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?

  • mako
    3·
    4 years ago

    You can customize keyboard shortcuts with most linux ditros (and also Ubuntu that ship with Dell, or Pop!_OS which is a spin off of Ubuntu and ships with System76). I’d be more concerned about the applications that I may or may not be able to install. So now coming to the hardware part. Battery performance is marginally better because the kernels are usually modified to suit the open hardware better. I’ve used the Dell XPS 13 for a few days and it works really well IMO. It even lasts as long as a MacBook Pro on a single battery charge with similar usage. I haven’t personally used System76 machines but I’ve heard some really good things about them, and are comparable to the Dell from what my colleagues told me. I use only Linux distros on my HP laptop that came with Win10 and I’ve not had any major problems. The only issue i had was long back when the Wifi driver for the RTL8723 was misconfigured so I had to do it manually. Other than that even if you choose to install it on your older laptop, you won’t need to do any sort of hacks on the hardware or software. My advice: get a laptop, try it out for yourself and see how you adjust before making the leap and spending nearly $1K for a well configured Dell or maybe more for a System76.