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4 years old MacBook Pro user here.
I'd have ignored this post if you only had wrote about Windows Vs Mac.
Buddy you are so wrong about "Linux".
Idk what distro you are using, maybe Ubuntu 18 on a cheap 14 inch 2008 acer laptop, but linux-based OS be it BSD, SUSE or debian are very performant on cheap hardware and on the other hand macOS is a bloated crap that can only work on a 1.7lac gig.
MBP does not support linux, but if you ever get chance in future do install debian on it, the thing will fly like unicorn. Boot time is like 3 seconds, apps opens up in the blink of eye.
I don't like MacOS because it locks me as developer to do low-level stuff with it.
And btw, MacOS is BSD based OS.
Not every hardware is supported...(My laptop was i5 5th gen 2015 model HP).Also solution to any problem is not fast. Though if you have a problem with budget I'll always suggest a laptop with good specs and Linux installed on it.
Were you running Ubuntu on it? And what do you mean by support?
I told you, I have MBP(2017) too, but I still like Debian more than MacOS.
Like Realtek Wireless Driver, Nvidia graphics card and etc . Also I'll also prefer Linux if all of such problem were not there. It slows down my development speed.
Canonical released a list of supported laptops, so at least for Ubuntu, there's a list of fully supported machines certification.ubuntu.com/desktop/models
Linux can be installed on a Mac as well
Hardware manufacturer needs to be blamed for this as they do not open source driver software. Right now I am also using a HP 15 laptop with MX Linux on it and I fixed WiFi issue, and that was fun. blog.amritpandey.dev/how-to-enable-wifi-linux-hp1…
At the end it all comes down to preference, when I got my MBP for the first time I loved it, but when my demand grew I felt the need of having a computer which I could use as I want without taking it to the service center and paying hefty sum to get it fixed.
Its difficult to find a fully open-source laptop in India, the once that are available are less in stock and others are just expensive.
Jan Vladimir Mostert Ubuntu consumes a lot of ram because of its smooth UI. I don't like Ubuntu because it is bloated.
Once I installed Linux Mint on MBA and although the experience was good, I found that apple has locked BIOS so the glowing apple and LED started misbehaving. I thought of unlocking BIOS settings to fix that but then I saw that they had restricted users to unlock BIOS.
So if you do anything with MB software or low level settings the warranty is still void. :(
Amrit Pandey, have you tried using one of the non-default window managers? There are some very lightweight window managers, XFCE is nice, i've used Blackbox on a Gentoo Linux machine (Blackbox taking lightweight to the extreme), iceWM and WindowMaker if you really want to go minimal. Gentoo and ArchLinux are great if you need to customize your OS for ultra performance with very minimal system resources. I was running Gentoo on an 800MHz machine for a long time and it was smoother than most people's setups who had 2 and 3 GHz machines with 10x the RAM.
MacBook repairs are insanely expensive in South Africa as well, typically, for most problems, it costs the same if not more to repair than buying a new one. My 2017 MacBook Pro went in for keyboard repairs and it required replacing more than 50% of the machine, luckily it was covered under Apple's recall program, otherwise it would have been ridiculously expensive to repair.
Jan Vladimir Mostert I use i3 window manager by default which is like no UI at all.
Although I have not used i3 on Ubuntu. In addition to UI, Ubuntu also have many proprietary software that if you go on deleting those will end up creating a new distro.
I have no beef with Arch, but I am a debian person. Customization are possible with every distro out there you just have to choose one that fits you. And I love debian(currently MxLinux).
Same problem of MBP keyboard with me as well. I got the keyboard replaced 3 times and for free. I had to write a mail to Apple Support in US in 2018 about keyboard problem, I talked to their cust executive directly, so they fixed it the third time for free. Since that repair I use a silicon cover and it has been 1 year my keyboard had no problems.
Likewise, Debian and its derivatives are nice, everything is in sane places and its mostly user friendly, its packaging system is easy to use and applications are generally available in .deb if it's available on Linux.
CentOS / RedHat / Fedora and its rpm packages are just weird, can't get used to the rpm flags, rpm -i / rpm -U / rpm -e / rpm -q / ... VS Debian, apt-get install / update / remove / ... package, but that's just preference. I remember on CentOS, there was also yum install, yum update and then yumdb. Would be nice if there was one package manager that could interface all of these so that you could use a single package manager across all distros.
Security on CentOS is way better than on Debian for example, so if security is a concern, then CentOS is not a bad option if you don't mind old packages.
Gentoo's Portage is rather nice, but compiling packages from source can take forever on slow machines (had to wait a whole weekend for Firefox to compile on my old 800MHz computer, on my AMD Socket 754, 3.2 GHz machine, it only took a few minutes)
i3 WM looks very similar to Blackbox, in Blackbox you had to physically write a bit config / code to get a taskbar, your application launcher is right clicking on the desktop, that's all you had. For a lowe powered dev machine, that's perfect (it actually reduces distractions), typically i only needed my IDE, browser and terminal, anything else i would start from command line.
RE MBP: You can claim a refund for any keyboard repairs you've done out of your own pocket. Silicon cover would have increased my overheating issues and probably would not have stopped the keys from cracking or breaking off the keyboard. If you write 100s of thousands of lines of code a year (wrote close to a million lines on that keyboard if not more), that keyboard simply doesn't last, the old design lasted fine for such heavy workloads. Cheap microsoft keyboards did the same, spacebars cracked, springs broke, enter keys cracked, vowels became non responsive after heavy use, their more expensive keyboards lasted forever which means this is simply a poorly designed keyboard on the MBP using cheap materials.
I'll try gentoo.