Honestly, this sort of thing should be considered “shippable”, and the fact that it isn’t has been holding Linux back for 10+ years.
I’ve been waiting decades for a Linux distro that just buys a few commonly produced laptops that are likely to be produced for a few years, and then tests the crap out of them and applies this sort of polish.
Current gen thinkpads probably would have fit the bill for the last ~30 years, for example. I was hoping the pinebook pro would be this, but it has a few severe hardware issues (suspend battery life, DSP noise) that don’t look like they’ll be fixed. Similarly, the XPS line has the capacitor whine problem, and are based on Intel (which has been exclusively shipping power hungry hot messes for the last 10 years).
If the M[1-3] end up being the models where Linux finally gains stable support for reasonable laptop hardware, then so be it.
The value proposition of M2 and M3 have been comparatively weaker, but on launch, the M1 macbooks blew everything else out of the water in terms of bang for buck, IMHO. You could perhaps beat them in terms of raw compute, but once you factor in the 120Hz HDR panel, excellent keyboard, sleek but still relatively robust chassis, it's an all-round winner.
Of course, it lacked Linux support on launch, but that's why the Asahi project is so great. It's providing that missing component of system integration.
Framework, System76, etc. are producing some cool laptops, and I'd consider them if I were looking to buy a new laptop today - but I'm not. I have an M1 Pro MBP in my hands right now, and I have no need to upgrade it any time soon.
Until you factor back in buying a usable config. And the fact that Asahi is still not totally feature complete. Three years on and DP alt mode for example is still a WIP.
>I’ve been waiting decades for a Linux distro that just buys a few commonly produced laptops that are likely to be produced for a few years, and then tests the crap out of them and applies this sort of polish.
nearly every major distribution does this to some degree and has had for years and years; whether or not you're happy with that level of 'polish' is another thing, though.
> I’ve been waiting decades for a Linux distro that just buys a few commonly produced laptops that are likely to be produced for a few years, and then tests the crap out of them and applies this sort of polish.
I suspect that the laptop market is far too fragmented to make this worthwhile
Do you know how many different models of laptop that HP alone is currently selling? One Hundred and Twenty. And that list has regular churn. You might think they'll all be using the same firmware and chipsets but you would be wrong. There are dozens of configurations, some older, some newer, some higher performance, etc... It's a huge mess.
I know. So take OpenBSD for example. That works best on older Thinkpads. For developers personal use they focused on making those work well enough. They care less about the other models of Lenovo laptops. For Dell you would focus on XPS only, for example.
> I’ve been waiting decades for a Linux distro that just buys a few commonly produced laptops that are likely to be produced for a few years, and then tests the crap out of them and applies this sort of polish.
So who is going to do all that work?
I bought a laptop that has RGB LEDs in the keyboard. I didn't particularly mind not having control over them on Linux but the problem was they defaulted to the brightest purest blue color imaginable. Booting Windows just to run the shitty manufacturer's software was unsustainable so I reverse engineered it and made a Linux user space driver with libusb.
That took a significant amount of time and effort. Just a bunch of LEDs, it seemed like a simple task. I actually had to record the USB messages with wireshark and then figure out what they meant, correlating the bits sent with my physical inputs. Hundreds of LEDs.
I simply can't fathom what it would take to apply polish like speaker safety to my own laptop. I honestly didn't even know there was a safety risk involved before I read this thread. Do these Linux distributions really have so much money in the bank that users can expect them to buy hardware to test stuff like this on? It's hard enough to ship software that works at all.
"I’ve been waiting decades for a Linux distro that just buys a few commonly produced laptops that are likely to be produced for a few years, and then tests the crap out of them and applies this sort of polish."
I’ve been waiting decades for a Linux distro that just buys a few commonly produced laptops that are likely to be produced for a few years, and then tests the crap out of them and applies this sort of polish.
Current gen thinkpads probably would have fit the bill for the last ~30 years, for example. I was hoping the pinebook pro would be this, but it has a few severe hardware issues (suspend battery life, DSP noise) that don’t look like they’ll be fixed. Similarly, the XPS line has the capacitor whine problem, and are based on Intel (which has been exclusively shipping power hungry hot messes for the last 10 years).
If the M[1-3] end up being the models where Linux finally gains stable support for reasonable laptop hardware, then so be it.