Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
The author doesn&#x27;t state whether they installed Linux on a laptop that shipped with Windows, or bought an actual &quot;Linux laptop&quot;. There&#x27;s a huge difference, like reviewing a Hackintosh and saying &quot;Macs are shite&quot;.<p>I did the same. I accidentally fubar&#x27;d my lovely 2015 Macbook by pouring a beer into it. I bought a Dell XPS and dual-booted Linux, which kinda worked but wasn&#x27;t great. Then I bought a Purism 14, which has been awesome (after some teething troubles with the build quality).<p>I&#x27;m kinda tempted by the M1 goodness. But to be honest, I&#x27;m not happy at all about going back into the walled garden of MacOS.<p>I guess my main point of difference with the OP is that I never bought into the Apple ecosystem in the first place - I didn&#x27;t use mail.app or calendar.app much. I never liked the Apple applications, they never seemed happy letting me take control of my life, and always seemed opinionated about what I should be doing.<p>I&#x27;m now running i3wm on PureOS (debian-derived), tweaked to how I like it. And it&#x27;s great. Couldn&#x27;t be happier. Except for Zoom&#x27;s Linux client, (but Spotify&#x27;s Linux client is now pretty good, so there&#x27;s hope!). And odd config issues with the USB ethernet.<p>But the point is that I can go fiddle with those issues, and learn how Linux USB ethernet works, and generally mess about with my setup however I like. Yes I might brick it. But that&#x27;s better than &quot;oh it&#x27;s gone dark, I have to take it to an Apple Store to get it fixed&quot;. Which is f-all use in a pandemic lockdown (or in rural SE Asia, which is where I was when I poured the beer in the Macbook in the first place). It&#x27;s MY computer, not Apple&#x27;s. That&#x27;s actually important, not an ideological stance that doesn&#x27;t matter in practice.<p>Because Apple stuff doesn&#x27;t &quot;just work&quot; any more. And if it doesn&#x27;t &quot;just work&quot; there&#x27;s f-all you can do except take it to the Store. And usually they&#x27;ll just shrug and hand you a new one, and hope you backed everything up to their servers. I mean, sure, that&#x27;s OK. But it&#x27;s not what I want.