability at a more reasonable price than pretty much any competitor on the market?

Yes certain Apple things are beyond stupid expensive, Hello Apple TV 4K 128gb being £180 on launch?

But when I want something to work and not have to think about it, the apple stuff fits that need.

What would you describe as large?

The company I work for is a multinational at this point and exclusively uses Google for Mail/Docs. We have I think 600 stores now across 12 countries.

This is pretty much the best answer, Debian with flatpak is your best option as it will be the most familiar and the safest bet.

Another alternative is to go the Arch route, which comes with its own headaches.

I haven’t seen all of them in person, but the other day someone showed me the StarLite which is their budget laptop and honestly it really surprised me. The only thing with similar build quality I’ve seen at such a low price was the google pixel book go which can be had used absurdly cheap.

I think they’re the company I’d use to buy Linux laptops if I used one daily, these days I use a MacBook Air m2 simply because the battery life beats all and for how I work that’s what I need most.

If you’re genuinely looking for Linux Laptops I’d take a look at https://starlabs.systems/pages/starfighter

There’s also https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/index.php

Honestly Plex/Emby/Jellyfin whichever you prefer is a gamechanger because if you have a large library of content then it just cuts the cord from the subscription services.

I’ve always been happy to pay for them until I went on holiday last January and realised that none of my services were working due to going to a country that was out of the way and the only way to access them was to use a VPN.

So having my own Netflix is a great thing.

Tailscale while doing the above is also really cool