I’ve had laptops with linux before, but linux was never the original laptop OS and modifying the configuration was always necessary. It used to be fun to hack and modify an OS on an old laptop but I guess if I’m going to spend 600 or 700 bucks (or more!) I’d rather not have to worry about modifications.
One of my worries is that in the past I’ve experienced bad or terrible changes to battery life/performance after installing linux. I’m guessing that that won’t be the case with a linux native laptop? Any experience… (dell, system76,…)? I remember trying to fix this in various ways that the internet had suggested but it never came out as I wanted.
My other worry is the keyboard and shortcuts. I’ve been using a mac at work which in my experience has a fairly different keyboard short cuts, is that still the case? (is this distro dependent?) I remember always having to modify cut and paste for terminals to match the browser’s cut and paste short cuts in ubuntu. This always seemed silly. Again not sure if I want to do this if I’m shelling out a significant amount of money.
Any advice or stories about going from a mac-unix-ish setup to a pure linux setup?
Should I stop trying and stick with macs?
I wouldn’t care at all about Linux being preinstalled - just about every laptop will run fine with Linux, the “comes with Linux preinstalled” part sounds like cheap marketing, as most Linux users (such as yourself) would have no problems installing the OS on their own. Claims of improved support sounds dubious as well. As for the laptop, what kind of workflow are you looking at? Personally, I’d wait for new Thinkpad T400 series with AMD Zen 2 CPUs to come out (I expect this to happen around this autumn) as they have superior performance and power savings. Also, having AMD means better Linux support.
On many convertibles the drivers of the fingerprint scanner and the 2in1 detection won’t work on Linux. If you buy one of those with linux preinstalled you can be sure that these features will work